Roland VS-840
The Roland VS-840 is another piece of equipment that Andy said was used to record a lot of the bands material, originally thought to only have been used on D>M and Kicking Cars, it turns out the band also had it while recording a lot of songs that are on Ferric Oxide, the most obvious of which being Neilssong, which uses the LO-FI Box "Retro Turntable" preset on the effects list of the VS-840 with the Yamaha DJX playing into it
The VS-840 also has a bit of an odd limitation where it cuts off a lot of high frequencies above 16khz, leading to something that resembles a purposefully lo-fi sound, despite this, it was totally unintentional.
I actually happen to own one of these and am still looking through a lot of the effects on it to find out what else was definitely used in Panchiko's music, so far i'm certain some of the guitar effects processing was used in No.8, Laputa, and D>M, but i'm waiting to give it a proper in-depth look before i say for sure.
Lila's Guide to the VS-840
There is virtually no info online about how to use the VS-840 except from a few manuals, but with Roland being Roland, the UI can be a bit tricky to use so I figured i may as well attempt (key word: attempt) to make a guide on how to use the thing for Panchiko-esque music!
Upgrading the ZIP Disk drive:
A fair thing to be aware of with if you wish to swap out the ZIP drive to be a CF and/or SD reader is that you NEED to update the firmware on the unit to the VS-840EX's firmware, version 2.05 to be precise.
The VS-840 can run this firmware despite not technically being an 840EX, all of the software for the EX version of the unit can run on the standard version too, but the part that really really sucks is that you can't actually update it over MIDI like you can to version 1.05 (the latest officially supported firmware for the standard 840). You have to update it over a ZIP disk, i've considered doing this in the past but didn't purely because of this issue. The way i thought about getting around it was by powering off my VS-840, taking the ZIP drive out and connecting it up to my Windows XP era desktop PC (the zip drive in the 840 just uses IDE.) to add the files to the disk, then put it back into the VS-840, but i haven't gotten around to it yet.
Okay, now on actually using the VS-840.
(Unfinished, will complete at a later date, sorryyyy!!!)