Keyboards Magazine, 1979
The Vannelli Bros. One of them is the Star — the one with the golden voice, the dramatic stage persona, the matted chest hair, the Grammy nomination, the Hunk Of The Month award from Sixteen magazine. The other one is the Shadow — somewhat to the rear, on the edge of the spotlight, in the dim gleam of the LEDs behind his synthesizers. Only one of them gets his face and pectoral forestry splashed onto magazine covers, but when it comes to making music, especially with regard to using keyboards to their best effect, it takes both of the Vannelli brothers –Gino the Star and Joe the Shadow — to get the job done.
Working with a variety of other musicians, a third brother, Ross, often among them on guitar and vocals, the Vannellis have been laying down ambitious pop-rock tracks for years. Their style seems to lie just beyond the traditional limits of AM radio, in that Gino’s compositions and arrangements are frequently more distended, his productions deeper and more Spectorian, than the usual Top 40 fare. In a format regularly saturated with formula music, where string players are unseen and almost unheard behind disco drums, the Vannelli brothers have hired the entire Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and used it as a prominent element in varying musical textures, together with Joe’s electric keyboards and Gino’s piano playing [A Pauper In Paradise, A&M;, SP-4664).
In spite of this typically grandiose approach, the Vannellis continue to produce accessible albums, partly because Gino’s personality as a singer cuts like a beacon through even the most involved charts. At the heart of his performance lies a love of jazz and rock, implanted by his father, a hairdresser and former big-band leader with a liking for Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and by his childhood experiences in the local Montreal music scene. While older brother Joe was practicing piano, Gino was inspired by a film of Gene Krupa to begin playing drums on a second-hand set, and at the age of 12 he started playing high school gigs with a band called the Cobras. After a year, the brothers joined forces in the Jacksonville Five, a soul band patterned after the music of James Brown and the Stax Records artists.
Eventually the Vannellis saved enough money to invest in a four-track tape deck and equipment, and soon they were at work preparing a demo tape in their own basement studio to hustle in Los Angeles. Even in those early days, keyboards played a large role in their arrangements, although at first this was due mainly to financial constraints. As Gino recently told Canadian Musician magazine, they had tried to line up a guitarist to play on the tape, but each one they talked to wanted to be paid, “and frankly, we just couldn’t afford any extra expenses, so we started using the synthesizer instead. I guess it was the root of the evolution.”
Gino had briefly been contracted — at the age of 15, no less — to RCA, and had released a single the following year that made it into the Canadian Top 10, but from the beginning the Vannellis had their eyes set on the bigger markets south of the border. Two years spent in New York as a songwriter whetted Gino’s taste for the business even more, and as his performing and composing talents continued to mature, it seemed only a question of time before his efforts would be rewarded.
The jackpot was struck in 1973, when Gino and Joe cut their debut LP, Crazy Life [A&M;, 4395]. Powerful People [A&M;, 3630] followed, and then came the third album, Storm At Sunup [A&M;, 4533], in which Joe’s synthesizer work began to be brought further into the foreground. Their latest releases are Gist Of The Gemini [A&M;, 4596], A Pauper In Paradise, and the platinum-selling Brother To Brother [A&M;, 4722].
The critics as well as the fans have praised the Vannelli albums over the years. Recently nominated for a Grammy award in the Male Pop Vocal Performance category for “I Just Wanna Stop,” off the Brother To Brother LP, Gino has received a Juno award, the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy, in the same category, and two of his albums have won Grammys for Best Engineering.
Although he played drums on Crazy Life, Gino hasn’t done any drumming in the studio since then. When he does perform on an instrument nowadays, it is the piano, and when not actually at the keyboards, he is developing his ideas of how to use them with Joe. The attention that they devote to these instruments is evident in their recent LPs and concert tours, in which other keyboardists are often used. Richard Baker, for example, who would later work with Gary Wright [see CK, May ’78], plays several keyboards on Gist Of The Gemini, and synthesist Leon Gaer doubles bass lines with bass guitarist Jimmy Haslip on Brother To Brother.
