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NORD STAGE 2 ULTIMATE GIG MACHINE? Techniques & Technology for Today’s Player
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Portable. Affordable. Analog. Dave Smith, creator of the fabled Pro-One (first crush of many a synth Mopho Desktop
Tetra
geek), unleashes his 21st century take on an analog mono synth for the people. And if one voice isn’t enough, pair it with a Tetra for a full-featured, ultra-compact, five-voice poly synth. Get the lowdown at davesmithinstruments.com.
CONTENTS
COMMUNITY 8
SOLUTIONS
Your pictures, anecdotes, questions, tips, gear, and feedback!
34 36
KEYNOTES Hot players, news, and reviews from the keyboard world. 10 Gregory Macdonald on Vintage Keys with Sloan 12 Angie Foster: Piano Panache from Portland 14 Editors’ Playlist
GEAR 40 46 50 56 60
LESSONS 16 20
38
10 Hot Licks in Honor of Chick 5 Ways To Play Like Chick Corea
DANCE Hit the Deck . . . the cassette deck, that is PRODUCERS’ ROUNDTABLE Mike Monday, Morgan Page, and Jon Margulies on Synth Recording Chains SESSION LOG How Cookie Marenco recorded Vijay Iyer in stunning high-resolution DSD format
Avid PRO TOOLS 9 Clavia NORD STAGE 2 Roland JUNO-Gi Apple MACBOOK AIR Avid MBOX PRO
COVER STORY 26
CHICK COREA FOREVER! The incomparable keyboard master’s seven decades on the planet have spanned myriad musical styles, and his instrument interests have swung from acoustic piano to synthesizers to both. With a revitalized Return To Forever lineup and a new live album, he lends us his alwaysilluminating insights on creativity, composition, improvisation, and connecting with one’s audience.
Supertech Ken Rich on making vintage keyboards play like new. 4
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TIME MACHINE 66
Cover photo by C. Taylor Crothers
KEYBOARD (ISSN 0730-0158) is published monthly by NewBay Media, LLC 1111 Bayhill Drive, Suite 125, San Bruno, CA 94066. All material published in KEYBOARD is copyrighted © 2011 by NewBay Media. All rights reserved. Reproduction of material appearing in KEYBOARD is forbidden without permission. KEYBOARD is a registered trademark of NewBay Media. Periodicals Postage Paid at San Bruno, CA and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to KEYBOARD P.O. Box 9158, Lowell, MA 01853. Canada Post: Publications Mail Agreement #40612608. Canada Returns to be sent to Bleuchip International, P.O. Box 25542, London, ON N6C 6B2.
First look: Roland’s double-decker Atelier Combo. 0 7. 2 0 1 1
Quotes from past Chick Corea cover stories.
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Vol. 37, No. 7 #424 JULY 2011 EDITOR: Stephen Fortner [email protected] MANAGING EDITOR: Debbie Greenberg [email protected] ASSISTANT EDITOR: Lori Kennedy [email protected] EDITORS AT LARGE: Craig Anderton, Jon Regen SENIOR CORRESPONDENTS: Jim Aikin, Tom Brislin, Ed Coury, Michael Gallant, Robbie Gennet, Scott Healy, Peter Kirn, Mike McKnight, Dominic Milano, Franics Preve, Ernie Rideout, Mitchell Sigman ART DIRECTOR: Patrick Wong [email protected] MUSIC COPYIST: Matt Beck GROUP PUBLISHER: Joe Perry [email protected], 770.343.9978 ADVERTISING DIRECTOR, NORTHWEST, MIDWEST, & NEW BUSINESS DEV.: Greg Sutton [email protected], 925.425.9967 ADVERTISING DIRECTOR, SOUTHWEST: Albert Margolis [email protected], 949.582.2753 ADVERTISING DIRECTOR, EAST COAST & EUROPE: Jeff Donnenwerth [email protected], 770.643.1425 SPECIALTY SALES ASSOCIATE, NORTH: Contessa Abono [email protected], 650.238.0296 SPECIALTY SALES ASSOCIATE, SOUTH: Donovan Boyle [email protected], 650.238.0325 PRODUCTION MANAGER: Amy Santana MUSIC PLAYER NETWORK VICE PRESIDENT: John Pledger EDITORIAL DIRECTOR: Michael Molenda SENIOR FINANCIAL ANALYST: Bob Jenkins PRODUCTION DEPARTMENT MANAGER: Beatrice Kim DIRECTOR OF SALES OPERATIONS: Lauren Gerber WEB DIRECTOR: Max Sidman MOTION GRAPHICS DESIGNER: Tim Tsuruda MARKETING DESIGNER: Joelle Katcher SYSTEMS ENGINEER: John Meneses NEWBAY MEDIA CORPORATE PRESIDENT & CEO: Steve Palm CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER: Paul Mastronardi VP WEB DEVELOPMENT: Joe Ferrick CIRCULATION DIRECTOR: Denise Robbins HR MANAGER: Ray Vollmer IT DIRECTOR: Greg Topf DIRECTOR OF PUBLISHING OPERATIONS AND STRATEGIC PLANNING: Bill Amstutz CONTROLLER: Jack Liedke REPRINTS AND PERMISSIONS For article reprints please contact our reprint coordinator at Wright’s Reprints: 877.652.5295 SUBSCRIPTION QUESTIONS? 800-289-9919 (in the U.S. only) 978-667-0364 [email protected] Keyboard Magazine, Box 9158, Lowell, MA 01853 Find a back issue 800-289-9919 or 978-667-0364 [email protected] Publisher assumes no responsibility for return of unsolicited manuscripts, photos, or artwork.
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COMMUNITY From the Editor Chick Corea is the reason I first became aware of Keyboard magazine. As a kid, I’d borrow LPs from the local library, a practice my classical pianist mom encouraged (and supervised—there’d be no Zappa until high school). One Saturday, I grabbed Return To Forever’s Grammy-winning album No Mystery because, if memory serves, the cover looked cool. When I got it home, it blew my ten-year-old mind. That the space-robot groove and resonant synth belches of “Sofistifunk” co-existed on the same piece of vinyl as the lilting piano chords and superhuman ostinato of the title track was like all the rules had changed—or were never rules in the first place. Wanting to know more about the keyboard player led me back to the library, where a helpful staffer guided me to the periodicals section and a magazine then called Contemporary Keyboard. I found the very first issue, with none other than Chick Corea on the cover. So, to preside over an issue that features the multikeyboard master and coincides with his 70th birthday (June 12 of this year) is a humbling honor. Big thanks to Michael Gallant for his excellent interview with Chick.
RECORDING
SPECIAL
I’m also excited about this issue because we have several stories devoted to the art of recording, from Craig Anderton’s full review of Pro Tools 9—which now works with almost any audio hardware, not just Avid’s— to a log by famed engineer Cookie Marenco about tracking virtuoso pianist Vijay Iyer’s solo project using the ultra-high-resolution DSD format. In my opinion, it’s the way everyone should be listening to music. Look for the above logo on articles meant to help you record better keyboard and synth tracks. A final note: In last month’s review of the Yamaha Motif XF, we promised a how-to by Julian Colbeck, founder of the motifator. com website. We have to delay it until next month’s issue, so look for it in August. Be seeing you!
DEPT. OF CORRECTIONS The Novation UltraNova review in the April 2011 issue was quite helpful, and now I’m considering getting one. I’m also a hardcore Waldorf Blofeld user, and want to point out an error on page 47: “Though the Blofeld is multitimbral, you need host software or a multi-channel MIDI controller to get at this, as there’s no ‘multi’ mode onboard.” There was an update that added 128 onboard Multi mode slots, which can now be accessed and programmed via the front panel. You even get graphical screens for splits, layers, MIDI channel assignment and volumes, and so on. Mark Mosher, Boulder, CO, via email
Having written the Blofeld review back in May 2008, I referred to it, and looked at Waldorf’s website, but somehow I missed this specific news. Thanks for the catch, and to the good folks at Waldorf, drinks at the next NAMM show are on me. Readers, check out Mark’s music at markmoshermusic.com and his gear blog at modulatethis.com. Stephen Fortner
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TECH QUESTION
Numa Dance I read with interest your review of the Studiologic Numa Organ in the May issue, and one issue stood out in my mind. You mentioned that you could use a MIDI controller as a second manual—but as which one: upper or lower? My Roland VK-7 can “flip” the presets (in the Utilities menu) so that if you put some small keyboard on top of it, that one could, appropriately, play the upper part. If not for that, your second keyboard would have to play the lower part and would be on the bottom, requiring a two-tier stand and even then making it difficult to space the keyboards as closely as would be ideal. Steven Zak, Sunland, CA, via email Upper, lower, and pedal parts on the Numa Organ are locked to MIDI channels 1, 2, and 3, respectively, and there’s no “flip” function per se. However, I tested a workaround to do what you describe. Set your second MIDI keyboard to send only on channel 1 so it plays only the upper part. On the Numa, hold the Split On/Off button until it flashes, then hit the highest key you want for the lower zone. If you hit the topmost C, the full Numa keyboard will act as the lower manual. Stephen Fortner
My jury is out until I get to play one
43%
It’s a mash-up of existing Roland technologies 17% What do you think of Roland’s new Jupiter-80 synth? The
Poll
It’s one of the coolest synths yet
16%
I’m mad it’s not an analog re-issue
11%
It’s very cool but needs more knobs on it
7%
I don’t get the panel design
3%
The whole is more than the sum of the parts
2%
The panel design seems cool for performance
1%
To catch up on previous episodes of the Packrat’s adventures in time, visit keyboardmag.com/packrat.
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KEYNOTES
GREGORY MACDONALD
Gregory stacks ’em high with Sloan. Top to bottom: Roland Juno-G, old model Korg BX-3, and Wurlitzer electric piano.
Vintage Keys with Sloan If you haven’t heard of Canadian rockers Sloan, you haven’t had the pleasure of experiencing one of North America’s finest bands— affectionately dubbed “Canada’s Beatles” by their fans. Their impeccable vocal harmonies and unique mix of sensibilities gel to form an unforgettable sound. Sloan’s tenth album is called The Double Cross, a bit of a pun on the Roman numeral XX (20) because this is the band’s 20th year. Keyboardist Gregory Macdonald has been with the band since 2006, when he toured for Sloan’s Never Hear the End of It. His first recording with the band was 2008’s Parallel Play, and he’s been involved with everything since. Here, he shares his experiences recording The Double Cross. Where did you record the new album? The album was recorded entirely in our rehearsal space with our amazing engineer, Ryan Haslett. He assisted the recording and mixing of everything the band has put out since 2006, and this time he’s the sole recording and mix engineer. He’s really done a fantastic job, allowing the guys and me a ton of creativity and experimenting with sounds and ideas. How does the new record compare to the rest of the catalog?
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I’m thinking of it as the shorter version of Never Hear the End of It [2006]. Kind of like a hybrid of that record and [1999’s] Between the Bridges. Most of the songs are fairly concise—under three minutes. It’s truly a Sloan album that is unique and different from everything else. How prominent are keyboards on this record compared with past albums? I would say this record has the most keyboards of any Sloan album yet. Never Hear the End of It had a lot, but it was mostly piano. During Parallel Play and [2009’s] Hit & Run, I got to play some piano and organ, but on The Double Cross I’ve been able to pull out all my toys, even the Stylophone! The Mellotron and Chamberlin sounds in the Nord are all over this record, and piano is on almost every song. I think the only thing in our studio that didn’t make it into a song is my wonderful little bright red toy piano, though I think Patrick [Pentland, guitarist] did audition it once for something. How much freedom did you have to create parts? Were there also specific parts they wanted you to play? I’m given total freedom to create my own parts. Of course, if I come up with a part that stinks, they leave it out. On the past two records, the piano was sometimes put on as an afterthought, but now the band is looking to me earlier in the recording process to add to the
Holding up that Nord Electro 3 is an original Korg BX-3 from 1980. Its analog circuits gave it a sound that, while not perfect by today’s clonewheel standards, makes it (and its single-manual sibling the original CX-3) sought after even today. song. Once in a while, someone will have a certain part in mind from a demo they want me to re-create, but everyone in the band is quite competent on the keys, so in those cases they’ll often record those parts themselves. Which songs stand out to you, and which keyboards did you play on them? I used my touring rig in the studio, along with a couple of keyboards and pianos that we have in our space. My [original] Korg BX-3 and Leslie 145 organ setup makes a few appearances, mostly on two of Chris’ [Murphy, bassist] songs, “Follow the Leader” and “Laying So Low.” The latter has nice piano and organ parts on it that I’m proud of. The speed switch on my Leslie preamp pedal makes a really loud click, and it’s audible throughout the whole song, which I love. Jay [Ferguson, guitarist] has a really nice 1973 Rhodes you’ll hear often on this record, and we also used our old upright piano on many songs. That piano used to be in [drummer] Andrew Scott’s living room, but he needed the space, so he traded it for the smaller console-style piano that was in our studio. I came up with a neat little piano part on Jay’s “Beverly Terrace” that he loved, and it became a featured part that ended up changing the overall sound of the final mix quite a bit compared to his original demo. I bought a new Nord Electro 3, and I played it a lot on this record. I had fun auditioning all the sounds in their libraries and picking my favorites. I’ve been mixing sounds together. There’s one part in the song “Your Daddy Will Do” that has the Mellotron strings, flutes, and our real piano all playing the same part in unison, and it’s an amazing sound. I also snuck in a little part on my Stylophone on a song called “Shadow of Love,” a great new wave, Costello/Bowie-type song. How will the keys translate when adding these new tunes to the live set? We always try our best to duplicate the record faithfully when we
You really do need a Leslie for older clonewheels to sound right. Here’s Gregory’s 145.
perform live. I’m thinking about adding a second Nord to the touring rig to pull off some of these new songs. There’s a couple times when I’ll need to instantly switch sounds or play a few sounds simultaneously, so that’s something I need to plan ahead for. The Nord can handle several sounds at once, but we also need samples, not just dynamic touch-responsive instruments like the Rhodes or piano sounds. I still have the Roland Juno-G, which I’ve used a lot on the road lately. What are your favorite songs from the catalog to play live? “Summer’s My Season,” a B-side from Between the Bridges. It’s a great song, and it’s mostly built around a great organ riff. Another one is “At the Edge of the Scene,” another B-side from the same record. It’s a fun, fast, bouncy piano song that changes tempo and key a couple times, which I love. “Who You Talkin’ To?” from Pretty Together [2001] has that great string-synth part and a nice bridge from Chris. “Before I Do” from Twice Removed [1995], is one of my favorite songs ever. It’s got lots of great piano and vocals, strange chords, and of course, the epic ending. “I Can Feel It,” also from Twice Removed, is a real crowdpleaser sing-along, and I’ve always liked playing it. Do any of the four core band members play keyboards or use them to write songs? Yes. Andrew is a great piano player, so he doesn’t often need me to play on his songs. I’m going to have to sit down soon with him and have him teach me how to play his new song, “Traces.” It’s very piano driven and a cool riff. The other three guys can all play just fine. Up until I joined, they had to do everything themselves. Robbie Gennet Song-by-song analysis of keyboards on The Double Cross.
