Sujet Son de Mike Oldfield

To create 'Guitars sounding like bagpipes', Mike employed the slightly mysterious Glorfindel box. This was an effects unit, encased in a wooden box, which Mike got from David Bedford, who'd been given the box at a party by its creator, a stoned hippy. The box was extremely unreliable in its operation, rarely giving the same result twice (Tom Newman was clearly unimpressed - talking in a 2001 interview with Q magazine, he said of Mike and the Glorfindel box: "he had this awful home-made electronics box full of horrid transistors, covered in faders and knobs which he called a 'Glorfindel'. This was a piece of plywood filled with junk that he could plug his guitar into and sometimes a sound would come out. Sometimes the sound was good, but most of the time it was terrible.")

It seems that, at least on this occasion, plugging the guitar into the Glorfindel box produced a heavily compressed and smoothly distorted guitar sound. Guitars were overdubbed at both normal and half speeds (as with the double speed guitar) to create the bagpipe sound on part two at 08:41. Mike took the idea of massed overdubbed guitars much further on the following two albums.