Since the Vannelli keyboard sound is the product of both Gino’s and Joe’s creativity, CK spoke with the two of them individually in order to focus on their own respective approaches. The following interviews, like their two symbiotic personalities, together offer a subtle insight into the singular success of the Vannelli brothers.
Gino Vannelli
Was the piano playing of your big brother Joe one of the main things that led you into music?
No, actually; it was the opposite way around. Joe was in college and I was in my last year of high school when I started writing. After a year in college I planned to go on with my career in music, so I made my way down to New York when I was around 17. Joey used to come and help me now and then in sessions, but it wasn’t until maybe a year and a half to two years later that he followed me full time. I was mostly a drummer then.
Do you still consider the drums to be your primary instrument?
Well, it’s the instrument that I once knew the most about, I think. If you don’t practice or continually get into an instrument, though, it really falls to the wayside very quickly, and I stopped playing drums by 1972 or something like that, so it’s been a long time. I do intend to play some drums again, maybe on our next tour and on a cut or two from the next album, but it’s mainly keyboard that I play now.
How often do you play keyboards onstage?
Basically on just one or two songs. I think I did it on “Ugly Man” [from Gist Of The Gemini] most recently, and on the tour before the last one I played on “Black And Blue” [from A Pauper In Paradise].
Do you stick to the piano, or do you play other keyboards as well?
No, it’s just the piano. I usually play it during a solo song, where it’s just me playing and singing.
Do you have a particular favorite piano?
We really like the Bosendorfer at AIR Studios in London. This one’s a nine-foot model worth about forty grand; it’s really hard to say exactly. Something happened to it, though, and it has lost its tone. Too many people abused it, too many cokes were spilled on the keyboard. I like the Yamaha acoustic piano too. I mean, there’s no doubt that the Yamaha is a good piano — I have one myself — but I think there is really no match for some of the older Steinways from the ’40s or ’50s and some of their big nine-foot models. The earlier Steinways have that certain tone that’s really great.
What kind of action do you like on a piano?
I think a medium action is good for me. I don’t like it too high and too heavy, and I don’t like it too low and too light either. I like a medium action that’s maybe a little on the stiff side. I prefer a big-sounding piano to a muffled, very untrebly piano. I like a piano that’s bright and just kind of shines, rather than a piano with a thin sound. Some of the Bosendorfers can get real thin when you get above the C one octave up from Middle C.
How is the piano amplified onstage?
We only used one acoustic piano this time out, and we had Helpinstill pickups on it. it’s just too much of a hassle, though. The Helpinstill is the best of its sort, but it picks up a lot of ground loops and radio station buzzes. It’s just another mechanical toy that could go wrong.
How do you mike the piano in the studio?
There’s really no set rule. Some pianos are too bright to mike closely, and some are too dull to mike from a distance. It could involve putting mikes inside, it could be just opening the piano and setting the mikes only a few feet away, or it could be shoving the mikes right near the strings and hammers, closing the top, and putting a cover on it. Some pianos sound good when you mike them from underneath, some pianos sound good when you play them on a tile floor, and some pianos just sound terrible when they’re on tile. I mean, it really all depends on the piano. You just have to work with what you have.
Do you occasionally have to deaden the acoustics in the studio when working on a tile floor?
Sometimes you want to deaden, and sometimes you want to liven. It all depends on the other parts of the room.
How much do you compress the piano signal?
Again, it depends on the piano. There are some pianos that are very peaky. For instance, the Bosendorfer piano is a very self-limited instrument. The treble range above Middle C does not get any louder, whereas some Steinways really get loud up there, so if you want to get a good level for the low part on the Steinway, you’ve got to limit the piano a little bit, or else the high notes just go right through you. The Yamaha electric grand usually does not need to be limited, because it’s got a very self-limited range. If you look at it on a meter, from low note to high note, the high notes actually dip a little bit some of the time, but it’s usually just right. The high notes have more of an apparent level, so you really don’t need more level than that.