Find out if Sloan is playing near you.
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JENNA HORTON
KEYNOTES
ANGIE FOSTER Piano Panache from Portland Angie Foster is a well-known fixture on the Portland, Oregon, club circuit. If she has her way, the singer, songwriter, and pianist will bring her music to a much wider audience. It’s not that she hasn’t come close. Foster almost won a slot on the Lilith Fair tour back in 1999. “That was really before I had gotten my confidence up to perform,” she recalls. “I recorded a song, sent it in, and really didn’t think anything of it. I ended up being one of 20 finalists out of, like, 800 people. At that time, I had really bad stage fright, and I wasn’t chosen. It was the first time I had performed in front of a lot of people in years.” A television appearance on the show America’s Got Talent in early 2010 earned Foster another shot at fame. “They had seen a clip of a local TV show that my band and I had played on. They contacted me and asked if I’d audition, and I did. I lost out to a hand whistler and an air guitar band, so I didn’t advance—but it really was a lot of fun.” Angie Foster was introduced to music as a child, but she was hanging with an older crowd. “I got my start at Portland State University,” Foster says, “which is where [Grammy-winning bassist] Esperanza Spalding went to school. My mom was a single parent and didn’t have a lot of money. The instructor said, ‘I’ll teach her for free. The only caveat is, she’ll be taught in front of a class full of master’s degree students.’” Foster says the university setting helped to build her confidence. “I’m pretty comfortable in front of people,” she says, “because my screw-ups, and everything I did as a kid was
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done in front of about 25 other students.” Foster eventually enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned a degree in music. She says she didn’t do a lot of performing. “There was a lot of theory and history. Any playing I did wasn’t in front of a lot of people, so I sort of lost my confidence to play in front of others. [Eventually] I had such a positive response from friends, though—they really pushed me to get out there. So I recorded my first CD and started playing out.” “My singing style,” says Foster, “is a cross between Sara Bareilles, Bonnie Raitt, and a little bit of the Motown sound thrown in. My keyboard playing is influenced by two very different genres. One is synth-heavy ’80s pop music like Duran Duran. The other is blues and soul, like Bonnie Raitt and Ray Charles.” Angie released her latest CD in June 2010 and is anxious to record again. “I already have a lot of material for new albums, so I’m looking at how to fund them. If you do it right, it can get expensive. So that’s really the main goal in the next year, to get enough material together to start, or at least rehearse for, a new album.” Ed Coury Angie performing one of her favorite tunes.
Angie online.
More Online! keyboardmag.com/july2011
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For more information visit korg.com/SV1 The National – photo by Mauricio Carey. Adam Wakeman – photo www.ianblissettphotography.com
KEYNOTES
EDITORS’ PLAYLIST
Jon Regen
Lori Kennedy
COLUMBIA FIELDS Bridging the Gap Connecticut’s Columbia Fields make unabashed piano power pop that harkens back to the days when songs were enough to get a band noticed. A crowd favorite on the East Coast touring scene (and a recent supporting act for Bon Jovi), the band features keyboardist Eric Heath on assorted, Americana-flavored instruments. Check out tracks like “Into the Fire” and “After Everything” for tasty, radiofriendly fare. (columbiafields.com) GEORGE COLLIGAN AND MAD SCIENCE Pride and Joy Composer, educator, and Keyboard contributor George Colligan steps out from behind his postbop piano pedestal with this rollicking jazz-rock record. Featuring Colligan on organ and assorted keyboards, the album explodes with metric and melodic combustion. Check out his angular organ explorations on “Keeping Pace” and “Song for Obama,” as well as his simmering, Herbie Hancock-inspired synth work on the title track. No matter the genre, Colligan continues to inspire and impress. Recommended. (Piloo | georgecolligan.com) HAROULA ROSE These Open Roads Los Angeles-based folk-pop songstress Haroula Rose paints recorded pictures with hushed abandon. On her latest release, she sings of love and loss amidst a stark aural atmosphere. Tracks like “Brand New Start,” “Close My Eyes To See,” and “Simple Time” marry guitar-laden Americana textures to instrumental quirk, with accordion and toy piano completing the sonic circle. Eminently listenable and affecting, These Open Roads deserves a home on your listening device of choice. (haroularose.com)
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Robbie Gennet
GRAND PIANORAMAX Smooth Danger The third release from the Berlin duo of synth alchemist Leo Tardin and drummer Dom Burkhalter, Smooth Danger is full of glitchy, funky, post-jazz, electronic experimentation, with skewed Wurlitzers and Moogs pushed to their sonic limits. Tardin clearly knows his way around the keyboard, and Burkhalter expertly lays down funky, sometimes spastic beats. Black Cracker drops rhymes on “Sleepwalk” and “Roulette” while Mike Ladd is featured on the super-dramatic “Domestic Bliss.” An excellently odd disc. (Obliqsound | leotardin.com)
PATRICK BRADLEY Under the Sun The music of Patrick Bradley has a vibe that would feel right at home with any Steely Dan fan. With arrangement, production, and added keyboards from Jeff Lorber, Bradley’s sophomore effort is chock full of smooth grooves. Bradley plays mostly acoustic piano and organ with a little Moog thrown in, while Lorber is credited with Rhodes, Clavinet, and synth bass. Drummer Tony Moore locks it down with bassist Alex Al, while David Mann’s tight horn arrangements add flair to standout tracks like the opener “Straight Path” and the funky “Slipstream.” (patrickbradley.net)
I’M FROM BARCELONA Forever Today This is the happiest album I’ve ever heard . . . and actually liked. How can you not like 29 Swedes (nope, not from Barcelona) singing about shooting stars, belting out lyrics like “Everybody’s got bellies full of butterflies”? Forever Today has the requisite handclaps, poppy keyboards, and catchy hooks. Nothing can bring this group down. The best part? They’re not disingenuous. I’ll bet you’ll find yourself doing a cartwheel or giving random strangers an unprovoked thumbs-up. (Mute | imfrombarcelona.com)
UH HUH HER Black and Blue From the New Order-esque synths that open the record, you know Uh Huh Her is a keyboard band at heart. Camila Grey and Leisha Hailey both play quite a bit of synths on each of the six nuggets on this EP that’s sure to tide over fans until their full-length Nocturnes. There’s real songwriting under the keyboard frosting. From the melancholy “Never the Same” to the electro-sex of “Fascination” and the hard rocking “I’ve Had Enough,” the EP raises the bar for their upcoming record and shows the ladies of Uh Huh Her to have real talent. (Plaid Records | uhhuhher.com)
VARIOUS ARTISTS Mortal Kombat: Songs Inspired by the Warriors Often, the soundtracks that accompany video games have a sound only a mother could love. I was wrong about this one. Tightly produced and curated by MSTRKRFT’s Jesse Keeler (who also contributes a stellar track), and with artists such as Tokimonsta and Skrillex, this disc is a heavy electro-dance masterpiece, with its dark, wobbly, sinister synths riding atop facepunching beats. Let the head-nodding and fistpumping commence. (Teenage Riot Records | teenageriotrecords.com)
MOOK LOXLEY Caress Fans of vintage Hammond organ and funky drums, meet Mook Loxley. Inspired by Jimmy Smith, Loxley mines his Hammond for soul gold, whether on his own tunes (the upbeat “Freedom”) or covers (a soulful take on Rihanna’s “Umbrella”). Loxley also plays drums and has his grooves down, from James Brown funk to Idris Muhammad swing. But this record is all about the organ, and it’s the driving force on all the tunes. Loxley creates a vibe and sound that feels both retro and fresh for a unique slice of organ jazz. Tasty!
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10 HOT LICKS IN HONOR OF CHICK Chick Corea is one of the most influential and important pianists in modern music. His influences run from bebop and European classical music to Afro-Cuban, Brazilian, Flamenco, funk, and beyond, but his pianistic language has a certain signature. Here are 10 licks
ANDREW ELLIOTT, COURTESY CHICK COREA PRODUCTIONS
LESSONS
by George Colligan
in the style of Chick that will elevate your own piano explorations. Remember to use small ideas to make your own big ideas. What follows are just the “words”—your job is to build your own sentences and paragraphs!
1. Four-Note Patterns For starters, this four-note pattern is based on perfect fourth and major second intervals. I consider it to have a suspended sound, in that there’s no sense of major or minor to it, which makes it more versatile. This pattern can fit over a Dmin7 chord, but also work over the following chords: Gmin7, Amin7, Cmin7, EbMaj7#11, CMaj7, BbMaj7, G7, F7, D7sus11, C7sus11, and G7sus11. This illustrates just how useful even four-note ideas can be for developing your improvisation.
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2. Chromatic Planing What academics call “chromatic planing” refers to moving the same intervallic structure, regardless of the official key center. Chick Corea might play this in his right hand and compliment it by moving perfect fourths in his left hand. Practice this pattern by moving it around in whole steps, minor thirds, and any other way you like.
& 44 œ œ œ œ œ
#œ #œ
œ #œ #œ
nœ œ bœ œ
j œ ‰ Œ
Ó
3. Smooth Hand Lines This is a variation of our first four-note pattern, except that it moves in a way that fits under the hand nicely. I find that many of Corea’s lines are technically quite smooth, which lets you play them quickly. Notice how this line turns back and forth, giving the illusion of complexity, while still using the same four notes throughout.
4 & 4 ‰ Jœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œJ ‰ 4. Fingering Variations A further variation of Ex. 1 is arpeggiated up an octave. A hallmark of Corea’s style is that he often uses the same type of hand motion with many types of intervallic structures. By using the same basic fingering shapes with slightly different notes, you can open your playing to new possibilities.
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5. Intervallic Alteration Here’s how Chick Corea often alters the interval arrangement of a familiar melodic idea. Here, instead of the suspended structure we illustrated in Ex. 1, we use a triad with a flatted ninth type of sound. This pattern works on dominant 7b9 chords or #9#5 chords. It even works on regular dominant chords.
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6. Diminishing Returns The diminished scale is one of the most useful scales in jazz, and is built using a series of half-steps and whole-steps. For instance, in the key of C, the diminished scale would read C, Db, Eb, E, F#, G, A, Bb, and C. It’s a symmetrical scale, and one which French composer Olivier Messiaen called a “mode of limited transposition.”
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LESSONS
7. Bebop and Bud This is a variation of our previous diminished scale idea, with a shape influenced by the style of Bebop pioneer Bud Powell, who was a big influence on Corea. This melodic idea ends using a sixth, imbuing a humorous, almost Thelonious Monk sound to the pattern. (Monk was another strong influence on Corea’s playing.)
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8. Chromatic Concepts Many musicians in the post-bop era of the 1960s often played this type of lick, either on its own, or combined with another melodic idea. This pattern can be thought of as using a combination of surrounding goal notes and chromatic tones, both hallmarks of many bebop lines.
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9. Pentatonic Patterns Here’s our good friend the pentatonic scale. Corea uses this frequently, but often in unexpected ways. One application is using the minor pentatonic scale whose root is the major seventh of the underlying chord. For example, you’d play the G minor pentatonic scale over Abmaj7. Try it—it works!
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10. Scalar Shapes Varying your hand motion can create compelling shapes from a scale. Here we use the same pentatonic scale as in Ex. 9, but it is played in a smooth, Corea-like fashion.
& 44 b œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ b œ œ œ œ œ œ œj ‰ Pianist and composer George Colligan has worked with Cassandra Wilson, Buster Williams, Don Byron, Ravi Coltrane, and many other acclaimed artists. Most recently, he joined drummer Jack DeJohnette’s new quintet, and released Pride and Joy on the Piloo label. Colligan is Assistant Professor of Jazz Piano at the University of Manitoba. Find out more at georgecolligan.com. Jon Regen
Audio examples.
The author live at Small’s.
