Long before there were Oscars on his shelves, Trent Reznor was waxing floors at Right Track Studio in Cleveland – biding his time while he put together the skills and the gear he needed to launch his career.

“I managed to come out of that (experience) with a PPG 2.3, an old Minimoog I had found with the MIDI retrofit and an Oberheim expander.” Reznor recalled. “That was my rig that I felt like I cover all the bases with at the time.”

It was enough. Mutating the demos he’d put together during off hours at the studio, Reznor compiled his demos and experiments into “Pretty Hate Machine” – a genre defining release that put the Model D he acquired on the front lines of his debut.

“Any synth bass that's ever been on ‘Pretty Hate Machine’ was Minimoog.”

When “Head Like A Hole” was released as the record’s first single, Nine Inch Nails became a significant part of a generational bridge into the industrial underground – a place where electronic music was poised on a razor-sharp edge between danceability and aggression.

“What I think is genius about it is it may not have every modulation possibility imagined. “It doesn't have this week's form of synthesis in there but what it does have right is the recipe of components in there (to) feel like an instrument. It has its own identity. It feels musical. It's hard to make it sound bad. It's elevated from a box with circuits in it and paint on the outside, to an instrument that has a personality and invites you to not only learn how it works but how to play it. And it feels expressive.”