How was the piano recorded on Brother to Brother?
There wasn’t any acoustic piano on the album. We used the Yamaha electric grand instead, just because it has a different sound. It’s always nice to go for a new sound, and the Yamaha is good for that, especially when Joe puts his effects on it.
What effects would he use on it?
Oh, it could be anything from a Roland Boss Chorus to a Univibe vibrato unit. It could be an Echoplex or a Korg echo unit, and there are all kinds of equalizers. Joey has got a shitload of stuff, but he always uses the same devices from night to night on a particular song. He would never trust himself if he didn’t have the same hookup.
Do you use any effects when you’re playing the Yamaha?
Oh, no. Basically, we get the EQ from the board on the Yamaha, and I never even have to hear the monitors, because I usually play it during ballads, so I just hear it acoustically onstage.
How do you feel about its tuning stability?
You’ve got to tune it every night. It’s never perfectly in tune, though, especially in the low notes. But, you know, sometimes a detuned piano could have a good sound too. As long as it’s tuned from about maybe an octave and a fifth below Middle C and up, you can handle it. If you’re playing bass notes, you are usually playing octaves, and your thumb is usually playing the note that’s in tune. Maybe your pinkie has got the one that’s a little out, but if it sounds a little wide, sometimes that oscillation is good. And anyway, the tuning is not very apparent when you’re playing in a coliseum or a big concert hall.
On the title cut to Brother to Brother, it sounded like the Yamaha had been intentionally detuned.
Well, we used two pianos there, and one of them had a chorus effect on it. That’s why it sounds highly detuned, but it’s also true that the Yamaha itself had been detuned. In other words, there’s a choral effect on it which detunes the right side signal on your stereo, so the pitch is bending, and that’s why it sounds a little out with itself.
Are you satisfied with the electric grand when it comes to reproducing the sounds of your richly-recorded acoustic pianos?
Well, they’ll probably improve it, but it’s the best electric piano of its sort right now.
Well, since your albums have won Grammys for production quality, has it been hard to match that quality in general onstage?
No, not at all. We’re just completing a live album, and we can’t help but feel that so much of the live stuff is even better than our studio records, even though the live recordings haven’t really been tampered with. We’ve got 24 tracks full of synthesizers, and that’s not any fewer than what we have to deal with in mixing a studio album, so that’s what we’re taking our time with now. What’s taking even more time is finding a song from one night that we like, and wanting to follow it with a song from another night, then trying to join the sounds of the audiences to make it sound like they were done at the same concert. That’s making the going difficult, but it’s working.
Do you have to alter or simplify any of the studio arrangements for live performance?
Sometimes a little bit, but usually not if you’ve got the players.
What criteria did you have for finding those players?
Well, for our current band, we knew that we needed a good left-hand keyboard bass player, because some of the old material features a lot of the bass parts being doubled by synthesizers. It took a little while to find someone who was as good as Brad Cole for that job. This was the first time we’d used Brad. I like his playing so much; I’ll probably use him again in the future. Then there’s Bill Meyers, who plays keyboard bass on a couple of songs at the same time that he’s playing other parts; every hand in our band is usually busy getting the texture that we’re looking for. I mean, you come across good musicians, but they’re hard to find. You won’t necessarily marry them or anything like that, but you keep in mind their abilities, and sometimes you have certain songs that just fit the bill for their abilities.
And this explains why you frequently change the lineup of your group.
You’ve got to change personnel. It’s also a matter of keeping interest up. I find that when you have a band on retainer, and they play your stuff and only your stuff, it could tend to get a little doldrumish after a while. It becomes a fact that the end justifies the means; and whatever it takes to come up with that product, that album, that tour, that sound, that song, you’ve got to go for it.
What instrument is the keyboard bass played on?
Mostly on one of the Korg synthesizers. They came out with a new model that is really dependable. We had tried a few more complex synthesizers for the bass, but it just wasn’t worth the effort.