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LESSONS
5 Ways To Play Like CHICK COREA
by Andy LaVerne
For over five decades, Chick Corea has inspired and delighted legions of fans and musical disciples. Like his former employer Miles Davis, he can’t be pigeonholed. Chick’s musical endeavors span from Mozart to Monk. Any musical situation Corea participates in contains a strong, immediately F7
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1. Pentatonics and Quartal Voicings Ex. 1a illustrates five-note scales that Chick often incorporates into many of his right hand lines. The quartal (fourth-based) left-hand structures are signature chords that compliment the pentatonic scales. Ex. 1b demonstrates how Chick sometimes anchors his quartal voicings with those constructed from roots and fifths. Ex. 1c is a right-hand pentatonic-based line with a signature Corea stamp: the grace note. Ex. 1d puts all these components into action. Check out Chick’s album Now He Sings, Now He Sobs for more examples.
identifiable creative core. I can say from my personal experience playing piano duets with him that his energy and openness are contagious and inspiring. The following concepts are just the tip of the iceberg, but if you incorporate them into your own playing, you’ll be channeling Chick’s core.
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LESSONS 2. Comping Ex. 2a illustrates how Chick’s accompanying is so compelling that it can work as solo piano. Again, notice his frequent use of quartal voicings. In Ex. 2b, Chick uses diminished structures, built from second inversion triads in the right hand over quartal voicings in the left. Ex. 2c uses quartal structures underneath right major triads. Many of these comping techniques can be heard on Chick’s arresting album Three Quartets.
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3. Single Note Lines In Ex. 3a, Chick uses a melodic line in the tradition of Bebop pioneer Bud Powell (a major influence), distributed between two hands, and at lightning speed. Ex. 3b demonstrates how Chick often thinks of each finger percussively, like a drummer. Notice how distributing these patterns between the right and left hands lets you execute them fluidly. Ex. 3c again shows how Chick divides melodic and rhythmic statements between both hands. Weaving lines throughout both the black and white keys makes them sound more chromatic and less tied to specific chord changes. Check out Chick’s Akoustic Band and Elektric Band albums for more riveting right-hand lines.
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LESSONS œ œ œ ‰. nœ nœ ‰ ‰ n œ n œ b œ r œ œ #œ Œ œœ R œ œ nœ nœ œ bœ bœ bœ bœ Œ ? 4 bœ bœ bœ Œ ‰ bœ bœ Œ bœ bœ bœ ‰. bœ bœ 4
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Chick Corea play-along book/CD featuring the author on piano.
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More Online!
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Jazz pianist, composer, and longtime Keyboard contributor Andy LaVerne has played with Chick Corea, as well as Frank Sinatra and Stan Getz. He’s Professor of Jazz Piano at The Hartt School of Music at the University of Hartford, and his latest CD is Live From NY! Visit him at andylaverne.com. Jon Regen
Audio examples and author duets with Chick Corea.
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5. Slash Chords Another signature Corea sound is his extensive use of “slash” (or compound) chords, shown here in Ex. 5. F/F# is a diminished sound, E/Eb is a Spanishtinged. Gb/C is half- diminished. Db/A is, once again, a maj7#5 chord, and Gb/Ab is a dominant seventh with a suspended fourth. Corea often played such slash chords with his group Return To Forever.
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ANDREW ELLIOTT, COURTESY CHICK COREA PRODUCTIONS
Chick Corea
Forever! At 70, the Keyboard Superhero is Just Getting Started
by M Michael ich haell Gall Gallant lant
The musical odyssey of 16-time Grammy winner Armando Anthony “Chick” Corea didn’t begin with lessons or recordings, a transcendent concert-going experience, or an inspirational music teacher. Rather, the lifetime of creative brilliance of the first artist ever to grace our cover launched simply—with a flying piano. “I was an only child growing up in Chelsea, Massachusetts,” he recounts from his current home near Tampa, Florida. “We had a three-room apartment on the fourth floor of this building on the corner. It was a pretty tiny place—my parents’ master bedroom, a living room where I slept, and a kitchen. In the middle room, there was a big window and I remember seeing, at age four, a crane lifting up this piano into the air. “There I was, this small kid, seeing a piano fly towards us! My mother had bought it for $40, and there was no way to get it up the stairs, so we had to hire carpenters to open the big window and haul it through.” Chick’s amazement with the spectacle quickly translated into fascination with the instrument itself. “It was this huge Trowbridge player piano,” he continues. “For me as a kid, it really was the ultimate toy.” Chick pauses in thought, and the silence that follows emphasizes the power of the anecdote. From a young boy’s wonder at a levitating instrument, dozens of groundbreaking albums, immeasurable influence on the way the world creates
and appreciates music, and decades of joyful creativity were born. Having just celebrated his 70th birthday on June 12th of this year, Chick finds that he still has much in common with the spellbound four-year-old in the story. “The piano has always continued to seem like a toy to me, something to play with, something to spend hours and hours exploring—so in the most important sense, nothing has changed!” he says. While many would consider the dawn of one’s seventh decade to be time for retirement, Chick is gaining creative momentum—in his own words, “Where I am right now, I’ve just begun to scratch the surface.” Currently on tour with the reborn Return to Forever IV—featuring original bandmates Stanley Clarke (bass) and Lenny White (drums), as well as world-class new members Jean-Luc Ponty (violin) and Frank Gambale (guitar)—Chick continues to innovate in the world of electronic jazz. On the acoustic side, his new album Forever features live piano-trio renditions of classic Return to Forever tunes, as well as jazz standards, culled from his recent tour with Clarke and White.
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Here’s what Chick had to say about Forever—and an illustrious career, still in full force, that will likely be remembered . . . forever. Where did the inspiration for the trio record come from? Stanley and I—and Lenny, too—our roots of playing, and where we all came from, was acoustic jazz of the ’60s and ’70s. When Stanley and I first got together with Lenny, it was in the electric context of Return To Forever. Stanley would pick up the acoustic bass sometimes, and we would always manage to play some jazz throughout the ’70s, but we never quite got enough of it. We were creating an electric band and focusing on playing and composing other kinds of music. So during the 2008 reunion tour of Return To Forever, we got another taste of playing as a trio. There was one spot in the show where I would play piano solo, and I always liked having Stanley and Lenny accompany me. We’d play a standard every now and then—“Green Dolphin Street,” “Solar,” or some other tune—and decided that it would be a nice exploration to go into that area completely for awhile. That’s how we put the 2009 tour together with the trio. Who chose which live tracks from that tour to include in the CD? It was a combination of choices made mostly by me and Lenny. I had some remembrance of which shows I thought were particularly good, but we did 50 or 60 concerts. It was difficult to listen to 60 concerts’ worth of music in one production sitting, but I did manage to scan through and pick out some strong stuff. It was difficult because we’d line up all of the takes of, say, “No Mystery”—we played that one a lot—and each one had its own flavor to it. I kept wanting to put out the whole tour [laughs], but that’s not done too much. How did you choose which specific takes to use? Different things would catch us. I’m always looking for the take that
just flows and sparks the whole way through. There were a lot of those, so then it came down to choices about what directions we went in, and whether that direction was ever documented before. Or I would hear a take and say, “That’s the only time I can remember where I played this tune that certain way.” Different criteria would come in to make different renditions stand out. Did you consider putting out, say, four different, outstanding versions of the same tune? There’s a certain small percentage of listeners who might like to listen to how one song develops over a series of concerts. It’s interesting to me to listen to how we took a song the first time we played it, and then each successive performance of it, hear the alterations and stretches being done to it. But I tried to take the viewpoint of the audience and wanted to make something that was widely listenable. We’re always having that problem with jazz in general. A music that’s so spontaneous and so creative and has so much origination in it—there are a lot of new ideas spilling out all the time. For a lot of people, jazz has too much motion, too much change. That’s why a lot of people say, “Ah, I don’t like jazz. I can’t follow it.” So I try to take the viewpoint of the audience and find a track, occasionally, where we settle into something melodic and simply rendered. That’s always nice, too. So it’s important to have something that may be complex and creative but also listenable and accessible? My tastes are wide, and it’s always a challenge for me to decide what direction to go in terms of balancing my own wilder personal taste with a form of rendition that I feel will reach people and communicate something to them. It’s a nightly challenge.
On tour with Stanley Clarke, Lenny White, Jean-Luc Ponty, and Frank Gambale as Return To Forever IV, Chick uses twin Yamaha Motif XF keyboards to captain his rig. “The new Motif is a deep and powerful instrument,” he says. “There’s facility to do so many things. For ReturnTo Forever IV, I’m using two—a Motif XF8 MIDI’ed to an XF6. I’m using the Flash memory in the XF8 to hold a special sampling of my old Rhodes that sounds killer on the Motif. In Master mode, I’m using the zones out of the XF8 to address the voices on the XF6 that I want to layer with my main keyboard sound in the XF8. It’s a slick arrangement.” Chick layers strings, pads, organs, and Clavs with the Rhodes sound without lifting his hands from the keys. “Using the zones as channels out of the Motif XF8, I use two foot pedals to control the volume of sounds on the XF6,” he explains. “I can then bring these sounds in and out with the pedals. I use the Song mode on the XF6 to house multiple voices. It works great.” Using the knobs, “I can tweak the reverb and chorus/delay—plus easily edit the ADSR [envelope] of the voice I’m working on, all without having to go into Edit mode.” Onstage, Chick uses a Yamaha AvantGrand in place of the CFIIIS grand shown above, thereby taking tuning and mic bleed concerns out of the live equation. Chick also rips on a Moog Voyager, which sits on top of the Motif rig. “I also very much like the Little Phatty,” he comments. “It really smokes, and it’s smaller than the Voyager, but it’s got a unique sound as well.” As a backup to his Motif Rhodes sample, Chick keeps a Yamaha CP1, which he recently tapped for Rhodes sounds while on tour in Australia. As Chick begins his 70th year, his rig reflects a lifetime’s worth of wisdom—and a focus on his top creative priorities. “I’ve gone in the direction that simpler is better for me,” he says. “The sampled Rhodes, which is part of the Motif, and then the Motif itself, have enough flexibility and basic pad sounds to service me from now until the third universe turns upside down and green,” he laughs. “In live performance, I really don’t tend towards wanting to be a sound designer guy,” he says. “The performance I go for is to have the minimal amount of sound change that seems appropriate for each song, and I don’t enjoy creating orchestral sounds from keyboards as much as I do being the rhythmic player, or the soloist, or the one who’s comping chords. I think it’s an interesting world to be able to create a credible, varied, orchestral sound with electric keyboards, but my own interest tends to be towards composition and spontaneous use of instruments.” For more on the Return To Forever IV tour, visit return2forever.com.
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Chick on Gear
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When you bring a tune like “Señor Mouse” into an acoustic context, the general pressures and density of the sound are so different, and the communication tends to be more intimate. You’re closer to one another, for one thing, and the sounds aren’t so heavy, so it becomes a different sort of expression. Especially with this trio, we were able to be a lot looser playing acoustically—looser with the ways we improvise, since the dynamic range tends to be wider. We took more chances. What were you using for the Rhodes sound on the album? That was the first version of my own sampled Rhodes. I did an extensive sampling of the vintage Rhodes I’ve had for decades and triggered it from a laptop with a Yamaha Motif XF8. Then I was also playing some Moog Voyager as well, like for a lead sound on “Captain Marvel.” Now since then, Yamaha’s people have helped me take that extensive sampling of the Rhodes and put it into the Motif’s new Flash memory, so it’s now in the Motif XF as a Voice. I don’t have to use the laptop to get the sounds anymore, and it really solves the cartage problem of the old Rhodes. And actually, it has some qualities about it that are even better than the old Rhodes. Mainly, it’s the fact that the Motif is a well-honed, well-crafted keyboard that feels great and is very even sounding, whereas the old Rhodes always had a lumpy feel to the action. It was never made as precisely as a piano keyboard, whereas the Motif is a weighted keyboard like a piano. So it’s actually easier to play, and I have the possibility to put effects on it and use the pitch wheel and modulation. Some musicians feel that the specific action of the Rhodes keyboard, the physical connection to the tines, is a vital part of the instrument. In this regard, tastes are going to vary and that’s totally fine. Whatever anyone feels comfortable with is what he or she feels comfortable with. How do you approach using those enhanced abilities for your sampled Rhodes—pitch-bend, modulation, and such—but still have it sound organic? It’s all so personal and subjective. What sounds artificial and unconvincing to one person could sound great to another. Either you like it or you don’t, and that’s always going to express itself differently from one keyboard player to another. We’ve all done stuff that sounds great at one moment, then we listen later and say, “What was that cheesy sound?” Or vice versa. I’ll be doing something at the moment and I’ll wonder whether it works, and then I’ll listen back to it later on and notice how the performance was really smoking and the sound really worked—and I’ll have a totally different opinion on it. Artistic judgment and opinion—it’s infinite, and it KRISTOPHER CAMPBELL, COURTESY CHICK COREA PRODUCTIONS
When you’re playing, do you ever consciously think, “This is getting a bit out there. I should draw it back?” Or is it more of a subconscious process? Well, neither. It’s all occurring at once. A performance tends to balance itself out. If I find myself pursuing a certain thought during a song, a certain exploration, I’ll just take it where I need to take it. It’s after the song is finished that I can really make a quick, split-second judgment of how it got across. One way is, physically, you can see how the audience responds to what you did. But also the main way is to just feel what the atmosphere of the emotion is in the room, and I make the judgment that way. There’s not much thinking, more just perceiving the emotions going on with the crowd. Do you ever find yourself judging your playing while you’re actually playing? I think I have finally, in my older age, cut that terrible habit out. [Laughs.] It’s a very non-productive way of doing anything. It just slows you down to a snail’s pace. How would you advise other musicians to achieve that? That’s nothing that can be achieved mechanically by practicing. It’s in the realm of the spirit, in the realm of an ability to be comfortable with your bandmates, with an audience, and with yourself, really. Some of it is a matter of confidence, being secure in your abilities, being able to have the courage to realize your own thoughts. Every musician has his or her own taste and goals, and the challenge in life is to bring that forth when you’re onstage and actually performing— to follow that through to its final conclusion without any barriers or considerations except for achieving that. That doesn’t tell you how to do it, but that’s the ideal. Can’t a lot of experience performing help you get closer, though? Playing a lot does help. It won’t be the complete answer since you can go out and play forever, keep having the same problem over and again, and reach a ceiling above which you can’t get. But definitely drilling it and playing, that’s one of the best ways to increase ability. On Forever, you have two different versions of “Señor Mouse”—one electric and one acoustic, one on each of the two discs. Well, the electric one—that was when we were rehearsing at Mad Hatter Studios in Los Angeles for a single date at the Hollywood Bowl. It was friends getting together with [original Return To Forever guitarist] Billy Connors. We hadn’t played as a group for a long time, and it was the first time Jean-Luc Ponty had played with all of us as an ensemble. We were just rehearsing, and we decided to record some of the rehearsal, which included more of an electric version of “Señor Mouse.” Then, when we got into the trio format with acoustic instruments, we decided it might be fun to try some of the Return To Forever tunes with acoustic instruments, so the renditions came out pretty differently. I enjoyed doing that. Were there any challenges switching between electric and acoustic arrangements? The two instruments that really are different, in the way we use them, are bass and piano. With an electric sound, I’m using the Fender Rhodes, usually, or an electric keyboard of some sort, and Stanley’s using his electric bass. Lenny’s playing drums in both instances, but with the trio, his kit is slightly smaller.
