Keyboard Memories (Part 2)

In 1981 the band was gigging away and thus we continued to expand our mannish young egos. Commensurably, my keyboard set-up got bigger and bigger, and more and more out of hand. It was magnificent. The latest addition was a Hohner ‘Duo’, so called because it combined two instruments in one, a Pianet (cousin of the Fender Rhodes) and a Clavinet.

Beatifully crafted

Hohner’s celebrated Clavinet was the funkiest keyboard ever made: witness Stevie Wonder’s Higher Ground or Superstition, or John Paul Jones’ stomping backbone to Led Zeppelin’s Trampled Under Foot.

Being all metal and wood, the Duo was purely mechanical and electric as opposed to electronic. It was a portable electric clavichord and vibraphone in one instrument. I made cantilevered attachments for my keyboard stand to accommodate the beautifully engineered, but heavy, Duo, and with the Continental and the CS-15 up top it was a hell of a weight to have balancing on one stand. Not many young keyboard guys would have dreamt of carting around such an unreasonable amount of equipment. But then again, not many would have been at the beck and call of quite as unreasonable a young ego.

At one gig we played support to The Comsat Angels, an English band who would go on to have a long career without ever really making the big time. They had a keyboard guy and, among other things, he was using a Hohner Duo. The Comsats guy had an impressively percussive technique on the Duo. Basically he slapped it about, and sort of bunched it a bit. It was a good effect. I made a mental note.  

To amplify my three keyboards a got Yamaha powered mixer with two 75 watt amps built in. This was a heavy enough item in itself to have added to my equipment pile, however, being stereo, it required a second speaker cab too. I paired off with my old four-by-twelve with a makeshift two-by-twelve for the time being.

There was to end to me hunger for new gear. Once again I had succumbed to the lure of the Belfast Telegraph’s ‘Musical Instruments for Sale’ column. I bought a Yamaha SC-30, A synth that was essentially the same as the CS-15, but with a few extras. It had a three and a half octave keyboard instead of the more usual three octaves of most monophonic synths, and it sported a primitive eight-step sequencer, and a ring modulator.

A ring modulator is a simple device that combines any two input waveforms to produce a fairly enharmonic output. As applied to the outputs of the two Voltage Controlled Oscillators of the CS-30 the resultant output was often not unlike the sound of a detuned short-wave radio. It was not a sound than was ‘musical’, in any conventional sense. Karlhinze Stockhausen, a leading light in Modern (i.e. nineteen-sixties) serious (i.e. really hard to listen to) music was always big on ring modulation. 

D E V O

You would be hard pushed, however, to find too many enthusiasts within the less ‘serious’ worlds of rock and pop, although, two important exceptions would be Devo and Bill Nelson. Devo’s brilliant first album, Are We Not Men? … We Are Devo, is positively dripping with Ring Modulation. Brian Eno, the album’s producer, seems to have had one wired up to the mixing desk, employing it with gay abandon and a frequency of use usually reserved for more normal effects such as reverb or stereo chorus. Bill Nelson, also, on songs like Rooms with Brittle Views, Do You Dream in Colour? and many other equally wonderful examples, typically places a motif on a ring modulated synth right up front in the instrumentation, in the place usually reserved for a guitar riff in less adventurous pop arrangements.

Notwithstanding the enormous inspiration I derived from Devo and Bill Nelson, I did not ever get around to incorporating the ring modulator into my own sound. I was however very excited about the prospect of using the SC-30’s sequencer. A sequencer is a device designed to play and repeat automatically and in strict time, a predetermined row of pitches; usually no more than sixteen, and often just four or eight, notes in total. Their basic design hadn’t really changed since their invention. On the control panel of the SC-30 there was a row of eight knobs (or ‘pots’ as we electronics engineers like to say). The position of each pot defined the pitch of that note. This row of eight notes would then be repeated ad infinitum (this being the whole point of the exercise) at a rate determined by a ninth pot. There was also a very dramatic big red ‘start/stop’ button.

CS-30 Sequencer with big red buttons

Sequencers had been around since the early seventies. A VCS-3, the original rock ‘n’ roll sequencer, can be spotted in the instrument listings on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon; the track On the Run being formed around an eight note sequence. Sequencing had a genre defining role in the work Tangerine Dream. It was the steady repetition that was the novelty plus the possibility of really fast rates of play. Keith Emerson was too much of a musician to make use of sequencer generally, but there is a dramatic guest appearance at the very end of the Karn Evil 9 on the phenomenal Brain Salad Surgery album, were Emerson steadily increases the speed of a sixteen note row, taking unbridled, full advantage of this defining characteristic.

Of course, following the digital revolution and the computer revolution, old fashioned sequencers have been replaced with software capable of storing and organising in digital form whole ‘scores’ of multi-track ‘sequences’ of notes that amount to whole songs or even orchestral arrangements. Sequencers have, in other words, evolved into virtual musicians. Strange to think then that back in the eighties the idea of repeating eight or sixteen notes in regular measure automatically still seemed pretty cool. But cool it certainly was, and I got to it straight away. I tuned in a fairly simple but effective eight-note row in my CS-30. Then added some key shifting stuff underneath on the CS-15 tuned to a fifth.