Do you try to duplicate a bass guitar sound when you double the bass?
No, we didn’t go for a bass guitar sound this time around, on the last tour; we left that up to the bass player. On other tours we played only the list that called for a keyboard bass, so we’d have to emulate a real bass for certain songs, but this time the authentic bass, the bass guitar, was playing, I’d say, two-thirds of the way through the show. Rarely was it not playing, but I should say that a lot of what it was doing was augmented by synthesizer sounds. Many times they’d be playing unison lines.
Why not follow the Gary Wright path and let the synthesizer take over the bass line completely?
Well, I find that if you depend totally on left-hand keyboard bass the sound can get stiff after a while. Obviously we’ve been primarily a keyboard act, but I look at it like I don’t want to confine myself to keyboards or to any other one thing. I love woodwinds, I love brass, I loved stringed instruments, and I love electric stringed instruments. On the next album I intend to use upright bass for a couple of songs, electric bass, synthesizer bass, guitar, some synthesized strings, and maybe some real strings.
Given the number of overdubs of string sounds you did with the monophonic Korg on Gist of the Gemini, you must have been ecstatic when the first polyphonic synthesizers were produced.
I know. My God! It took hours to do one song. The Maxikorg had just two oscillators, and you needed two oscillators to give you some kind of width with the one string sound, so Joe and Richard Baker had to play one note at a time to build up the string section sounds on that album. It’s just not worth it to work that way, because you don’t really know what you have until you’re done mixing it down. There is one advantage to recording one string at a time, though. That’s actually how it’s being done with real string sections. One player is doing one thing, so there is always a separate mind, a separate hand, a separate finger getting the sound from the instrument. That means you have a separate touch, with a little discrepancy in timing, and these personal differences are a part of the sound you get in the end. So in many ways I think you achieve more of what a string section would achieve if you’re playing one note at a time, or if a couple of guys are playing a few notes, because you achieve that subtle imperfection. Whereas with a polyphonic synthesizer, your ten fingers go bam at once on the keys, and there’s no string section that’s ever that perfect. It’s good, but it’s a little bit more plasticene-sounding. It does save a lot of time, though.
It probably keeps the creative momentum rolling too.
Oh, it does. When you’re doing one note at a time, you get tired, your engineer gets tired, everyone gets tired. And when I’m producing on one of those occasions, I’m trying to envision if there’s too much high end on the synthesizer, if the filters are open too much, how it will sound after 28 overdubs: Will it become just a total buzz? Sometimes you’ve done a whole array of overdubs and you realize that the timing is all wrong; once you put them all together, you see that they’re moving in the wrong direction.
Wouldn’t it be easier to hire a real string section instead?
Well, on the next album, we’re going to use both real and synthesized strings. On certain cuts where the strings are not really much more than a blanket or a cushion of sound, it’s not that important to use a real string section, because you don’t really hear those imperfections that make it human. But when you’re doing a ballad, or a song with more of a classical style, it may be wiser to just use a real string section, even though it’s going to cost a lot of money. We’re not just going to hire 15 string players; we’ll probably hire 60 players.
So you see synthesized and real strings as two totally separate musical elements.
They are, but they give you the same effects in many ways. Single notes and solo playing are not really good on synthesizer when you’re going for strings. For instance, when you get a string part like those staccato notes in the Elton John thing, “Philadelphia Freedom,” you should have live strings; the synthesizer isn’t any good in getting you that, in my opinion. It doesn’t sound real; it just sounds fake, too plastic. But I think that when you have a blanket-type sound, like on some of the things we’ve done in the past, it’s very difficult to tell the difference. It’s when you want to have both, like in some parts of “Black And Blue” [from A Pauper In Paradise], when you’re using solo effects and a section comes up playing some lines of the melody with the rest of the instruments providing that blanket of sound, that the true essence of strings comes out.
Has anyone influenced your approach to orchestrating with synthesizers?