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could vary even in one individual from moment to moment. You can’t even begin to imagine what differences in taste we have between different artists. It seems like it would take a lot of guts to record a rehearsal and then release it to the public. Were you nervous at all about how it would be received?
Not really. I listened to it and I thought, “This sounds pretty good.” That was the only time that this particular group was ever recorded, and there was a specialness about it. That’s why it seemed like a nice idea to share it with listeners. It had a vibe and energy that a lot of studio recordings, even by great players, don’t even come close to. Yeah, the reason for that is that none of us were “making a record.” We were all rehearsing, so it was pretty relaxed, and there’s always a nice quality of humanity when there’s that relaxed feeling of just playing music. For me, that’s the ultimate objective in what emotion I’d like to present to an audience. I’d like to make listeners feel the feeling I get when I’m just completely in the zone of creativity, which is a very relaxed place to be. I’m sure many musicians dream of having careers that are as long, vital, and varied as yours. What advice could you offer to help them get there? There’s a built-in code, or set of principles, that’s very natural to everyone. Once you go in the direction of wanting to be an artist and attempting to create something beautiful, that’s in the realm of aesthetics, and that set of principles becomes even more apparent. They apply to everything—but in particular, things like being true to your own goals. Everybody’s got something they want to achieve. How much energy you put into it, and how little you are tempted to vary from your own goals by the other pressures of life, is really the way it’s done. This is true not only for my successes, but also for the successes that I’ve seen other artists have when they follow their own dreams and really do it thoroughly, continuing to expand on it as time goes on. Really learning how to play the piano and get a gig—that’s all important and that has to be done—but in terms of ultimate success, the individual has to seize his or her goals and never let them go.
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I was talking about music with a friend recently. He told me, “My philosophy is, if it ain’t fun, I ain’t interested.” I told him, “That’s my philosophy, too.” If you’re really doing what you love to do, it’s going to be fun. And if you stay in that realm and take every challenge that comes along and manage it—things like finances, keeping your life in order, keeping your body healthy—it enables you to reach your goals. Success is going to be different for every individual because every individual has different goals. But that’s a surefire policy as far as I’m concerned. So one of your goals is simply to do what’s fun. It’s not so much a goal as a monitor. If I’m having fun pursuing a certain aspect of music, for example, I must be doing something right. What you’re doing also has to be productive, though—I’m going to have fun at a movie, but that’s not going to make me any money. [Laughs.] If I’m going to have fun doing something that I really love to do—and that activity also exchanges with people, and people like it and are willing to give me something back that helps me pay my rent—then I’m really happy with it. That’s the case when I play a concert or make a recording, which are things I really love. Earning enough to pay my rent, live pretty well, buy a car, and then buy my next keyboard—that’s really good. How do you feel your relationship with the keyboard has changed throughout your career? I’m still fascinated by any keyboard I see, whether it be an upright piano; a Bösendorfer, Yamaha, or Steinway concert grand; a Motif or Moog Voyager; or some software synth with a tiny little virtual keyboard on Got a question for Chick? Ask it here!
Hear great Chick Corea collaborations on SoundCloud.
the screen. I guess I’m very lucky, and maybe smart, too, to have been able to make a living working with keyboards because it’s really what I love to do. I’ve never viewed my life as a progression, though. It’s a straitjacket to view life as a history. It’s more fun to view it as an ongoing process that’s continually happening. Being a musician is great fun and it’s creative—and my tool for music is the keyboard. Fortunately, the keyboard is now attached to a lot of different sound sources. This graphic keyboard with notes from low to high, it’s become a universal hookup. How would you describe your relationship to acoustic versus electric music, and how has it changed over the past few decades? As I get older, the mechanics of music—the exact sound and what instrument I play—become less and less important in terms of “I must sound like this,” or “I like this keyboard more than I like any other.” More and more to me, my task is figuring out how to get my creative ideas across to numbers of people, and it’s an ongoing challenge. I don’t want to get stuck to any instrument. Times and cultures change, as do ways of communication and styles of music. Everything is in a constant flux, so my joy is to be living and in good communication with the culture. And in that sense, the success of my artistic communication is more important than any instrument I use. Of course, I did grow up with that Trowbridge upright piano being hauled through my window at four years old, and I’ve never gotten over the love of the acoustic piano, so I’ve always considered it my basic tool for creativity. But I love it all.
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Dance
HIT THE DECK All too often, we hear artists and producers bemoaning the loss of tape in modern recording rigs. The compression, saturation, and warmth of tape still haven’t been properly duplicated by software. So, if you want the sound of real analog tape, where do you go? To your garage, of course! I’m betting that the majority of Keyboard readers still have a cassette deck lying around. I’m also betting that the deck has some life in it. Oh, sure, some of those decks (like mine) may be well worn after a decade of disuse, but they can still add true analog grit to even the most digital of synths. All you have to do is route one of your DAW’s audio tracks out of your audio interface and into the cassette deck (for mono tracks, just use one channel of the deck), then record it onto a cassette. After that, re-record the cassette back into your DAW, and align the beginning of the taped audio with the original audio track. Here are a few tips on how to use this archaic technology in a modern context. Francis Preve
1. Cassettes are hard to find these days. I went to my neighbor-
signal. Doing the opposite will soften the high end. CrO2 and/ or metal switches will function a bit like preset EQs. Experiment!
hood Radio Shack and asked if they had blank cassettes in stock. The staff looked at me like I’d grown a third eye. If you can find a shop that sells cassettes of any kind, stock up.
2. If you can’t find a brand new cassette, consider taping over an old one. Chances are, that high school mix tape you made about a distressed romance will have unusual audio characteristics that make it perfect for distressing your signal.
3. Tape versus digital isn’t an either-or proposition. In fact, you can get some really unique results by blending the two in various ways, so experiment with mixing the original and taped tracks to taste.
6. If you just want to run your signal through the deck’s analog
4. If you use sensible gain structure, you can get a solid recording. If you hammer your input levels into the red, you can get wonderfully warm compression and distortion that sounds nothing like a guitar pedal or a plug-in.
5. Dolby or dbx noise reduction, tape type switches (remember metal tape and CrO2?), and bias knobs can all do cool things to the signal. For example, if you record with noise reduction and play back without it, you can brighten (and add hiss to) the Before-andafter audio examples.
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Step by step video of car adaptor technique.
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circuitry (and/or can’t find cassettes), pick up a cassette-shaped adapter for old car stereos—big-box stores still sell these. Put the adapter in the deck, and run your DAW track into the adaptor’s input. Since that input is a 1/8" male plug intended for the headphone jack of your MP3 player, get a 1/8"-to-1/4" adaptor and tap into the headphone jack of your audio interface. Press Play on the deck, and run the output of the deck back into your DAW. You won’t get tape saturation, but your audio will still pass through enough transistors and capacitors to heat up the signal in strange and wonderful ways. (Thanks to Keyboard regular Peter Kirn’s site, createdigitalmusic.com, for this tip.)
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SOLUTIONS RECORDING Producers’ Roundtable
SYNTH RECORDING CHAINS S
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This month, we asked our ever-evolving team of pop and dance music production experts what sorts of signal chains they use to record their synths and other signals. Quite a few of our usual crew of producers are entirely software-based, but from those who still record audio in one form or another, we got some interesting responses. Got a question for our panel? Email me at [email protected]. Francis Preve
MIKE MONDAY (mikemonday.com) I’m very militant about keeping things as simple as possible in my setup, as this means more creativity and increased productivity. So in the last few years I’ve gotten rid of most of my outboard gear and do most of my processing in [Apple] Logic. What I use now is a Roland TR-909 for the boom, a Dave Smith Poly Evolver Keyboard for the squelch, and an M-Audio Sputnik mic for whatever strikes my fancy, all going into a TC Electronic Konnekt Live interface. I also sample a lot of stuff from vinyl on a Technics SL1210 turntable going into an Allen & Heath Xone 32 DJ mixer. Even when I had more outboard, I’d never record anything with any compression, EQ, or effects, preferring to go for the shortest and cleanest signal path possible.
MORGAN PAGE (morgan-page.com) I record pretty much all vocals via an M-Audio Sputnik mic into an Avalon VT-737SP channel strip, Purple Audio MC77 limiter, then Prism and Avid converters. Everything is composed, edited, and mixed in Pro Tools. I use Waves Artist Signature series plug-ins for vocal processing. I record all my hardware keyboards, such as my Moog Voyager and Dave Smith Prophet ’08, via Avalon U5 direct boxes. Finally, I place a clone of an SSL bus compressor on the master bus in Pro Tools for a bit of transformer-like warmth.
JON MARGULIES (heatercore.net) When I record audio, I go into a Chandler Germanium preamp/DI, which goes right into one of the line inputs on my Apogee Ensemble interface. The DI sounds great for guitars and synths. My main microphones are a Røde NTK and a pair of Peluso CEM-C6. Generally, I don’t track with any compression—I just watch my levels and enable the Apogee’s soft-limit feature just in case. The Chandler is a really interesting preamp because instead of just having a gain control, it also has a Feedback knob that acts like a “master volume.” This lets me adjust the gain for varying amounts of saturation while using the Feedback to control the overall output without going through another piece of gear. If I want a really neutral sound, I just go directly into the Apogee Ensemble.
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© 2011 MUSIC Group IP Ltd. Technical specifications and appearance are subject to change without notice. The information contained herein is correct at the time of printing. 985-90000-01466
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SOLUTIONS RECORDING
Gammy-nominated jazz pianist Vijay Iyer.
Session Log
THE ULTIMATE PIANO RECORDING A great recording has three components—a virtuoso performance, a memorable sonic event with carefully selected instruments, and a skillfully arranged recording setup. Last summer, when the wonderfully talented pianist Vijay Iyer asked me to record a solo piano release at my Bay Area facility, OTR Studios, the first two elements were dropped in my lap. My challenge was to create the third.
The Performer, the Piano, and the Formats Vijay appreciates great recording techniques and an excellent piano. Light or heavy action, key grip, pedal noise—name it, and it varies between pianos, making it a challenge for any pianist to perform at their best. Made in 1885 and rebuilt by renowned Steinway specialist Sheldon Smith, my seven-foot, 85-key Steinway B has served my studio for more than 25 years. After several albums recorded on this Steinway, Vijay’s comfort with my 100-plus-year-old piano was part of his decision to come to OTR. Vijay wanted to future-proof his music by recording with the highest fidelity audio gear and format available, so we used the ESE (Extended Sound Environment) techniques devised for our own Blue
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Coast Records projects. We simultaneously recorded tape to a two-inch, 24-track Otari machine, DSD to a Sonoma DAW, and CD-quality audio at 24 bits and 44.1kHz. There’s nothing like a well-calibrated tape machine to record acoustic instruments. With tape above $350 per reel, we ran parallel tracks on our Otari to conserve tape. Dolby SR noise reduction let us run at 15 inches per second, extending the recording time of a reel to 30 minutes. Six tracks per recording pass gave us four passes per reel—two hours of recording time in total.
