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Jazz
and blues piano teacher in London |
Keyboard player
Final warning!
- Unless you are a keyboard player with some interest
in equipment, please read no further. There is nothing offensive
in what follows. On the contrary, it will be duller than ditchwater!
- I of course started out with an acoustic piano
but in 1967 you needed at least an organ to get into a band.
- For a penniless
keyboard player in the late 60's, there seemed to be a choice
of two organs: the Farfisa or the
Vox Continental . Both were single
manual, had drawbars and sounded absolutely nothing like a Hammond.
You always stood up to play them because it looked cooler and
they didn't come with a stool. Had I been given the choice, I
suppose I would have gone for the Farfisa as it sounded more funky.
But when I turned up for my first ever audition with The Hijackers
(a name they may not have chosen in this Century), the Vox Continental,
with its reverse black and white keys, awaited me. The organ solo
on Telstar by the Tornadoes began playing in my brain and I desperately
tried to replace it with Alan Price's solo in 'House of the Rising
Sun' by the Animals. In the end, I gave them my rendition of Green
Onions (standing, of course) and got the job.
- The next
choice to be made was which electric piano? Would it be the Wurlitzer
or the Fender Rhodes ? The 'Wurly'
was considered the more 'Rock and Roll' of the two and was later
to be a trademark of Supertramp's sound. It was also hideous to
tune. The Rhodes was more sophisticated and 'Jazzy'. I went for
'jazzy'. If the likes of Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea were happy
with it, who was I to argue.
- It was time to move on to a more up market organ,
at least one with two manuals. Yet again, there was a straight
and obvious choice: a Hammond or a Lowrey .
- Why did I think twice? All my favourite organ
players used a Hammond: Jimmy McGriff, Jack McDuff and of course
Jimmy Smith. But closer to home, in fact in the London clubs,
I was closely watching Stevie Winwood, then in the Spencer Davies
group and the man I idolised: Graham Bond. You may not have heard
of him, but the Graham Bond Organisation had a residency at the
100 club in Oxford Street every Thursday night and I often looked
on in awe. Jack Bruce was on bass, Ginger Baker on drums (both
later to form Cream with Eric Clapton) and John McGlaughlin sometimes
played guitar. In the midst of this formidable line up sat a large
figure with greasy hair and a pint of bitter on his Hammond organ.
His raspy voice was perfect for R&B and the organ sound,propelled
by Leslie speakers, ripped your ears apart. The man was an inspiration.
I once plucked up the courage to sidle up to him and ask, "Who
are your musical influences?". "Nobody", he gruffly
replied, and I slunk back into the crowd. Graham Bond had no real
commercial success, became involved in heroin and black magic
and died in tragic circumstances.
- Then along came psychedelia and overnight all
my favourite bands changed their music and their stage clothes.
A good example was the Zoot Money Big Roll Band. Zoot was (and
still is) another Hammond organist, singer and general nutter,
who thought it a good idea to turn the band into Dantalion's Chariot.
They came on stage wearing caftans and I left the club. Zoot's
(or should I say Dantalion's) guitarist was Andy Summers, who
later ditched the caftan, bleached his hair and joined The Police.
- Let's rewind
and consider my choice of manual organ. Remember, it was to be
either the Hammond or the Lowrey.
No contest? Well, perversely, I chose the much more insipid sounding
Lowrey. In my defence, Garth Hudson of The Band managed to make
it sound amazing. I expect, though, that Garth would have employed
several roadies to lug it in and out of vans and up flights of
stairs. All I had was the drummer.
- I did eventually come to my senses and swap it
for an M100 Hammond organ. I still made the token effort to be
original by using a wah wah pedal fuzz box instead of the conventional
Leslie speaker. I thought I could solve the back-breaking aspect
of being an organist by purchasing a split Hammond. This meant
that you could unplug the top half and carry it separately. Unfortunately
the bottom half weighed more than two Lowreys.
- I was now being asked to produce string sounds
and, as I couldn't afford a synthesiser, I opted for the Solina
String Machine . Not only was it made of wood, but it had buttons
that said violin, cello, trumpet and horn. The Solina sounded
absolutely nothing like any of these instruments, so I wired that
up to a fuzz box too, and succeeded in making it sound like nothing
on earth.
- And so we
come to my next choice: which synthesiser? In the early 70's,
analogue mono synthesisers were the latest 'must' for any self-respecting
keyboard player. The obvious choice was the Minimoog
, as used by Kraftwork and Rick Wakeman, and still being dragged
out by bands such as The Orb and The Chemical Brothers to this
day. OK, I won't drag this one out. I bought an ARP
Odyssey , as used by Abba and Gary Numan. And, yes, I wired
it up to my Solina String machine.
- In the late
70's, polyphonic synthesisers were horrendously expensive and
were more like switchboards. This time, I made a great choice.
Now this is pretty obscure, but I went for this wooden box with
jack-sockets called a Korg PS3200
. Korg had obviously run out of catchy names but I took to my
PS3200 immediately. Despite being faced with an array of oscillators
and filters that needed to be 'patched' with jack leads, I was
soon producing whatever sound people required of me. I also had
the luxury of 16 memory presets to save my favourites. What is
more, it was made of wood. Five years ago I waved it a fond farewell
as it was carted off to a synthesiser museum. Along came digital
synthesisers. Actually, there was the one that every keyboard
player would have sold their mother for: the Yamaha
DX7 . Apparently it had frequency modulation. We didn't
even need to know what that meant because it sounded wonderful
and we couldn't wait to boast to our frequency modulator-less
colleagues. The sound, in fact, lived up to the rumours, and the
DX7, which emerged in 1983, had a clear and defined quality that
was soon being described as 'cold'. Although I missed my switchboard
and jack leads, I was immediately entranced by the magical sounds
emanating from 32 factory presets. The problems began when I tried
programming it myself and before long I was buying more factory
presets rather than being creative. What's more, everyone was
using exactly the same presets!
- Manufacturers
soon began to realise that it made more sense to start building
synth modules, i.e. boxes we could just link together to one master
keyboard. So I started buying boxes, and more boxes. I accumulated
loads of TX7's (keyboardless DX7s),
a Matrix 1000, a Korg
01R, a Roland U220… it goes
on and on. J ust when we thought there was nothing new to buy,
we were told to ditch our synthesisers and move over to real sounds.
These, apparently, were called samplers. I have no technical knowledge
whatsoever, but these new gadgets could somehow grab an audio
sound and convert it to digital information. Don't ask me. But,
somehow or other, this concert violinist plays a few octaves,
the sampler records it, translates it and suddenly I'm playing
great violin on my keyboard.
- Well, actually
I'm not. The sound he produces depends on his instrument, the
bowing action, the weight with which he plays it and how one note
connects with the next. Actually I hadn't a clue how to play violin,
but I do know that when I pressed that key it sounded nothing
like a violin. But of course I went ahead and bought one anyway.
I remember my choice then was between a Mirage,
a Prophet and an Emax.
I went for the Emax and started sampling anything that made a
sound.
- What do I
play now? Well, I have a Kurzweil PC88
master keyboard attached to my Apple Mac
G5. I ditched all the boxes in favour of plug-ins that
run from my MOTU Digital Performer.
T he only instrument I really like playing is my acoustic piano,
which I had in the first place!
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