No doubt that the best synthesizer orchestrators are Japanese, like Tomita. There’s just no question at this point. There is one other person, Wendy Carlos, whose Switched-On Bach [Columbia, MS-7194 and M-32659] was good, but still Tomita is better. He’s very textural; that’s why he does a lot of pieces by people like Debussy and Stravinsky. But he’s also very precise.
Do you own any synthesizers or dabble around on them in your spare time?
Well, all I’ve got at home is the grand piano, an electric piano, and a set of drums. That’s it. But Joe has a real array of synthesizers sitting in his home, and once in a while he calls me and says, “Well, how do you like this sound? How do you like that sound?” I’ll say, “That’s great. I like this, and I think we could use it for this song,” so it becomes a total cooperative effort.
How do you actually work out the keyboard parts?
Well, basically, the song is written most of the time on my grand piano or on my electric piano at home. I usually have an idea of how it should sound on disc. By the time I get ten or fifteen songs together, we audition players by making them play a few runs that we suspect would be used for those particular songs to see if they would adapt and be useful within the style of the new album or whatever.
Do you write parts out?
No, we just tell the players what to do. If they’re of a certain calibre, you can mumble through your ideas and they’ll be able to pick them up without having them written down. If you have a musician with total uncreativity in his noggin, then you’ll need to write the part. I usually show Joey the changes of my songs first, and then he gets a few musicians together in our rehearsal hall. Then I’ll come up and say, “Let’s try this, let’s try that, and let’s go through the changes.” Certain musicians will take certain notes, perhaps, on various passages to keep from forgetting them, so the only written things you’ll see are some chord charts and maybe some private notes on passages that are hard to play, which the musicians have to take home and practice. But other than that, it’s all verbal.
How are the brass and string parts divvied up?
We use two Korg PS-3300 synthesizers, which each have three separate synthesizer voice modules. You can tune each of the master oscillators to get more realistic chorale effects. Then we have two Korg PS3100s, so all that adds up to about thirty grand worth of synthesizers just to reproduce the string sound onstage. We only use the smaller ones as backup, in case the big ones go. Anyway, what we did was to buy two keyboards and inter-face them into one of the PS3300s, with one keyboard in Bill Meyers’s setup and the other in Brad Cole’s. This way we could switch the string parts back and forth from one to the other as the need arose. The other big Korg was programmed for brass, and the same kind of switching could be done. The synthesizers themselves were kept right beside Joey, so he could tune or fix them if he heard anything wrong. So that’s how we got our string and brass onstage, and they really were incredible sounds, so much so that we’re recording with them right now in the studio, without any overdubs.
Joe Vannelli
What kind of training on keyboard have you and Gino had?
Well, I studied piano privately for about five years and played in various local groups when I was a teenager. It was basically sort of a hobby at the time; I was going to high school and college, and I thought I was going to be an engineer or something like that. I don’t know whether I would have gotten into music by myself, but when Gino was about 15 or 16 he thought that he’d like to pursue a professional career in music. He had studied percussion for about the same amount of time that I had taken piano lessons, and he was a drummer for many years before he decided to get into the singing and writing aspect of music. By the time he was about 16 he was signed to RCA in Canada, but he couldn’t get the exposure and the right push he needed, so he went down to New York and lived there off and on for about two years. By the way, when he was recording up in Canada I would help him out with the sessions, and I did the same thing when he did his demos down in New York. I was sort of commuting back and forth while he was staying there.
Were you playing basically piano then?
Yeah. Gino was doing guitar overdubs while I was doing piano. We hadn’t gotten into the whole synthesized trip yet; that was a whole new area.
What were you playing on your first album for A&M;, Crazy Life?
There were basically two musicians on that: my brother and I. We did all the work on it. He played percussion, and I did all the keyboards. The album apparently didn’t do anything, and we felt that we’d have to go out on the road to get exposure that way. Naturally, two people can’t go out like that and try to create that sound, so we put a band together. Right about that time was when I started looking for different sounds, picking up the synthesizer and getting into it.