Direct Stream Digital DSD is a one-bit format, which is a wholly different paradigm than conventional PCM digital recording. Instead of logging a 16- or 24-bit
JIMMY KATZ
SPECIAL
number so many times per second (44,100 for CD-quality audio) to record an audio signal, it samples at approximately 2.8 million times per second, registering a 1 if the amplitude increases compared to the previous sample, or a zero if it decreases. This “wordless” approach is initially hard to wrap your head around, but the results are analogous to looking through a perfectly clean, clear glass window as opposed to a screen—you can see the view through both, but there’s more dimension and depth through the glass. DSD’s major advantage is that the quiet sections of audio retain the detail of the louder sections—unlike PCM digital audio, where at lower sample rates, the sound quality falls apart by losing bit depth as it gets quieter. Because the “sample rate” from your ears to your brain is much higher than any technology can produce, the comparatively high sample rate of DSD is far closer to reality. DSD dynamics seem to fall faster and more naturally, while PCM sometimes feels puffy in the decay. Engineers debate DSD versus the current “high end” of PCM recording: 24 bits at 192kHz. Our blind listening tests confirmed DSD as our choice for archiving, mixdown, and multitrack recording. Sony invented DSD in the mid-1990s. Used as the format for Super Audio Compact Disc (SACD), it was intended to replace the CD as a physical format. Sadly, DSD nearly became extinct when MP3 took over, as consumers preferred the convenience and mobility of downloading and storing hundreds of songs on a pocketsized music player. Looking at that trend, Sony lost interest in DSD. Today, the pendulum is swinging the other way: Music enthusiasts are increasingly disenchanted with lo-fi MP3s, and there’s a renewed interest in high-resolution recording—and distribution— of files worldwide. At the forefront of this movement is Gus Skinas. Part of the original Sony DSD and Sonoma Recording system team, Gus now operates the Super Audio Center in Boulder, Colorado, where he services, sells, rents, and masters for DSD recordists. Find out more at superaudiocenter.com.
U67 and U87 three feet from the piano, and a pair of Neumann KM184s placed 24 inches behind the B&K mics, halfway between the lid and edge of the piano. We connected all the mics to the preamps with silver/copper alloy cables that we built in-house using a patented custom design. Originally, this cable was designed for the French aerospace industry, and it has incredible ability to reduce RF and extraneous noise. It’s expensive but well worth the price—on remote recording gigs, we can do 100-foot cable runs without loss of quality.
We used Millennia HV-3D mic preamps. They’re clean, uncolored, and can handle acoustic piano transients without distortion. With eight channels in a compact unit, they’re also great for remote recording. The more you use them, the better they sound. Finally, we didn’t use any EQ or compression in the recording or mixdown of the Vijay Iyer solo project.
The Future of DSD
Vijay’s Recording Chain
Every artist wants to preserve their work at the highest quality, and wants their fans to experience what they hear in the studio. It’s now possible. Limited only by the bandwidth of your Internet connection, delivery of large files is here. DSD (and high sample rate PCM) files are large—around 40 times the size of MP3s given the same running time. While recording Vijay’s projects, our in-house programmers developed a way to distribute DSD recordings over the Internet. Vijay’s adventurous spirit—along with the willingness of his record label ACT Music—made him one of the first artists to release his music as a DSD download. With Vijay’s recording, you can compare formats from CD quality to DSD at actmusic.downloadsnow.net/solo. If you’re hooked on DSD piano recordings, you can also get Art Lande’s While She Sleeps and a duo recording with top keyboardist Matt Rollings and Jenna Mammina at bluecoastrecords.com.
For the Vijay Iyer project, we chose Meitner (emmlabs.com) DSD converters upstream of the Sonoma DAW. Before these, we inserted Bybee Bullets, which are compact, inline XLR devices that reduce the small high-frequency distortion that occurs in recording acoustic instruments, mostly noticeable in harp or piano. Typically, I use a stereo pair of B&K 4012 mics, placed about eight inches apart at a 60-degree angle, straddling the middle of the piano, and not directly over the sound holes or any part of the metal frame. We place piano mics about halfway from the lid to the strings, with the piano lid open full stick. Slight variations in mic position depend on how hard the performer plays the keys. In Vijay’s recordings, we used a six-mic setup, adding a Neumann
To listen in true DSD, you need a device with actual DSD converters. The Korg MR-2, MR-1000 (reviewed July ’07), or MR-2000S are good options. For listening only, Korg’s AudioGate software (a free download at their site or at audiogate.bluecoastrecords. com) converts DSD files to be playable on your best “regular” audio hardware, and even if you’re listening at 24-bit/96kHz (or even 16-bit/44.1kHz), music that was originally recorded in DSD will still sound better. As evidenced by the eight-track DAW prototype Korg unveiled at a private showing during 2010’s AES convention, DSD is undergoing a rebirth. Its exquisite audio fidelity, ease of use, and convertability make it the format of the future. Cookie Marenco 0 7. 2 0 1 1
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GEAR
Avid PRO TOOLS 9 Different updates have different characters: Some are about features, some emphasize workflow, and some—like this one—are about compatibility and integration. Pro Tools 7 was the update that entered the world of grooves and time-stretching, while PT8 polished the rough edges and added a whole bunch of goodies, including new instruments and effects. So what did Avid do for version 9? They changed the whole paradigm.
Overview Though Pro Tools HD and M-Powered are still in the lineup, there’s no more Pro Tools LE. The big news is that the version that replaces LE—simply called Pro Tools—no longer requires an Avid-branded audio interface to run. Instead, it works with just about any CoreAudio or ASIO interface. I tested PT9 with interfaces from Roland, E-mu, Focusrite, Mackie, MOTU, and others, and they all worked. What’s more, when running PT9 under Windows 7, I attained lower latencies while working strictly in the Pro Tools environment than anything I’d been able to attain before: 128 samples with complex projects, and 64 for simpler ones. One important thing to know: Some audio interfaces have a slider in their software control panel for setting the sample buffer, which lets
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by Craig Anderton you get settings other than the usual multiples of 64. For PT9 to pass audio properly, though, you must use 64 samples or a multiple thereof: 128, 256, 512, and so on. In-between settings such as 96 or 100 samples cause problems. The irony of divorcing the software from the hardware is that along with PT9, Avid released a new line of Mbox interfaces that you might really want to use with Pro Tools, or for that matter, any other DAW— see our full review of the new Mbox Pro on page 60. Forget everything you knew about the Mbox line; the new is to the old as a Porsche is to a Volkswagen Beetle. Ditching dedicated hardware is also an important move for laptopbased musicians and producers, who can now use a MacBook Pro’s internal Core Audio interface, or ASIO4ALL with a Windows laptop’s internal sound chip (or an ultra-compact ASIO interface), turning PT9 into a DAW-to-go.
Delay Compensation Another change is the inclusion of path delay compensation. This is one of those “What took you so long?” changes, but that doesn’t make it any less welcome. It compensates for any delays inherent in an audio path through some device so that you hear tracks that don’t
Fig. 1. When using delay compensation, set the overall amount (1,024 or 4,096 samples) higher than this number, and you’re good to go. Among other benefits, this makes it easier to use DSPpowered effects such as Universal Audio’s Powered Plug-Ins.
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pass through the device in perfect sync with tracks that do. This works on internal inserts and with DSP-powered effects such as the Universal Audio UAD-2 series—yes! For delay compensation on hardware inserts (e.g., patching in an external compressor or EQ), you need Pro Tools HD or HD Native. You have a choice of short (1,024 samples) or long (4,096 samples) compensation, which determines the level of resources allocated; Pro Tools then delays each mixer track to attain the overall delay amount. I found that even with just a few UAD plug-ins, I needed to specify the long delay. Thankfully, this isn’t done by trial and error; there’s an unambiguous figure in the Session Setup window that shows the existing delay (see Figure 1 above), so you just choose whichever compensation setting is greater than that. The UAD plug-ins are a good test because they require going through their own DSP hardware (which, incidentally, is why you have to use realtime bounces with them on all DAWs, not just Pro Tools), and hey, I like them, so I wanted to make sure they work. If the required delay for a given plug-in is longer than Pro Tools can provide (as it may be for, say, a dynamics plug-in with a particularly long “look-ahead”), then you have the inelegant but workable option of disabling compensation for that plug-in only and shifting the track manually to compensate. Pro Tools doesn’t ping the system to provide a suggested amount of delay, so this is pretty much a manual process. It also works the same way if you’re processing via external hardware. I did note that when employing compensation with fairly big projects, I
needed to bump the interface buffer up for stable results: 256 samples usually did the job; if not, then 512 never let me down. If you’re recording in a track that uses delay compensation, Pro Tools turns it off to minimize monitoring latency, and then turns it back on during playback. It behaves similarly with virtual instruments, but note that this works only with instruments within the Pro Tools environment—it can’t reach into ReWire applications to compensate for any issues going on there.
Plays Well with Others Being able to use any audio interface isn’t the only way in which Pro Tools is now more neighborly. EuCon compatibility may not seem like a big deal—unless you’re a fan of the Euphonix Artist Series controllers such as the MC Mix and MC Control. These are excellent, compact control surfaces with motorized faders, and EuCon is the Ethernet-based, highly sophisticated protocol they use. Previously, they worked fine on the Mac with a limited number of applications, and still do, but since acquiring Euphonix, Avid has finally implemented EuCon for Windows as well as Mac. This is another “it’s about time” feature, although no one using only Windows realizes that’s the case because until now, they had no way of knowing how cool the Euphonix controllers are. Another note for Windows musicians: If you’ve been having trouble installing the optional Instrument Expansion Pack, you’re not alone, and Avid has a fix. See our “More Online” box on page 44 for the link. There’s also a lot more import/export mojo revolving around the
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GEAR popular session interchange standards AAF and OMF, including fairly esoteric options like being able to import RTAS plug-in data from an AAF sequence. More interesting to musicians is that PT9 can now export MP3 audio files without you buying an extra encoder. You’ll also find additional time code and sync functions, like redefining time code positions and being able to use the “Go To” command with subframes. I also like the “Export Sessions as Text” option. Perhaps it’s not a crucial part of studio life, but it creates a handy reference of audio files and audio regions used in a project, as well as including Edit Decision List information, crossfade info, and more.
Further Improvements PT9’s gestalt is pretty much the same as previous versions. It works, people are used to it, and the interface is straightforward. With minor exceptions, you don’t need to re-learn what you already knew. Here are the coolest new tweaks. Workflow. You now can create a new track from a send or track output, change stereo pan depth (this sets the attenuation when a stereo signal is panned to center—a variation on the pan law concept), and—fanfare, please—there’s now auto-scrolling in both the Edit and Mix windows. Track Count. You no longer need an add-on to get big track counts. Pro Tools 9 does 96 voices (mono or stereo) at 44.1kHz, 48 voices at 96kHz, and for those who prepare music for canines, 24 voices at 192kHz. You can record 32 tracks simultaneously (if your computer can handle it, of
Specifications No longer tied to Avid hardware. Works with virtually any CoreAudio or ASIO interface. Includes delay compensation for plug-ins. Increased track count. EuCon control surface support. Realtime bouncing only. No track folders. Requires RTAS adapter for VST plug-ins. CONCEPT Digital audio workstation (DAW) software with multitrack audio and MIDI recording. MAXIMUM AUDIO TRACKS 96 (stereo) at 44.1/48kHz, 48 at 88.2/96kHz, 24 at 176.4/192kHz. OPERATING SYSTEMS Mac OS 10.6 or higher, Windows 7 (32- or 64-bit). Visit Avid’s website for detailed hardware requirements and qualified computers. PLUG-IN FORMATS HOSTED RTAS. List: $599 Approx. street: $599 avid.com
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GEAR course), and have up to 64 instrument tracks, 512 MIDI tracks, 160 aux tracks, 256 busses, and one video track. You can double the voices and instrument tracks by adding the Complete Production Toolkit 2—except if recording at 192kHz, where you get 50 percent more voices. These are the same elevated track counts you get with Pro Tools HD; the Toolkit also adds 64 video tracks and the popular VCA mixing capability. Beat Detective. The multi-track Beat Detective used to be available only in PTHD, or PTLE with Music Production Toolkit 2 or Complete Production Toolkit. Now, it’s standard-issue. The bad news (sorry, Dave Grohl) is that its presence may encourage more people to use it, but of course, that complaint is a matter of taste. DigiBase. This searchable project management tool lets you find files not only by name, but also by modification date (useful for tracking down files used in particular sessions) and kind. It’s now standard in Pro Tools 9, where formerly you had to have PTHD, or PTLE with either DV Toolkit 2 or the Complete Production Toolkit.
Conclusions PT9 is the debutante ball where Pro Tools comes out and joins society. It no longer lives in its walled garden of hardware, and includes many Video overview by Craig Anderton.
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features that used to be optional at extra cost. It has a more unified feel, right down to the single installer for all versions. However, this standardization comes at a price: for Windows users, only Windows 7 is supported, and for the Mac, it’s currently Snow Leopard or nothing. I understand that this simplifies matters, but given how much Vista resembles Windows 7, I’m surprised it’s not supported as well. Another note for Windows users: Pro Tools 9 is not a 64-bit program, but runs as a 32-bit app in 64-bit systems. Whatever horsepower you lose by not having native 64-bit operation is made up for by increased compatibility with other programs that haven’t made the 64-bit native jump, such as ReWire clients and Waves plug-ins. Some of Pro Tools’ features are about catching up with the rest of the world, but “revolution number 9” is also about system integration. Coupled with the session interchange and sync enhancements, and the superb new interface hardware if you want it, Avid has—by accident or by design—made Pro Tools more of a standard, not less. This isn’t just good news for Pro Tools fans, but for anyone who uses any DAW, yet also wants to be compatible with the de facto industry standard for multitrack recording. That’s what Pro Tools is, regardless of whoever may like to say it’s not. Bonus review: Pro Tools Instrument Expansion Pack.
How to install the Instrument Expansion Pack on Windows.
