Not only do we get a glimpse of some of his influences — including Kraftwerk, Wendy Carlos, David Bowie, Brian Eno, Bjork and Portishead — but an interesting look at how digital is used to take some of his beloved analog sounds on tour.

Rhodes must re-create those synthetic tones digitally, because it’s not practical to drag vintage analog machinery on the road. (Rhodes does bring one digitally controlled analog synthesizer on tour. It’s called the Andromeda.)

So to re-create the album on tour, Duran Duran digitally sampled all their synthesized tones and texture.

“Digital sampling now is amazing,” Rhodes says.

But digital still doesn’t have the same aural response as analog, he says.

“Analog can do things that digital will never be able to do. It’s got a heartbeat,” he says. “Analog instruments are all like wild animals you have to tame. You can get things out of those beasts that you’re never going to get out of digital synthesisers.”

According to Garson, The Bowie Variations was the perfect vehicle for the Disklavier. “There was no studio or hall involved initially and no need to force creativity all at once,” says Garson, noting that he was able to spread out the recording over the period of a month and work on it at home at his own pace. Once the creative process was complete, Yamaha provided a duplicate Disklavier piano at Oxnard Performing Arts Centre, where famed recording engineer Professor Johnson expertly mic’d the piano and it then played itself for the next several hours. The CD is now available on Reference Recordings, an audiophile label that records the best classical and jazz artists of our times.

The record and playback function likewise enabled him to layer multiple piano parts. “It’s like having six hands,” he relates. “The Disklavier has really allowed me to record track over track, and let me completely abandon myself to the creative process. It was fun. I wasn’t pressured in any way and wrote or improvised when I felt it.”

In the 1980s, Garson became the first musician to ever use the Yamaha Disklavier, a traditional acoustic piano equipped with an integrated digital electronics system that enables the recording, playback and creation of complex multi-track arrangements. An early adopter of the instrument, Garson procured the first one on the market and still treasures it to this day. “The piano is so good that I never wanted to change it,” said Garson. “There really aren’t too many pianos out there that sound better than this one.”

Ever since he obtained the instrument, it quickly became Garson’s main compositional and improvisational tool. “Prior to that, all my music was written by hand,” he recalled. Since he began using the Disklavier in the late 1980s, Garson saw his productivity – as well as the complexity of his work – skyrocket. “Because of the Disklavier, I can play pieces that are much more involved now. Before, it was mostly pop and jazz tunes, which are less dense by nature, but now I can play sonatas, nocturnes and etudes, which are far more intricate and elaborate.” Garson even coined a label for the music he makes with his Disklavier. He calls it “now music” because it allows him to orchestrate what he feels “in the moment.”

Over the next few months, Garson plans on performing some of the music from his latest work live in concert, with some dates already set for Washington State and Indiana. He is also weighing the possibility of a Bowie Variations Volume 2. For piano enthusiasts, Garson’s sheet music from the CD is also available. “It’s rather difficult,” he warns, “but pianists can really have a ball. Just listen to the recording for the feel and then check out the notes.”

An acclaimed jazz pianist who began playing at the age of 12, Yamaha Artist Mike Garson now boasts nearly 4,000 original compositions to his name and an illustrious career spanning over 40 decades with David Bowie, Nine Inch Nails and the Smashing Pumpkins. Although his background is in classical jazz, he learned a great deal early on at the hands of music icons like Lennie Tristano, Hal Overton and Herbie Hancock, and developed the creative flair and improvisation skills that propelled him to stardom.

A signed copy of The Bowie Variations is available at www.mikegarson.com.

In 2009, after enduring years of pounding from one of modern music’s most innovative composers and performers, the keyboard became too fragile to take on the road. Before being shipped into storage, however, Corea and his tech team painstakingly sampled every note at Mad Hatter Studios in Los Angeles. After months of searching for the right technology platform, Corea took the massive amount of data to industry-leading sound designers, who developed Chick’s Mark V Sample Library for the Motif XF and worked with Keyfax NewMedia to bring it to the Motif community.

The library is being used by Corea in his Motif XF8 on the current Return to Forever reunion tour and is available for purchase by end users exclusively at www.motifator.com for $129.

“If you want to own a piece of musical history, or just be able to access a landmark Mark V that speaks with clarity, character and punch, this sample library is unparalleled,” said Athan Billias, Director of Marketing at the Pro Audio & Combo Division at Yamaha Corporation of America.

Corea’s direct involvement in the process makes this sampling session unique. A specially developed vorsetzer player piano mechanism helped capture pristinely balanced velocities across the entire keyboard scale. The library contains all of the original samples recorded in the meticulously engineered sampling sessions and consists of 12 unlooped velocity layers and note offs. The full, natural sustain of each note is meticulously maintained. Corea even provided several songs demos recorded on the Motif XF using the sounds that are included with the Motif XF library file.

Part of what makes this collection unique is the custom hammer and pre-amp configuration of Chick’s original electronic piano instrument. At F# above Middle C, Corea and his team modified the hammers from the standard neoprene to wood and sent the signal from those keys to a completely separate pre-amp with a specially designed EQ. This creates an almost split keyboard effect that lets notes in the treble register ring with a clarity and punch that is unavailable on a standard Mark V. The sound designers used proprietary Yamaha tools for sound compression so that this amazing collection fits easily onto a FL- 512M flashboard module for the XF.

Take the tour and see his Yamaha CS-80, Roland TR-909, ARP Solina String Ensemble, Korg Trident, Univox Minikorg, Moog Polymoog, plus the all-important rack of effects et al, The Yamaha NS10 speakers, Ableton Live, and his beloved bass guitar.