What model did you start with?
Oh, just a cheap Univox or Roland, that sort of stuff. I had no idea what it was all about, and I was just slowly fooling around with it at that point in time. At present I’ve got two Korg PS-3300s and two 3100s, plus an Oberheim Eight-Voice and a whole bunch of little synthesizers to put onstage. On top of the fact that we use a Yamaha electric grand and a regular Yamaha acoustic seven-foot grand, we’ve got a Hammond B-3, a Clavinet, a Rhodes, a Wurlitzer… You name it, we’ve got it.
Who plays what keyboard in concert?
Let’s see. In my setup I’ve got a Rhodes, a Wurlitzer, a Yamaha electric grand, an Oberheim Eight-Voice, a Korg K-3, and a Korg MS-20. Bill Meyers uses a B-3 and a Korg synthesizer-he also uses a K-3.
Why use all three electric pianos?
They all have their own inherent sound. I’m really happy they invented the Yamaha electric grand piano, because for once you can really hear the piano player, and it sounds real ballsy compared to a regular piano with just a Helpinstill on it. So naturally we wanted to imitate the acoustic piano onstage. The Rhodes has its own mellow jazzy sound that I like using. I use the Wurlitzer basically for one song right now, “People Gotta Move” [from Powerful People], our old hit.
How are you mixing your keyboards?
Well, all the electric pianos are going through a little six-channel Tapco mixer with three Moog parametric equalizers on each instrument. That’s the sound, those parametrics. I need a lot of EQ, especially on the Rhodes, to get it to sound real bright. I used them on the last album too. I mean, no matter how much EQ you add on the mixer console, you still never get enough top end into the Rhodes. You’ve just got to add a ton of it. I’m running that through one amplifier that I bought in Canada about eight years ago, a GBX amplifier. I’ve got two cabinets with four 12′” full-range speakers in each, and each cabinet is about 150 watts.
What about the synthesizers?
As far as all the synthesizers, we don’t use any amplification onstage. We run them all direct into our 48-channel mixer out front and about 32,000 watts of PA. My brother Ross is mixing the sound that controls all of the synthesizers onstage, so he’s really got to have all the arrangements pretty well down. He creates all of the volume swells and whatever. None of the guys onstage do that; they just bang the keys.
Ross isn’t playing guitar with you, then?
No, Ross doesn’t play onstage as such, although he’s an artist in his own right at this point and he’s pursuing his own career. Hopefully he should be recording soon.
Who is in your group now?
Besides me, there are two other keyboardists onstage; one is Bill Meyers, and the other fellow is Brad Cole. On guitar we’ve got Darryl Stuermer. Then there’s Dave Marotta on bass, Mark Craney on drums-the guy who played on Brother To Brother-two percussionists, two women singers, and Gino out front. We’ve got a new percussionist, a fellow out of Denver named Mike Fisher, a really excellent player. As a matter of fact, all the players in the band are excellent–some of the best players around, actually.
Why three keyboardists?
Our stuff is very orchestrated. It would really be impossible for one guy to do the keyboard parts alone. For example, on a particular tune where I’m doing the comping on the piano and somebody else may be doing the organ and the synthesizer bass at the same time, the third player may be doing strings and brass. Besides, there are too many synthesizers alone to play onstage. I do program the real difficult ones for the other fellows, though. It took me six months just to probe into programming and find out what it could possibly give me. Our band was only put together last January, so a lot of the guys weren’t really familiar with our equipment.
How are the keyboard parts arranged?
When the records are put together we just start off with the nucleus-bass, piano, guitar, and drums, or bass, piano, percussion, and drums, something like that. We begin with the rhythm section and work with that. Then, once that is done, I’ll take the tracks home and try to add lines to them, like string backing or horns. I write out a rough chart for myself, because I know a lot of things are changed at the last minute in the studio. Then we’ll go into the session and start adding all those different sounds. It’s done in stages, actually; it’s not done all at once.
What did you use for string and brass sounds before you got your polyphonic synthesizers?