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MOX6–semi-weighted 61-note
MOX8–88-note graded hammer action
–The Mobile Motif For the past decade, Motif synthesizers have been the industry standard for both live performance and studio production. Combining Motif technology with new multi-channel USB computer integration technology and bundled VSTs, the MOX 6 and 8 are the most powerful, mobile and affordable Yamaha music workstations ever. They are destined to bring Motif music production to a whole new generation
• 1217 Voices and 355MB of waveforms taken directly from the Motif XS • 256 Performances with 4 arpeggios that spark your musical inspiration • Direct Performance Recording to the internal Song and Pattern sequencer • Extensive keyboard controller features for all major VSTs and DAWS • Built-in 4-in/2-out USB audio interface with one-cable computer connectivity • Comprehensive cross platform software bundle including: Yamaha YC-3B organ, Steinberg Prologue Virtual Analog, Cubase AI DAW • Extremely lightweight for mobility (MOX6 –15.4 lbs, MOX8–32.6 lbs)
of players and producers.
For detailed information scan QR code or visit www.4wrd.it/moxkey3
©2011 Yamaha Corporation of America. All rights reserved.
GEAR
Clavia NORD STAGE 2
by Eric Lawson
The original Nord Stage (reviewed Nov. ’05) was a highly soughtafter performance instrument that bundled the best of Nord’s electromechanical vintage sounds with tonewheel organ and a single-oscillator virtual analog synth section, giving you access to up six sounds at once (two each of organ, piano, and synth) along with loads of realtime control in each section. Nord rolled out a few incremental revisions of the original Stage—most recently the EX, which doubled the internal memory. There’s nothing incremental about the new Stage 2, though. We’ll focus on the newest features in this review, and as you’ll see, they make the Stage 2 more desirable than ever for putting on the bottom (or only) tier of your gigging keyboard stand.
very playable, even on the weighted keyboard of my 88-key review unit. I had no problems with palm smears and quick single-note repeats. If you’re playing mainly organ but want the other sounds on offer, though, consider the Stage 2 Compact, which features unweighted waterfall keys. While I still slightly prefer a Neo Ventilator pedal (reviewed May ’10) for my Leslie effect, the Stage 2’s onboard simulation is so much better than the older Stages that I’ll surely use it a lot. My early unit had red lights to indicate both slow and fast rotary speed, and neither pulsed along with the speed. Since then, Nord has gone to a green LED for slow and a red one for fast, making it easier to tell the rotary speed at a glance.
Organ
Piano
The Stage 2’s B-3 simulation uses Nord’s latest and greatest tonewheel modeling. Other than lacking a third part for bass pedals (though you can split the keyboard between upper and lower manual parts), it’s identical to the dedicated C2 organ we reviewed this past May. In addition to the well-known “drawbuttons” with their LED strips, more organ parameters are editable than before. For example, you can choose different tonewheel sets, from clean to dirty and leaky. This organ sound is a pretty big upgrade from the original Stage and Stage EX. The most noticeable improvements are in the percussion, key click, and Leslie simulation. Also, Nord’s decision to trigger the organ (as contrasted with other sounds) at a high point in the keys’ travel makes it
The piano side of the Stage 2 improves upon the original Stage and Stage EX models. All sounds from the Nord Piano Library are compatible with the Stage 2. “Grand Imperial,” “Grand Lady D,” and “Grand Studio 2” are stunning, and “Grand Imperial” works especially well in both stereo and mono. A friend and frequent contributor to the Keyboard Corner reader forum, Dan Patten (a.k.a. RedKey) plays a Stage 2, and hipped me to the dark horse among its piano sounds: “Black Upright” (sampled from a Petrof 132 upright) is oozing with character, cuts through a mix beautifully, and turned the heads of a handful of audience members that wanted to know more about that sound. Previous opinion about the Stage’s acoustic piano sounds has been
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Fig. 1. Sound Manager (left) is a librarian for all sounds in the Stage 2. You can import any sounds from Nord’s Piano Library into the 500MB of Flash memory reserved for the Piano section (right), which also houses electric pianos and Clavinets. polarized—you either loved them or hated them. Essentially on par with the dedicated Nord Piano (reviewed Sept. ’10), those in the Stage 2 are so vastly improved that it’s hard not to love them. Though there’s not as much new to talk about in the electric piano department, the funk, grit, and realism of Nord’s EP and Clav sounds is at an all-time high in the Stage 2.
Samples and Synth Section Sample loading, a capability shared with the Nord Wave and Electro 3, is another huge improvement over previous Stage models. You can load either your own samples or ones downloaded from the Nord
Fig. 2. Want to play your own samples? Once you have them loaded, edited, and keymapped in Nord’s Sample Editor software, click the Generate button to port the whole thing as a multisample to the Stage 2’s next open sample slot.
Sample Library, which are then used when you select “Samp” as the base waveform in the Stage 2’s Synth section. (Modeled-analog pulse, saw, and triangle waves, plus FM and sparkly digital wavetables, are your other options.) The 380MB of memory will likely max out before you can fill all 999 slots, but what’s cool is that it’s separate from the 500MB devoted to the Piano section—that’s for factory pianos and further sounds from the Nord Piano Library, which in turn is distinct from the Nord Sample Library. Both memory blocks are non-volatile Flash, so their contents are waiting for you any time you power up. Nord ships the Stage 2 loaded with a diverse enough selection of great samples that it’s akin to a ROMpler or workstation. This is really
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GEAR the first time that Nord has offered a keyboard that couples a stellar vintage machine with a wide variety of general-purpose sounds. Using the Nord Sound Manager software (see Figure 1 on page 47), I quickly moved sounds I’d created on my Electro 3 into the Stage 2. Nord’s website also offers an impressive collection that has grown to include the Sequential Prophet-5, Yamaha DX7-II, and Minimoog. (Note to Nord and developers: I’d pay good money for a Roland Jupiter-8 library!) I loaded 150 slots worth of extra sounds without maxing out the memory. The large piano memory is also a welcome upgrade, as on earlier versions of the Stage, you couldn’t effectively load different pianos at the same time for comparison. Dan Patten provided additional feedback on sample loading. “Many prior Nord Stage owners supplemented their keyboards with another synth or module for string and brass,” he explained. “This is no longer necessary. While Electro 3 owners have been treated to this library for a while, they couldn’t layer it with other sounds or modify it with synthesis. On the Stage 2, you can, and the synth controls [such as the modulation envelope and resonant multi-mode filter] really make the samples you put in there come alive.” See Figure 2 on page 47 for how it’s done. Some of my favorite sounds include the Mellotron and Chamberlin. The more modern string samples are great as well. A pop horn set called “HornTrio+Baryton_Split” cuts through a mix better than any keyboard I’ve heard in a live setting. The accordions are inspiring and really breathe. As with the Nord Wave, samples are independent of sound presets—if you delete or move a sample, your presets won’t know it’s missing. It would
Specifications All of Nord’s best sounds in one keyboard. Exceptional organs, EPs, and Clavs. Beautiful acoustic piano sounds. Can load user samples as well as diverse, high-quality sounds from Nord’s extensive online libraries. Even with dedicated controls for most functions, it can be difficult to grasp at first. The few hardware buttons for changing programs are shared with Live settings. No MIDI thru. CONCEPT All-in-one gig machine with emphasis on vintage keyboard sounds. SYNTHESIS TYPE Modeled tonewheel organ and analog synth. Sampled acoustic and electric pianos, Clavs, and other sounds. POLYPHONY Organ: full. Piano/EP/Clav: 40-60 voices. Synth: 18 voices. MULTITIMBRAL PARTS Organ: upper and lower. Piano/EP/ Clav: 2. Synth: 2. WEIGHT 88 keys: 41 lbs. 76 keys: 36lbs. 73 waterfall keys: 21 lbs. 88 weighted keys | List: $4,599 | Approx. street: $4,200 76 weighted keys | List: $4,299 | Approx. street: $4,000 73 waterfall keys (Stage 2 Compact) | List: $3,999 | Approx. street: $3,600 nordkeyboards.com
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See your favorite retailer or call Music Dispatch at
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be great if the Sound Manager software had a way to warn you, for instance, “By removing this sample, you’ll affect programs A21, B35, and C55.”
Onstage The Stage 2 was my gig partner in Flat Elvis (flatelvisband.com), a band I’ve recently joined that plays everything from Beatles to ’80s pop to the Killers and Muse. I’ve used an older Stage for a number of years, so I’m familiar with the layout, but still found myself a little overwhelmed by the number of features to digest at first. I had a few hours in advance of my first rehearsal to learn the Stage 2 and create some “programs” (actually multis that save the state of the whole instrument) I’d need for the set list. Many things I needed were there out of the gate, such as piano/ synth layers, and splits with a pad in the left hand and a lead in the right. Keyboard action is a subtle but perceptible improvement over the Stage “classic” and EX. The keys-to-sound connection is one of the best I’ve ever felt, with an immediacy and dynamic range I normally find lacking. I do wish Nord had included a second row of program buttons in addition to the simple row of five. As it stands, these are shared with “Live mode” slots, which are admittedly very useful: Each slot remembers whatever changes you most recently made, then saves them (even with the power off ) without you hitting “Store.” It’s worth noting that the original OS (version 1.10) on my review unit had a number of small bugs that were addressed in an OS update I downloaded a week before we went to press. Many gaps were related to forgotten features that hadn’t yet made it over from earlier Stage versions. I didn’t get special treatment for being a reviewer, but just downloaded OS updates and sound banks from the Nord website like any customer would. My experience confirmed Nord’s reputation for listening to musicians’ feedback and staying on top of updates.
sounding synthesizers, workstation-like general-purpose sounds, the ability to load your own samples, effects that are easy to apply and adjust on a whim, and an action that really connects you to the sounds. Nord has rolled all of it into one classy mothership of a keyboard that’s a genuine joy to play. Read our review of the original Nord Stage.
Being able to stack and split all these sounds almost instantly, without paging through edit parameters, is most refreshing, and I believe that the Stage 2 will earn its keep very quickly in just about any gig. It’s a model of how a premium instrument for professional keyboardists should sound and behave.
Audio examples.
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Conclusions What justifies the Stage 2’s existence in today’s crowded market of all-in-one gig keyboards? It’s the combination in a single instrument of all these sounds and features: killer organ and vintage keys, breathtaking acoustic pianos, analog- and digital0 7. 2 0 1 1
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Roland JUNO-Gi
by Michael Gallant
You get a call from your songwriting buddy who has a great idea and wants you to come over ASAP with a keyboard and a recorder. You’ve got a killer solo or duo gig coming up, but your car is in the shop, so you need to create some ripping backing tracks and haul minimal gear. You just want to chill on your stoop, jam with some cool sounds, and archive whatever good licks you come up with. For these scenarios and more, Roland’s Juno-Gi may be the answer. It’s a hybrid of features, the standout being an eight-track digital audio recorder. To keyboardists looking for sonic flexibility that won’t break their backs, the ingredients are certainly there. But does the Juno-Gi deliver sonic thunder worthy of its storied name? Let’s find out.
Build, Action, and Controls I was immediately impressed by how light and compact the Juno-Gi was. Weighing in at under 13 pounds, it’s the very model of a subwayand shoulder-friendly gig keyboard. Still, it felt solidly constructed with serious usage in mind. The Juno-Gi aims at ease of use, and pretty much hits the mark. Sections such as “Sound Modify” and “Digital Recorder” are clearly labeled, and the large, bright screen makes it easy to know what’s going on at a glance. The sound category selection buttons, which also let you access your own favorites, are right above the keys
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for easy reach mid-performance. I liked how their textured tops let me find them without looking, just a bit more quickly than I would have otherwise. While some compact instruments end up with cheap-feeling controls, the Juno-Gi avoids this. The knobs feel strong and hefty, the recorder’s sliders move smoothly and with good resistance, and the pitch/modulation joystick is meaty enough to lean into. Similarly, the synth keyboard itself feels like a step up from other flyweight instruments I’ve played. The action is musical and strikes a middle ground—springy enough to give single-note trills on a B-3 organ sound machine-gun rapidity, but resistant enough to make the nuances needed for playing acoustic piano manageable. On some piano and electric piano sounds, however, the velocity switching from a mellow timbre to a bright one sounded a little too abrupt, with one fierce clunker note emerging in an otherwise understated run. This is far from a deal-breaker, but something to be aware of if you intend to play lots of jazz piano or ballads on the Juno-Gi. Via USB, the Juno-Gi works as both a MIDI controller and audio interface, and while it won’t replace my MOTU UltraLite as my main computer recording solution (it’s 44.1kHz only, for starters), it’s more than up to playing soft synths from a laptop without you needing an extra piece of hardware. Given the number of flimsy, easily-kicked-
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out-by-some-drunk-guy power connections I’ve worked with, I also appreciated the ultra-secure power adaptor jack.
