Keyboards and Kayleigh

Keyboards and Kayleigh April 2010 Rock band Marillion’s keyboardist, Mark Kelly, recently chatted to Justin Richards about the evolution of music software, how the internet has changed the music industry and why music piracy is so prevalent. Can you provide us with a bit of background about yourself? Going back about 30 years I was an arts student, then quit that and became an electronics student. I’d only been there for a few months before I started playing with a local band just for fun and Marillion were our support act in the local pub and they asked me to join and that was the point where I first considered doing music as an actual career, rather than just for fun. That was 1981, so I quit my electronics course and carried on in music. I’d always had an interest in electronics - in those days there weren’t many computers around to speak of, certainly nothing like the sort you have around these days. I think the Sinclair ZX81, or something like that, was the only computer I had at that time. But when the Spectrum came out I got one of those. I suppose being a keyboard player, the connection between keyboards, electronics and computers has grown over the years - most keyboards nowadays, when you look inside them, are actually computers. I think bands like Kraftwerk and Hawkwind were using quite sophisticated keyboards back in the early 70s. Yes, that’s right, although in those days they were using analogue signal generators, weren’t they, and step sequencer and stuff. Tell us about the equipment you use. I guess my two main interests in life have sort of converged and become the same thing! I’ve graduated more and more into computer-based stuff, although I do use some hardware keyboards. Actually I’m looking at what I’m using right now, and basically they’re just controllers; I’ve got a Korg Karma - it’s the only keyboard I’ve still got, that’s actually a keyboard that generates its own sound, everything else comes from either a PC or a thing that’s called a receptor. It’s a Muse Receptor, it’s made by an American company, but again it’s really just a rack-mounted computer. It’s a Linux machine with Wine, (which is a Windows emulator), on top, so you can run Windows plug-ins and VST plug-ins. So basically it’s just another computer running virtual instruments now. But it’s in a convenient 19 inch rack so it looks like the sort of rack unit a guitarist or a keyboardist might use on the road and it’s pretty reliable, mainly because it’s got a Linux operating system; having said that these days, if you use XP or even Windows 7, both seem to be good for music. At what point did you move across from standard keyboards to the more computer based equipment? I was quite an early adopter of all that stuff, VST instruments, although not so much the sequencers because I’d still rather actually play stuff rather than just sequencing things. Once it became possible to generate sounds that could be played on a keyboard, and you can treat it like a normal instrument, rather than just sitting in front of a computer, that’s when I got interested. We’re still very much a real band; we have a drummer and all that sort of stuff. Go back twenty years and some people were using sequencers and drum machines and we weren’t. The software I use is a programme called Forte, which is created by a small American company; it’s like a VST host, it’s for working live really - it doesn’t record or sequence or anything like that, it’s just like a wrapper for the plug-ins and controls all the routing between the keyboards and the plug-ins. So I use that and you can set up screens for different parts of songs or for whole songs and you can load the instrument you want with the sound you want. At the moment, on here, there’s something called Lounge Lizard by Applied Acoustic, which is an electronic piano module. I use a module by Arturia, basically just an emulator, and a Minimoog, which is pretty realistic. Most of the stuff I have is software versions of instruments I have played and still own, such as the Minimoog; the software version’s a bit more reliable, but I’ve still got my Minimoog. I’ve got native instruments, ABSYNTH, B42 Hammond organ emulator, which is really good, FM7, which is really a recreation of something called a DX7, which was an early FM synthesis thing, made by Yamaha back in the early eighties, that was probably my first MIDI keyboard actually. Then we’ve got Guitar Rig, which is sort of like a virtual guitarist rack full of effects and distortion peddles, the sort of stuff a guitarist would normally use but I put the keyboards through it. And then there’s Kontakt, which is a sampler, MASSIVE, which is a synthesizer, and Pro-53, which is an emulation of Prophet-5, which was made by a company called Sequential Circuits back in the 80s. Also Atmosphere by Spectrasonics - I’ve got quite a few actually! I use all of this live and Ivory is the piano I use - it’s a massive sample piano basically, there’s about three different pianos in there and there’s about 40 Gigs of samples. What’s the process of putting a album together? Well, we’ve got a producer, Mike Hunter. He’s working through some stuff for us at the moment. We’ve literally just started writing again. So we’re set up in the studio, only no one’s here yet, except me! I’ll put a few sounds on my computer and keyboards and we’ll just start jamming and just record it all to a little digital two- track recorder at this stage. It’s a Zoom H4M, it just uses SD cards, so very simple, useable quality. And that’s just to capture the ideas as they happen, like a sketchbook really. We’ll work on the ideas and then arrange them. At that point it’s just the five of us. And then at some point we’ll get our producer, Mike Hunter, involved and he’ll just comment on what we’re doing or make suggestions - he’ll be listening to things we’ve done, even weeks, months ago and say ‘What about this idea, I liked this, have you thought about doing something with this?’ Using Pro Tools, he’ll even edit stuff together and say ‘look I’ve put these two bits together, what you think?’ It’s a bit like building a collage of bits. So do you always use Pro Tools? For the recording side of things then yeah, Mac-based Pro Tools seems to be the choice of professionals really. I mean I used to be a Mac person, but I switched over to Windows a long time ago and never went back. I find it quite frustrating – you’ve got a mouse with only one button on it. I know you can press the key and create short cuts; I guess it’s just whatever you get used to! So yeah, in the studio that’s what we use, we use Pro Tools. I personally use Cubase for recording if I’m doing stuff on my own. It’s different these days from how it used to be. Twenty to twenty five years ago we’d jam, come up with ideas, and arrange them into songs, without having recorded anything. It was a different process. You’d rehearse and then you’d demo it and then record it to tape. And then once you’d done demos you’d go through it again deciding what was going to go on the album and then you’d start recording the album, do the over dubs, mix it and then it would be finished. Whereas now all those lines are blurred because we could be jamming and recording just a jam, but recording it to master track and that master track could end up being on the finished album. If the ideas we’ve worked on before work, you just use Pro Tools to chop them in and the sorts of edits you can do now in post-production you couldn’t do with tape, so you can now use material that you couldn’t have used 20 years ago because you didn’t have the tools back then. With all the techniques and technology around these days there’s no start and finish point for jamming or writing or demoing, it can all be happening at different times. How has the internet changed the music industry? I think there’s been a lot of misunderstanding about the role of the internet, to be honest. There’s been a lot of hype around it regarding how it’s been used generally. Take the Arctic Monkeys – I don’t believe for a minute that they were discovered on the internet. They signed with a major label; it had nothing to do with the internet! That’s the thing, you get all these people saying ‘we came up through the internet’, but they didn’t. What happened was they started off as a MySpace page with a few hundred or few thousand followers at the most, they got signed to a major label, became huge and then said it was all due to the internet, which is just rubbish.

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