Oh, we used to kill ourselves! On Gist Of The Gemini we used just a simple little K-3 synthesizer. We had the two 24-track machines set up together, then we used one of them entirely for strings. We had written out the whole arrangement, and we recorded each note one at a time! That meant we had to do something like 65 overdubs. It took us forever. At that time the polyphonic synthesizers weren’t out yet, so everything had to be done individually. That’s how we did it on all the old records, right up until A Pauper In Paradise. When they came out with the polyphonic stuff, we were really happy. It saved us a lot of time, and the results were great also. It really put a strain on our patience to do those overdubs. When you’re in there just listening to one note… [laughs]. I remember Geoff Emmerick, who was our engineer when we were in England recording Gist Of The Gemini, thought we were crazy, but when it all came together it just sounded amazing.
That explains how you got such a fat string sound
Well, there are a lot of overdubs. Naturally, the fat sound usually begins with the drums. If you’ve got a good drum sound, everything else is fairly easy. A synthesizer records real easily. You feed it direct, and it’s there. The acoustic stuff is more difficult to record, and that’s got to be done well. Once you’ve got that, the rest is pretty simple.
How do you record the piano?
On the last albums we’ve used the Yamaha CP-70, but in the past we used an acoustic piano with just two Neumann 47 mikes on it. It’s a lot easier now with the Yamaha. it’s only doubtful on the bass notes, where it’s really difficult to stay in tune. When I play them, I try to stick in the midrange. If a part in the studio would call for specific playing in the low end, then maybe I’d use a regular piano. But with the major portion of what you might play, it works fine.
What kinds of things do you do with the Korg polyphonics?
We can’t do that much with them, since they’re basically programmed and they stay that way. I think there are about a hundred knobs on those synthesizers, and to have to reset them for each tune would just take an eternity. That was the only disappointment I had when I first bought one: I was looking for a computer programmer that could program it, but apparently they don’t have one available yet. I was trying to get one built for me, but there was no guarantee that it would be real stable and dependable onstage, so rather than get ulcers every time you do a concert, I figured we might as well get four or five of the Korgs, have them all programmed differently, and use them that way. Last year, when I went out on the road, I used basically the Oberheim Eight-Voice, and I had problems with the programmer. Every now and then it’d get knocked around, and I’d lose all my programs right before a show. That was panic time!
Have you tried any other programmable synthesizers?
I haven’t really tried anything else, to date. Hopefully I’ll be walking into the stores and talking to people about them soon. Some people have been raving to me about the Prophet 5. I haven’t heard it yet, but I’d like to check it out.
Do you listen to orchestras for ideas of idiomatic string or brass lines to do on synthesizer?
Well, naturally there are certain things that can’t be accomplished with synthesizer. You really can’t get the way a violinist will articulate, because when you try to analyze it there are six or seven or maybe ten different sounds happening at once. The only thing you can get is the layers or blankets of sounds. If you’re trying to create something with a lot of motion to it, you’d have to use a real orchestra. That’s why we did use the Royal Philharmonic for our fifth album [A Pauper In Paradise]. As far as live gigs, though, the synthesizers are really unbeatable, because most of the time, when I check out a live band that has string players, they tend to get lost in the shuffle. You never hear them, whereas with the synthesizer the sound just comes out loud and clear. I can drown the whole orchestra and the whole rhythm section with it. My brother [Ross] has got to be real careful at the board, especially with the 3300, because the PA just sounds enormous.
Have you modified any of your keyboards internally?
As far as any major modification is concerned, no. The only thing we did was, in buying my Rhodes, I tried many of them out, checking them out for action and for overall sound, and when I picked one out, I reset all the notes myself and had the piano padded down a little bit, because the Rhodes tends to overload when you run it too hot. Everything else is basically stock. I just run it all through the EQs to make the sound real punchy and bright and fat.
What effects devices do you use?