Rick on a much examined gatefold

When I had bought the CS-30 synth, I had justified the expenditure by pretending to myself that it was to be a replacement for the SC-15. But, inevitably, I never did get around to selling the supposedly redundant CS-15. Electronic polyphony was just too much fun. One of the songs from this period of the band’s life was a veritable keyboard extravaganza. The guitarist shifted onto my Vox Continental, filling the sound out while I had both hands full with the two synths.

The reader should remember that these were monophonic synths, capable of producing only one note at a time. For even the most rudimentary polyphonic harmonising you needed two of them, one for each hand, necessitating a certain amount of Rick Wakemanesque pouncing about with your arms outstretched and a tortured look on your face. Never mind adjusting the sound; I wouldn’t even get a chance to scratch myself during these songs.

* * *

In September 1981. I got myself a Korg analogue Stage Echo, a state of the art bit of kit It cost an outrageous four hundred pounds. It boasted a loop of quarter inch tape about thirty seconds long, and five brilliantly clear hi-fi quality playback heads. This machine contributed considerably to my overall sound. It also had a marked effect thereafter on the sort of music I wrote for the band. Indeed, in these days of intense and purposeful practising, my echo-keyboards became one of the defining elements of the band’s emerging sound. A real paradigm shift.

Long loop of the Stage Echo

One song was in swing time, with a sort of three-against-two cross-rhythm going on; a direct result of my experiments with the exquisite Korg Stage Echo. I set the delay time in sync with the triplets (three notes played in the time of two). To have a bit of fun with this, I started the tune off with a couple of bars of the echo-triplets in isolation on my (left-hand) bass-line synth; a real curve ball to the listener. This was a nice touch, similar to Pink Floyd’s One Of These Days or Brian Eno’s Third Uncle, (both of which start off with the same echo-triplets trick on bass guitar.)

My enthusiasm for cross-rhythm experiments soon matched that of our new drummer at the time. Speaking of the drummer; If I was a bit of a commodity fetishist in the area of music equipment, he wasn’t far behind me. He had drums, pedals and cymbals that cost a frightening amount of money. At one practice session he came along with a new cymbal about which he was particularly excited. It was a Pang cymbal; a cymbal that made a sound like “pang”. He kept thumping it (as drummers will) just to hear all the different “pang” sounds he could make with it. After a while, our singer, in jocular mood commented, “I’ve got a tin bread bin at home that sounds a bit like that”. The drummer curled his lip.

As well as scanning the Belfast Telegraph’s ‘Musical Instruments For Sale’ column pretty much on a nightly basis, I also regularly had a rummage around in the second hand shops down in Smithfield Market. It was there, an a Saturday in January 1981, that I came upon a Mini Korg 700-S. It was going for a hundred and fifty quid, and, on a whim, I bought it.It’s a pity I hadn’t found it a few years earlier. It wound have been just right for The Cars covers, since it was a Mini Korg that Greg Hawkes used on the Cars’ debut Album. 

The cute 700

The 700-S had real Luxury of limitation appeal. It was a very simple and small machine, one of the earliest synths produced for mass consumption. It was all metal and wood, and its minimal row of control switches was tucked in on the front panel just below the two and a half octave keyboard itself. This darling little synth owed more to the design of the home organ that to any other early synthesisers. The switches were marked with quaint non-synth-like terminology, such as ‘vibrato’ and ‘bend’. The whole thing was a breath of fresh air. It was really cute.

Suddenly I had become a three-synths man. Two hands and three synths: was this really necessary? Well, strictly speaking, no. But it was very convenient. It was my lot to produce highly precise sound and music with fairly imprecise equipment. More often than not I would find myself playing one song and at the same time setting up some bit of equipment for the next, like Dr. Frankenstein in his lab frantically making his final adjustments. Having the facility of a third synth, all set-up ready to go would mean that things would be a bit easier on stage. In any case, hte truth was, of course, that I could not have resisted the 700. It was just too cute. It even had a wee door on the back panel, behind which you could store the mains lead.

Down on the shop floor, so to speak, I built some boxes to protect the band gear, and while I was at it I put casters on just about everything that moved. My own personal set-up was as large and unreasonable as ever. By now I had two speaker cabinets, the old four-by-twelve orange monster, plus a new cab containing an outrageously powerful,  four hundred Watt, fifteen inch speaker, and a high frequency horn.  I built boxes for the trusty old CS-15, the CS-30, and my mixer-amp. Along with the brass hinges and magnetic catches, I put a finishing touch to my handiwork with some old leftover paint from my dad’s garage. It was a mixture of green and white emulsion paint. I suppose mat black might have been a bit more rock ‘n’ roll, but pale green was the best I could do with what happened to be available on the garage shelves (and let’s rememder this was a garage band). When the guys saw the boxes at the next practice, to my chagrin they seemed to find it all very amusing. While I was expecting them to be impressed by my workmanship, they could see only the paintwork. The singer didn’t miss his chance. “Hey, Keith”, he chuckled, “what’s with the bathroom cabinets?”; very droll, I’m sure.