Mesmerism was commissioned from Oxton-born composer, Emily Howard, by the Liverpool Mozart Orchestra (LMO), to celebrate the orchestra’s 60th anniversary year.

Mark Heron, the LMO Musical Director, will conduct the orchestra for the première, in a concert which will also feature well-loved classics performed by the orchestra in its first season in 1951.

The commission was made possible by generous support from the PRS for Music Foundation.

Tickets can be pre-ordered from www.pacificroad.co.uk.

(Via)

Closed since the 1970s, Eric’s once saw the likes of The Sex Pistols, The Ramones, Blondie and Joy Division as well as OMD.

Long before the Wirral band found fame and fortune, McCluskey’s dad worked at Stanlow, and in April this year, 50 OMD fans from across Europe travelled to the refinery to pay homage to the place that inspired their heroes.

The original recording even used ambient sounds recorded in the refinery in 1980.

Andy McCluskey said: “If Eric’s had not existed then neither would OMD. Even though you cannot recreate what Eric’s meant to our generation over 30 years ago, it will be fun to play on the same stage again remembering the past whilst hopefully celebrating a new and different future.

From the beginning, OMD’s Paul Humphreys and Andy McCluskey launched their own unique style of electronic melodies and thoughtful lyrics to carve out a reputation for intelligent pop.

Read more at the Chester Chronicle.

Watch videos of Jeff Boynton, Daniel Baum and Dr Moonstien as they do some serious mods to a CX-500, Fujitone II and a ‘guitar sequencer thingumajig’.

Read more

Norlander’s band of stellar musicians includes guitarist Freddy DeMarco, bassist Mark Matthews, and drummer Nick LePar, all from the Akron, Ohio area. Also joining this performance will be Asheville, North Carolina vocalist Debrissa McKinney who worked with Norlander on the Moogus Operandi concert last year. An additional highlight of the concert will be Norlander’s Wall of Doom, a massive Moog modular analog synthesizer whose core dates back to 1967. Michelle Moog-Koussa, Executive Director of The Bob Moog Foundation, will be introducing the band on stage and hosting a table for the Foundation throughout the festival.

The Rites of Spring Festival 2011 (RoSFest) will be hosted by the Majestic Theater, 25 Carlisle Street, Gettysburg, PA May 20th – May 22nd. A limited amount of tickets are still available and can be purchased at http://www.rosfest.com.

So…

The Sun is reporting that singer Susan Boyle, despite being on a £300-per-week allowance, has splashed out on a grand piano:

“Recent purchases include a grand piano, a top iPhone – worth £600 – and some new furniture from Edinburgh’s finest department store, Jenners, for her gaff in Blackburn, West Lothian.”

What amused me straight away is that journalist Gordon Smart obviously has no clue how much a grand piano costs. Note that he swoons at “a top iPhone worth £600″, yet an acoustic grand is likely to cost at least 20 times that.

If true, that’s quite some spend.

“My standard of comparison is the Yamaha CFIIIS concert grand piano with a gorgeous, beautiful sound, so I was a little apprehensive when I first saw the AvantGrand,” says the Yamaha Artist, who was recently named JazzTimes’ 2008 Artist of the Year.

“I thought, ‘look at this little thing, what’s it going to do?’ It blew me away,” recalls Corea. “I sat down and adjusted the volume to make it sound like a big piano and immediately went into reverence at the R&D department and how they pulled it off, because it’s quite an accomplishment.”

Priced at a fraction of the cost of a concert grand, the N3 features the exquisite sound of the acclaimed Yamaha CFIIIS concert grand piano in a stunning grand piano style cabinet.

Currently on tour as a member of the Five Peace Band, also featuring John McLaughlin, Corea will be making select solo appearances, including the Nice Jazz Festival in Nice, France and the Detroit Jazz Festival in Detroit, Michigan. He will also perform with Stanley Clarke and Lenny White for several dates in September.

“Once I started playing the AvantGrand and getting into the musical flow of it, I could lose myself in the music just like I like to do. I could certainly envision using this instrument in my louder bands, my electric bands.”

Fusing 21st century music technology with Yamaha’s century-long heritage of piano craftsmanship, the N3 features highly advanced sound reproduction and sampling technology, without the tuning, cost or footprint of a comparable stringed instrument.

One of the greatest challenges in creating a true acoustic piano experience electronically is to accurately re-create the vibrations integral to the playing experience. The AvantGrand Series are the first pianos to actualise the physical connection with their instrument that pianists could only experience – until now – with an acoustic grand.

Its innovative Tactile Response System transmits “string” vibrations through the keys to player’s hands. Even the foot pedal action became subject to Yamaha’s demanding criteria. In traditional pianos, resistance is created in proportion to how deep the pedal is depressed. To replicate this, Yamaha created a new, specialized grand piano pedal for AvantGrand that reproduces the finesse of acoustic pedals, duplicating the spring, friction and inertia of traditional pedals.

The placement of the four-channel, three-way Spatial Acoustic Speaker System mimics the points where the original grand piano samples were taken, while the Soundboard Resonator create a non-directional sound dispersion directly in front of the player, duplicating the subtle reproduction of the buildup of sound felt by concert pianists. These technologies combine to authentically re-create the depth of tone of the Yamaha nine-foot CFIIIS grand piano, the choice instrument of many of the world’s top musicians and performance venues.

In addition to the remarkable grand piano sound sample, the N3 also features electronic piano and harpsichord voices.

The AvantGrand N3 is slated to ship in July 2009. The AvantGrand N2 upright model will be available in September 2009. Both include a matching padded bench.