We’re not using that many effects. I mean, we use the regular Harmonizer-flanger-DDL-tape echo stuff, mostly Eventide. I think we have a Multivox tape echo. We’ve been lucky with it; we used to use Echoplexes and they were quite noisy.
What about equipment breakdowns? How do you deal with those?
Well, that’s something I don’t like to talk about [laughs]. But we’ve been very fortunate. The only breakdown I ever had was a couple of nights ago, and it was just a bad cable. Everything has held up really well, considering how long we’ve been on the road. You’re always concerned, though, about whether everything will hold up, especially the synthesizers. We’ve got everything heavily cased, and we have pretty conscientious roadies.
So you don’t have any proverbial horror stories to tell?
Horror stories? Oh God, let me think. There was one time when one of our limiters went out, and this excruciating frequency went throughout the whole PA. We use 32 cabinets with two 18s, two 10s, two 2440 JBLS, and two 2205s in each cabinet, and with this one noise I think we destroyed every tweeter in the PA, so we had to do the whole show with no high end. It was torture, just torture. Then you always have the horror story where trucks break down and don’t show up until right before you go onstage. We had that happen to us in Norfolk, Virginia, and in Pittsburgh. The trucks were eight hours late. Now, we won’t go onstage unless we get a sound check. I mean, we have to check every instrument and make sure it’s operational, and to EQ the room itself takes quite a bit of time. We usually have a stage call at nine in the morning, since it takes six or seven hours to set up the rig, but now the trucks arrive at five in the afternoon and nothing is set up. Fortunately, we got at least a ten-minute sound check. That’s the beauty of it. With my kid brother [Ross], he does everything so well that the whole crew was just hustling [laughs].
Speaking of Ross, why is it that you haven’t used many guitar players in the past?
Well, we’ve used guitar players sparingly on the albums. We had a guitar solo in “Mama Coco” and “Where Am I Going?” [both from Storm At Sunup]. We tried to compensate for it live by using the synthesizer. We felt it just wasn’t worth it to carry an extra musician just for those two or three solos. But on the last album we incorporated more guitar playing, and figured it would be worth it to add a guitarist to the band. I guess it was also a question of trying to find the right musician for our concept of how the guitar should be used, and Darryl fit into the concept perfectly. But as far as people talking about us on the road, most reviewers have reiterated that ours is basically a keyboard sound, a thick, blanketed-type sound, with guitar interjected here and there.
How much does Gino have to do with the creation of that sound onstage?
Oh, Gino has a lot to do with it. He writes 90 percent of the music, so he’s got definite ideas about what he wants. He’s a drummer, so he really gives drummers a hard time [laughs]. I mean, he’s got it right down to the different beats that he wants drummers to use. Sometimes he’ll get on the drums and play it for them. He plays keyboards and guitar too, so he knows enough about that to tell people what he wants, but as far as getting into voicings and stuff like that, I have a little bit more knowledge, so I can help him out with that. It’s sort of a family affair. It’s really hard to describe how we all work together; it’s just a culmination of things. One thing he says may spark another thing that I may do, or vice versa.
How exactly do you and he work together on new material?
Well, Gino has the tunes written out, then we’ll get together and go over them, and maybe I’ll tell him that I don’t like this particular line, or I’m not crazy about a particular lick, or whatever. And we just fool around with the songs. We were kicking around some of the songs from the last album for a couple of months. Then, once we get a basic format, we’ll get the musicians together, start working on the basics of the tunes, and build from there.
What influences can you cite with regard to the kind of voicings you might apply to Gino’s songs?
Well, when we were kids we liked the energy and the excitement of rock and roll, but we weren’t crazy about the limited chord structures, the I-IV-V or I-II-V chords. We thought we could add something maybe a little out of the ordinary to rock and roll, to make it special. We grew up listening to the Dave Brubecks and the Oscar Petersons, who were utilizing the kinds of chords we dig years and years ago, and we thought it would be great to combine the musicality of those artists with the energy of rock and roll. And that’s what we’ve been trying to do for the last few years.