Sounds As a longtime player of Roland sounds, I was excited to plug in some headphones and see what goodies the Juno-Gi had to offer. With roughly 1,300 sounds and a wide variety of effects, there was depth and musicality in all categories I can imagine needing. Particularly immersive were the varied electric pianos, strings, and electric guitars, though the synth pads, which include many throwback emulations, were no slouches either. The Juno-Gi names its playable sounds Live Sets. Essentially, it’s always in “multi” mode, and each multi can have up to four customtweaked Tones, which correspond to single patches. To test things out, I started with the “Agogo” ethnic percussion patch and decided to flesh it out into something a little more cinematic. After some quick consultations with the instruction manual (many aspects of the JunoGi are intuitive, but not so much as to navigate without the manual), it was a simple matter to layer “Agogo” with a wood block sound for added pop, plus two types of string sounds to impart an ominous rumble. Assigning the four Tones to keyboard zones was also easy, given the straightforward visual feedback in the display. A little panning and relative level setting, and I was basically done. I also called up the Juno-Gi’s effects editing menu, which lets you route Tones of a Live Set individually, and ran “Agogo” through heavy chorus and tremolo. Nice. Especially with the more electronic sounds and patterns, I enjoyed holding down a trigger note in my left hand while tweaking the reverb,
sweeping the filter cutoff and resonance, or pumping up the bass EQ with my right hand using the Sound Modify knobs. I found this particularly useful while playing with the synth’s impressive arpeggiator; it gave me a touch of DJ-style control over beats and grooves, which is a really nice treat when working completely inside a single instrument. Also, Roland’s ubiquitous D-Beam can either tweak expression (volume) or assignable sound parameters, or serve as its own Theremin-esque solo synth. That last option is mainly a novelty, but it’s cool that you can trigger it independently of whatever else the Juno-Gi is doing at the time. Though the Juno-Gi looks like a preset synth, you can actually edit individual Tones in a Live Set fairly deeply on the “Pro Edit” screen— separate volume, filter, and pitch envelopes, filter type with keyboard tracking, and two LFOs are the highlights of what’s on hand. Still, given the Juno’s live orientation, I’d like to see hardware controls for a few more of these settings. You can change the EQ, filter cutoff and resonance, and reverb send with the Sound Modify knobs, but that’s about it. One often stumbles across (for example) a pad that would be the perfect comping sound if it had a faster attack or quicker release, so at a minimum, some envelope sliders (or a mode that retasked the audio recorder’s sliders for this) are needed.
Multitrack Audio Recording Those familiar with Roland’s VS family of standalone recorders will immediately warm to the Juno-Gi’s onboard audio recorder, in which each of the eight “real” tracks can comprise eight separate takes, or “virtual tracks.” When you mix down a song, the virtual track you’ve chosen as the “keeper” is what will sound.
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GEAR Specifications The recorder lets you bounce down multiple tracks and then re-arm the source tracks for more recording, so if you want to lay down, say, 16 tracks, it’s do-able. Note that while all eight tracks can play back at once, the Juno-Gi can only record two tracks at a time—a disappointment, as I would have liked to record stereo keyboard tracks while singing a vocal, or while a friend laid down some guitar or bass. The recorder took me a bit longer to learn than creating my own Live Sets did, but not an inordinate amount of time. The Juno-Gi’s Rhythm Pattern functionality resides in the Digital Recorder section, and that’s where my first recording began. It was a simple matter to set a tempo, choose a drum kit that felt appropriate, and throw together a basic arrangement from the keyboard’s varied and highly usable set of factory preset patterns; mixing an old-school electronic kit with heavy metal drum patterns yielded surprisingly cool results. After that, I armed tracks 1 and 2 to record internally from the Juno-Gi itself, dialed up my custom Live Set (titled “Happy” because that’s how it made me feel), and recorded. Again, the button presses to get from A to Z of this process were not quite obvious enough to navigate without instruction, but with manual in hand it was no problem. Next, I overdubbed electric guitar and bass. After adjusting input levels on the back of the keyboard and in the Juno-Gi’s Recorder View, the guitar sounded great, adding a nice, grungy dissonance to my already sinister track thanks to the keyboard’s Boss-sourced effects processing. The bass, however presented some initial problems: a low signal level
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Very portable. Can run on batteries. Deep sound set is versatile and inspiring. Strong effects. Relatively easy learning curve. Eight-track audio recorder with good mastering effects. Only two tracks recordable at once. Velocity switching on some keyboard sounds is a bit abrupt. No aftertouch. POLYPHONY 128 voices. AUDIO RECORDING 8 tracks, each with 8 virtual takes, 44.1kHz resolution. EFFECTS Internal sounds: 2 inserts plus global chorus and reverb. Audio recorder: Boss-derived multi-effects; global reverb and mastering effects. List: $1,199.00 Approx. street: $999.00 rolandus.com with too much noise. Further tweaking of levels helped me record usable bass parts. A bit later on, I discovered that I’d been inadvertently running the bass input through an amp simulator effect, which was the source of the noise. So, be sure you know what effects are active before you record an external instrument or vocal.
GEAR
Highlights of the Juno-Gi’s rear panel include 1/4" line ins, a mic/ guitar combo jack, an SDHC card slot for the eight-track audio recorder, and a separate click output you could send to a drummer. Needless to say, keyboardists used to recording in DAWs will find the Juno-Gi limited, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Its feature set is still pretty robust—punch-in overdubbing, effects routing possibilities, basic editing, and more—and the end results can sound great, especially after you tweak your stereo mixdown with the built-in mastering effects. Even though I use Apple Logic for most of my recording and composition, I found the more focused and utilitarian Juno-Gi unexpectedly appealing. For firing off quick sound cues, the keyboard struck a nice middle ground between flexibility and not providing so many options that I couldn’t get started recording music. Though there’s no multitrack MIDI sequencing of the workstation sort, the Juno-Gi is 16-part multitimbral and can therefore play back Standard MIDI files (as well as WAV, AIFF, or MP3 audio
files, giving you lots of options for handling backing tracks) from an inserted USB stick. You can also import MIDI files as rhythm patterns or arpeggios.
Conclusions The Juno-Gi has a unique combination of portability, playability, programmability, a deep sound set, and eight-track audio recording that makes it well worth looking at for a wide variety of musicians. Despite my minor playing and recording gripes, the Juno-Gi tucks significant firepower into a slim frame at a slim price. It pushed me in unexpected creative directions; among other things, I already have new sound cue material and some very cool live jams to show off. I expect that many happy keyboardists will engage the Juno-Gi with similar success and positive results.
MARKETPLACE
Original audio examples by Michael Gallant.
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Our Juno-Gi video overview.
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Apple MACBOOK AIR I’d never taken the MacBook Air seriously as a music production machine. Previous models were undeniably gorgeous, and I was happy with the second-generation (late 2008) model as my mobile office and my portal for managing Keyboard’s website. It also had enough power for hammering out a handful of tracks for a quick song sketch, and for quickie edits of web-sized videos in iMovie. However, I wouldn’t have trusted it with a mission-critical multitrack project, nor as my sole sound source for a gig that called for lots of split and layered soft synth setups. When Apple asked me to try the latest model (introduced in October 2010) for exactly such tasks, I glanced at the new specs and thought, “This could work.” My verdict: Not only does it work; it works
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by Stephen Fortner so well as to be the only laptop that a great many mobile musicians will need for some time to come.
Overview The MacBook Air has two USB2.0 ports, an SD card slot, and fast 802.11n WiFi, but no wired Ethernet or FireWire. A mini FireWire port or third USB port would make it easier to connect the trifecta of audio interface, MIDI controller, and copy protection dongle, but an increasing number of synths—including the Roland Gaia and Juno-Stage, M-Audio Venom, Novation UltraNova, and Yamaha’s new MOX—have built-in USB audio interfaces, letting you kill two birds
Fig. 1. Mounting my desktop Mac’s DVD drive to install Pro Tools, using the MacBook Air’s Remote Disc functionality.
Fig. 2. Despite the alarming CPU meter, 15 virtual instruments played this dense piano loop at once with no audible problems. The buffer was set at a low 64 samples. with one cable. You’re also fine if your controller has a conventional MIDI out and your interface has a MIDI in. There’s an 11-inch model, but unless super-small is super-important, you want the 13-incher. It’s still impossibly thin, and so light that I almost can’t tell it’s in my laptop bag by how the strap feels on my shoulder—I have to double-check visually to make sure I didn’t leave it in a bar. (My favorite bars all have WiFi. You might say I’m a workaholic. . . .) The screen resolution of 1,440 x 900 pixels (as compared to 1,280 x 800 on 13-inch MacBook Pros) was enough for me to split the screen in Logic or Pro Tools with the arranging window across the top and the mixer on the bottom, and still get at everything I needed without too much scrolling and zooming. Everything in MOTU Digital Performer’s unified window was crisp and legible as well. Most importantly for music, while all MacBook Airs now use zippy, non-volatile Flash storage, only the 13-inch offers 256GB of it. That’s the point where you start to be able to record a decent amount of multitrack audio while also hosting your favorite virtual instruments and at least some of the sample content that comes with them. A bump in CPU speed from 1.86 to 2.13GHz will cost you $100. So will an extra 2GB of RAM (which you need to opt for at point of purchase) for a total of 4GB. If you have to pick one, get the RAM. It’s more relevant to how much you can do at once and to smooth operation.
Installing Software Though you can download much of today’s music production software, just as much of it still comes on DVD-ROM—instruments with
multi-gigabyte sample libraries are a prime example. Given that there’s no room in the MacBook Air for a CD/DVD drive, how do you get stuff onto it? First, Apple will pre-install some software they make, such as Logic Express (but not Logic Studio). Second, an external Apple SuperDrive is just $79 and connects via USB. Third and most cleverly, if you have another Mac with OS 10.4.10 or later, or even a PC (!) running Windows Vista, 7, or XP Service Pack 2, you can use its CD or DVD drive as though it were the MacBook Air’s. Simply enable DVD/CD sharing in the System Preferences of the Mac (or the Control Panel of the PC) that has the optical drive. That drive will then show up as “Remote Disc” in the MacBook Air’s Finder. (See Figure 1 above.) The two computers need to be on the same network. In case you aren’t near a WiFi hub, I tried creating a computer-to-computer network on an older MacBook Pro, and then joined it from the MacBook Air. This worked fine. Full instructions, and software updates you may need, are at support.apple.com/kb/ht1777. For installing samples for virtual instruments you already own, using an external hard drive (make sure it has a USB2.0 port) as an intermediary is faster than Remote Disc. It also helps you be selective— 256GB is a good chunk of room, but probably not so much that you’d indiscriminately copy over everything from your studio machine. For example, I installed just the Synthogy Ivory II program from DVD using Remote Disc access, then dragged over all the files for its Yamaha C7 library from a backup of my Mac Pro’s “Ivory Items” folder that lives on an external Glyph drive. The Yamaha takes up about 23GB, and the total install time was ten minutes. The progress bar for copying the same
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GEAR Specifications files over the network via remote login showed 45 minutes, and installing them from remote DVD would have taken much longer.
Ridiculously portable. Enough battery life for you to work all day. Gorgeous display. Quantum leap in computing power over previous MacBook Airs. More than suitable for serious music production.
Horsepower I’m shocked. In a good way. For starters, the new Flash storage boots apps and sessions stinkin’ fast. Time from cold power-up to a 40-track project being open in Logic Pro: 28 seconds. Time from clicking the MainStage icon to the “Keyboard with Patches” template having loaded all its instruments and samples: 20 seconds. Time Ivory II needed to load a grand piano keyset with 16 velocity layers: two-and-a-half seconds. How many things a computer can do at once is where the rubber meets the road, and the first of my torture tests was to create a project with 48 stereo audio tracks and Logic’s buffer set to 64 samples, at 24-bit/44.1kHz resolution. I then started dragging audio files to tracks—to give the Flash drive a workout, I needed to make sure each track was accessing a different file, not just playing copies of the same audio region. Playing all 48 tracks back put Logic’s system performance meter for one CPU core consistently in the top 20 percent of its range while the other hovered near the bottom—and the Disk I/O bar barely registered any activity. The audio itself was smooth and glitch-free. I then started inserting two of Logic’s most demanding plug-ins— the Space Designer convolution reverb and Spectral Gate filter—on each track. Screen graphics slowed down by track 20, and I got to track 23 before playback stopped and a system overload message appeared. Upping the buffer to 128 samples let me put both plug-ins on seven more tracks, and if you mix down at even higher buffer settings (as is common practice), you can expect more still. Of course, I’m not suggesting anyone be this profligate in the use of insert effects—this is just meant to show how much power is really on tap. My next tests were more relevant to live soft synth hosting and writing songs “in the box.” With the buffer back at 64 samples, the densest sustainpedal-down playing I could muster in Ivory II—with Ivory’s polyphony set to the maximum of 160 voices—produced no dropouts, flam between notes, or latency. Going multitimbral, I copied the same MIDI file into all 15 instrument tracks in Logic’s “Instruments” starter project, which includes six instances of the EXS24 sampler (I turned on the filters in all of them to use more resources); one each of EVP88 electric piano, EVD6 Clav, and EVB3 organ; four Ultrabeats; and two ES2 virtual analog synths. The MIDI file itself had lots of sustained chords, and I was able to play it in a continuous loop with one core’s meter pegged, the other dancing at about halfway, and again, no audible problems. I got away with changing two of these tracks to Sculpture, Logic’s CPU-intensive physical modeling synth, before an overload (see Figure 2 on page 57). Your mileage will vary if you use third-party effects and instruments and/or a different DAW, but not by much. Writing to a Flash drive is somewhat slower than reading from it, so the only thing that might give me pause is multitrack recording of a lot of audio inputs at the same time. What do I mean by a lot? You’ll have no problems tracking every analog input on single-rack USB2 audio interfaces such as the MOTU 828 Mk.3 or RME Fireface UFX—even at 96kHz. If, on top of that, you want to fill all 16 channels of lightpipe
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Thinness precludes a built-in CD/DVD drive. No FireWire or Thunderbolt. RAM is not user-expandable. CONFIGURATION TESTED Intel Core 2 Duo 1.86GHz, 4GB 1,067MHz DDR3 RAM, 256GB Flash storage, 13" LED backlit screen. As tested: $1,699 With 128GB storage and 2GB RAM: $1,299 No list/street price difference apple.com either of those interfaces offers (by adding a couple of eight-channel mic preamps that have lightpipe out and recording a swing orchestra, perhaps), you’ll see the disk I/O meter in your DAW start to climb. I’m not saying the MacBook Air will glitch, but I’ll stop short of guaranteeing that it won’t. As always, sample rate and buffer setting make a difference. Some previous MacBook Airs had overheating issues, but not this one. Though the fan spun up to full blast at the height of my CPU abuse, the underside of the machine got no warmer than my cat is after lounging in a sunbeam. Finally, battery life rocks. I regularly left for the office without the power supply. Despite all-day use that included powering my Novation UltraNova synth via USB, the battery usually had one to two hours left by the time I headed home in the early evening. Asleep, the thing barely uses any juice. You could conceivably open it on a two-day-old charge, realize the charger is at home, and get through a gig.
Conclusions For music production on the go, the MacBook Air is a giant in elven clothing. It’s also very stable—I saw the occasional, brief “beach ball” if I opened a plug-in window while everything was playing back, but nothing affected the audio. I also never once had to force-quit anything or reboot, and the SSD speed has forever spoiled me for conventional hard drives. Unlike current MacBook Pros, it doesn’t have the latest Intel Core i5 or i7 processor, so if you need that level of power for, say, film scores using the Vienna Symphonic Library, it’s not like any amount of portability or beautiful design is going to change your mind. Otherwise, an uninflated look at your needs may well argue loudly for making the MacBook Air the centerpiece of your mobile keyboard, DJ/ producer, or songwriter rig. It’s truly the first ultraportable that pros can take totally seriously for music and multimedia creation. Video: First look and testing.
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keyboardmag.com/july2011
FROM 35 YEARS OF
®
CLASSIC ROCK
SYNTH GODS
Classic Rock brings out the stories
Culled from the pages of Keyboard
behind the hits on drive-time radio, as
magazine, this book spotlights artists
No single decade revitalized the keyboard
told by the keyboard-playing artists and
who did much more than just play
as a focal point as much as the 1980s.
sidemen who created them. It’s all here:
synthesizers: they changed the course
Here, the editors of Keyboard magazine
the gear, the songs, the road stories,
of music history and inspired generations.
have culled that era’s best articles and
and the inspiration behind some of the
Featuring in-depth profiles of
combined them with a wealth of insight in
greatest songs of the ’60s, ’70s, and
Jan Hammer, Wendy Carlos, Rick
one landmark book. Features 20 interviews
’80s by Chicago; Deep Purple; Tom
Wakeman, Brian Eno, and others,
with noted players, producers, and pioneers
Petty & the Hearbreakers; Blood, Sweat
this book delves into how these new,
like Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, Duran
& Tears; Steve Winwood; the Grateful
untested boxes of circuitry captured
Duran’s Nick Rhodes, Depeche Mode’s
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the imagination of so many
ISBN 978-0-87930-952-7 $14.99
legendary artists.
THE BEST OF THE ’80s The Artists, Instruments, and Techniques of an Era
Vince Clarke, Peter Gabriel, The Human League, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, and Frank Zappa. ISBN 987-0-87930-930-5 $19.95
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GEAR
The Mbox Mini (top) and Mbox (middle) are more compact and less expensive, but both have the same sound and build quality as the Mbox Pro (bottom).
Rear Panel
RECORDING
SPECIAL
Avid MBOX PRO This one took me by surprise. Avid had been claiming their new Mbox series was “really good, really it is, it really isn’t like the old interfaces, honest” . . . which of course I took with a grain of salt. That is, until I put one on the test bench. The Mbox Pro is an eight-in/eight-out FireWire interface. Two of the four combo jacks are switchable between instrument inputs on the front panel and line-level 1/4" ins on the rear. The other two are switchable on the front panel for mic or line-level signals. As a helpful bonus, these four inputs also have rear-panel TRS insert jacks. For the remaining I/O, inputs 5 and 6 are RCA auxiliary ins (but note that they aren’t turntable-friendly), and 7 and 8 are stereo S/PDIF. There are six 1/4" balanced output jacks (enough for 5.1 surround monitoring), stereo S/PDIF out, and dual stereo headphone outs. What’s not to like? The 48-volt phantom power switch is global— either it’s active for all four mic inputs, or it’s not. Also, the MIDI and S/PDIF are on a breakout cable. Interestingly, on the one-model-down Mbox (which has less I/O and uses USB2, and also sounds excellent), the MIDI and S/PDIF jacks are on the unit itself. If you care about specs, they’re extremely impressive, with audible results. Low-frequency response rolls off by less than 0.5dB at 5Hz—that’s serious low end—and even at a sample rate of 44.1kHz, response is essentially flat up to 20kHz, after which it falls off a cliff. There are no noise components above –120dB, and most sit around –130dB. That’s seriously quiet. As to distortion, all I could find was a second harmonic distortion component at –110dB, and a third harmonic at a hair over –100dB. Short version: These specs are audiophile-quality and very few interfaces meet them. What’s more, the thing is built like a tank. When you take off the
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by C b Craig i A Anderton d t outside metal case, there’s an inside metal case. We’re talking major shielding. There’s also a feature that only us geeks notice, but it really matters: Jacks and controls mount to the panel with lock-washers and nuts. This is very different from inexpensive interfaces that solder these components right onto the circuit board and have the shafts poke out through a hole in the casing, wobbly knobs and all. If you’re plugging and unplugging a lot, Avid’s way of doing it takes strain off the circuit board, greatly adding to longevity. It’s not an overstatement to say I was shocked by the quality of the new Mbox Pro and the line overall. Granted, it’s not cheap, but you do get a significant break if you buy any Mbox bundled with Pro Tools 9 (reviewed on page 40), which costs $599 by itself. Whichever new Mbox you choose, that bundle is certainly a Key Buy-winning value.
Specifications Specs and audio quality are nothing short of superb, and more in the league of expensive standalone converters. Extremely durable construction. Phantom power is global, not selectable per mic input. No turntable inputs. Hardware only | List: $799 | Approx. street: $720 With Pro Tools 9 | List: $1,099 | Approx. street: $1,000 avid.com
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To buy tickets or for more info, visit www.namm.org/summer/2011/wannaplay
PR O D UCT SP O TLIGHT
Special Advertising Section
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Octavian - Keyboard Calculator Bitnotic
Ivory II – Italian Grand
Available on the iTunes App Store
Now Available
Instantly see and hear 500+ scales and 50+ chords on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Also features Circle of Fifths, scale modes, chord inversions, descending scales, and much more. Keyboard Magazine said of Octavian 1.1.0 (Jan 2010): “It’s a cheat sheet no keyboardist should leave home without.” SRP: $2.99 USD
Featuring the same award-winning piano engine found in Ivory II Grand Pianos, the Ivory II Italian Grand boasts a spectacular 10 foot piano with incredible tonal range. Enhanced with their exclusive Harmonic Resonance Modeling, the largest of Synthogy’s virtual pianos, (wth up to 18 velocity layers) rewards your touch with a sublime wash of color and nuance you must play to believe. SRP: $179
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Distributed by ILIO www.ilio.com (800) 747-4546
To advertise in this section contact: Contessa Abono at 650-238-0296 or [email protected]
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07.2011
C LA S S IF I ED S Categories
Education & Tutorial
Sounds, Sequences, & Software Studio Furniture Education & Tutorial Mixing and Mastering Instruments
Instruments
Learn Piano Tuning, Repairing, And Regulating, taught by Craftsman technicians. Complete correspondence course includes written and video tape training material, Apprentice Training Manual, much more. Licensed by Departmentof Education. www.pianotuning.com. Randy Potter School of Piano Technology, 61592 Orion Dr., Bend, OR 97702. (541) 382-5411.
Pianos & Organs
Buying or selling instruments through our Classified Ads offers you convenience, a big marketplace, and a wide range of instruments and prices. However, buying mail-order does have its drawbacks, too. Keyboard Magazine suggests the following guidelines to help the buyer and the seller in these transactions: 1) Get a written description of the instrument, which should include the serial number. 2) Get front and back photos of the instrument. 3) Get a written purchase agreement, with a 24-hour approval clause allowing the buyer to return the instrument for a full refund if it does not meet his/her reasonable expectations.
Selling a Korg M1 keyboard workstation, stand included. I am the original owner and the keyboard is in excellent condition. $665 or best offer. Call Danny 925-325-1619.
Nord C1 available, power cord and manual plus extras included . With orignial case. Like New. Selling for $2,500 or OBO -usually listed at over $3,000. Also for sale one Leslie speaker. I’m original owner, 760 90-watts. Like new. Call Jimmy durning Central standard time 5pm - 12pm. (612) 822-4635
Piano & Keyboard Players Only “I enthusiastically endorse this book!” – Mark Isham http://www.billkeis.com/pkpo-ebook.htm
Sounds, Sequences & Software
Pianos & Organs
Learn jazz piano on the internet at www.JazzPianoOnline.com www.VintageKeyboardSounds.com Authentic
www.b3hammond.com. Buy/Sell MINT Hammonds, Leslies. Wordwide sales. (701) 400-2933, [email protected]
MELLOTRON, B3, and COMBO ORGAN SAMPLES. All Formats Supported. 562-856-9333
Mixing and Mastering
BAND-IN-A-BOX IMPROVEMENT PRODUCTS * Put A Better Band In Your Box * Norton Music (since 1990) * www.nortonmusic.com
www.B3GUYS.com HAMMOND Organs & LESLIE Speakers Sales - Service - Parts - Rental 615-438-8997
AD ORDER FORM Studio Furniture
An ad in Keyboard ’s Classifieds reaches more than 16,900* serious musicians for only $2.40 per word plus $7.00 for an address. Minimum charge: $25.00. Please underline words to appear in bold type and add $0.50 per every bold word. Please indicate clearly any words to appear in all caps and add $0.25 per every cap word. Advertisers must provide us with complete name, street address, and phone number, whether
or not included in the ad copy (you may list a PO Box address in your ad, however). Mail ads to: Keyboard Classifieds, Attn: Contessa Abono, 1111 Bayhill Dr., Suite 125, San Bruno, CA 94066. FAX (if paying by MasterCard, or Visa): (650) 238-0263. For more information, call Contessa Abono at (650) 238-0296; E-mail: [email protected]. (*Audited circulation; does not include pass-along rate.)
Company Name_______________________________ Contact Name_____________________________ Address ______________________________________________________ City____________________________________ State__________________Zip ____________________ Telephone
______________________________________________________
TO COMPUTE COST OF AD #______words x $2.40 = _______ #______bold words x $ .50 = _______ #______ ALL CAPS wds x $ .25 = _______ Address $7.00 = _______ Total cost per issue = _______ (minimum $25.00)
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_________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________ (do not include address when counting words) Category: ❒ Marketplace ❒ Duplication ❒ Talent and Employment ❒ Sounds/Sequences/Software ❒ Mixing/Mastering ❒ Instruments ❒ Accessories ❒ Gear for Sale ❒ Acoustic Products & Svc’s ❒ Studio Furnishings ❒ Other
07.2011
KEYBOARDMAG.COM
65
TIME MACHINE A LIFETIME OF INSIGHT
by Stephen Fortner
It’s an understatement to say that Chick Corea has been a lifelong friend and mentor to Keyboard magazine. He was featured on the cover of our debut issue in 1975, and has been regularly generous with his time and wisdom ever since. Here are just a few quotes from previous interviews over the decades. Happy 70th birthday, Chick, and may you rock our world for many, many more years to come.
SEPTEMBER/ OCTOBER 1975 On practicing: “If a guy wants to play jazz-rock music at heart, but feels for some reason (or someone told him) that he has to spend 12 hours a day practicing Beethoven, he’s going to be killing himself. So . . . do what you want to do and do it with unreserved intention, which is quite a task.”
FEBRUARY 1978 On difficult riffs: “Just subdivide the scale or arpeggio or whatever it is and play it with two hands . . . with three notes in one hand and four in the other, or whatever. Get the hands to flow over one another up and down so that it sounds even, and you’ll be able to play twice as fast as you can play with one hand.”
OCTOBER 1985 On going electronic: “If it wasn’t for the fact that touch-sensitive keyboards are the order of the day, and if you didn’t have the sound systems and signal processors and good electronic keyboard sounds you can get now, I don’t think I would have gone all the way with this.”
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JULY 1983 On improvisation: “Somewhere in what you do, a sense of organization must take hold. . . . For instance, if you begin very slow and sparse, only a deranged mind would continue in that mode over a long, long length of time. The natural thing to do is to contrast with something of a different tempo and density. In this way, you deal with the dichotomies of life.”
JULY 1988 On Herbie Hancock: “Herbie is unique in my life in that he’s so easy to play with. When we began noodling around with the idea of playing two pianos, it just started coming together so magically. . . . Also, our musical tastes are similar, and the kinds of musical games we like to do run along the same lines. Our lives are a bit of a mirror.”
Oh red and beautiful Nord Stage 2 Nothing in the world compares to you
Now with Nord’s excellent Sample Library functionality, the new Stage 2 is a professional keyboard player’s dream instrument come true with superior sounds, intuitive interface, and renowned reliability.
WHAT’S NEW? Check out the comparison chart at our web site.
www.nordkeyboards.com For more information contact [email protected]