The Skills of Expression

For the last year or so my workouts and long car rides have been accompanied by Marc Maron, Terry Gross, Greg Kot and Jim Derogatis. Nothing passes time like a good interview, and yesterday while huffing and puffing on a stationary bicycle I heard a doozy of a conversation on Sound Opinions with multi-talented Esperanza Spalding, just another of the seemingly endless blind spots I have in my musical repertoire. I only knew Spalding as the bass player with big hair who beat out Justin Bieber for the Best New Artist Grammy some years ago, but after this interview I’m next in line to purchase her latest album, Emily’s D+Evolution. (Yes, that’s right, if you like a piece of art, you should buy it, not stream it on youtube.) This gal can not only play, she can express herself, think deeply, push boundaries and challenge conventional wisdom. If you haven’t heard the interview, I highly recommend it.

But it was the interesting juxtaposition of something Spalding said and a quote from a character in the Mike Mills film 20th Century Women that prompted me to write this blog.

20th Century Women is if nothing else a love song to punk music, and while I’ve never been a fan of the genre, I was taken with the following exchange as Dorothea – played by Annette Bening – challenges Abbie – played by Greta Gerwig – about the music she’s listening to (thanks to Wikiquote for making this easy):

Dorothea: What is that?

Abbie: It's The Raincoats.

Dorothea: Can't things just be pretty?

Jamie: Pretty music is used to hide how unfair and corrupt society is.

Dorothea: Ah, okay so... they're not very good, and they know that, right?

Abbie: Yeah, it's like they've got this feeling, and they don't have any skill, and they don't want skill, because it's really interesting what happens when your passion is bigger than the tools you have to deal with it. It creates this energy that's raw. Isn't it great?

There’s something to this, I think, and it really made me consider punk music in a new way.  There is something very powerful in expressing oneself in a raw, uninhibited way despite not having tools to do so eloquently. It happens at nearly every outdoor festival I play at. There’s always that one guy – usually shirtless – who stands near the side of the stage and dances. Dances like there’s no tomorrow, like he’s offering a primitive prayer to the heavens, arms and legs flailing, torso gyrating, eyes closed. This man is dancing despite not knowing how to pirouette or jeté, and there’s something very freeing and very pure about this, like when a three year-old joyously shakes and stomps to music. I wish I could express myself as uninhibitedly.

But in the Sound Opinions interview Spalding offers another way to consider things:

“You need technical prowess to express yourself freely. You don’t need to use all of it all of the time, but it really helps to have technical facility.” She goes on to mention dance troops who hire ballet dancers, not because they’re performing ballet, but because they need the technical skills to pull off the dance moves the troop requires. “Music is the same. Jazz music, whatever music. It’s just having more vocabulary, like you want to be a great writer and you discover that your vocabulary is limited, like you feel the crunch, like I want to have a place out here, I need to work on my vocabulary.”

And she is, of course, spot on. I think of the multitude of times that I wanted to get my point across in a sharp, succinct way, but couldn’t find the one word that would have allowed me to do so, instead leaning on very basic vocabulary that diluted my message. Similarly, when I play piano, there have been times when I wanted to take my playing to a new place, and although I could visualize exactly what I’d like to do, I didn’t have the technical skills to take me there.

It’s important that Spalding added the following caveat, “You don’t need to use all of it all of the time.” When my son was just learning drums and starting to come up with his own fills, I played for him the tom fills in Toto’s song, “Africa.” You know it well, but in case you need reminding, go to 1:10, 2:20 and 3:15 of the following video. 

These are three of the simplest tom fills you’ll ever hear, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find any more effective. It’s important to note that Toto drummer Jeff Porcaro was among the most talented and most sought after drummers in the music industry at the time, and while he could have overcomplicated things (probably in a very tasteful and interesting way), he opted to offer simply what the song required. I imagine it’s the same in any art form. Ernest Hemmingway wrote relatively simply, but I suspect he could have rivaled F. Scott Fitzgerald’s word wizardly if he’d chosen to or needed to.

And that’s the ultimate aim of any musician, any artist or really any human being: to have the skills to express yourself in any way you see fit. If simplicity is required to express raw emotion like that of punk music, great. But if something more extravagant is needed, you can go into your bag of technical skills and do what’s required.

Keyboard Rig for the Aging Rocker

When I started gigging again back in 2011 I was using a heavy, inflexible beast from the 1990s, a 60 pound Roland A-90 that – along with its sonic limitations – virtually guaranteed regular chiropractic visits. When it died two years later, its replacements offered other problems. The Korg SV-1 was 15 pounds lighter, though still cumbersome, and it was functionally limited. It offered zero layering and splitting capabilities and its organ sounds were simply terrible. I added a second keyboard – a 31 pound Kurzweil PC3LE6 – that really shined in some areas, but now I was lugging around two heavy-ish keyboards that still didn’t do everything I wanted. Add to that a QSC K12 for my keyboard amp, and at the end of an evening my back was ready to cry uncle, not to mention my ringing ears. I considered purchasing a Nord, but in additional to the exceedingly high price, these keyboards also have imitations. I was looking for something to offer me flexibility without breaking the bank or my back.

A year ago I started to seriously consider updating my gear to a laptop based system, and after months of research, several purchases, a steep learning curve and countless hours of frustration, I am now playing live with a new setup that’s got one foot in the 21st Century while still offering the stability and simplicity of a 20th Century rig. Here are the specifics:

Nektar Panorama P6 61 key controller keyboard (used)

Casio PX-5S 88 weighted keyboard (used)

MacBook Pro (used)

Mainstage 3 software

IK Media Sample Tank software

Focusrite Scarlett 6i6 (2nd Gen) audio interface

USB port (used)

2U Rack mount case

Rack mount Power Supply (used)

3 keyboard pedals

Shure SE 215 headphones with self-made in ears molds using Radians custom molds

Call it a keyboard rig for the aging rocker who still wants to stay relevant. The price? I purchased both keyboards, the MacBook, the USB port and power supply secondhand, saving me around $1000. All told, my new gear cost somewhere around the price I would have spent on a new Nord keyboard.

A couple of points:

The Casio PX-5S is the best-kept secret in the keyboarding world. It sounds great, it’s flexible and I can carry it under one arm. It’s staggering light – only 23 pounds – and I personally love the feel of the keys. The Nektar Panorama P6 only weighs 17 pounds. So in essence I went from carrying 76 pounds of keyboards to 40 pounds. Nice.

I no longer take an amp with me when I gig. Instead, I use my Shure headphone and directly monitor my keys along with a PA vocal feed through my audio interface. No more heavy amps and I’m guaranteed to be able to hear myself without subjecting my ears to deafening sounds.

I use soft synths for my top controller keyboard only. I use the internal Casio sounds (while still programming patch changes with Mainstage), partly because I like the sounds and partly because it provides me with a backup in case of catastrophic computer failure. No matter what, I'll be able to get through a gig. I basically use the Casio for pianos, Rhodes, Wurlitzer, clavs, Vox Continental, Farfisa and some pads and strings, but it can do a lot more in a pinch.

I run both the Casio and the softsyths through the Focusrite and out the back in mono - each panned hard right or left - so that the audio engineer still has flexibility to change volumes. I've learned that this is a better way to go (for me, at least) because sometimes the volumes I set during rehearsals need tweaking when playing live.

My rack mount contains my audio interface, mult-USB port, Power supply and all the cables I need to set up, which I can complete in about seven minutes. I use Velcro strips to adhere my rack mount onto a music stand, and I use additional strips to adhere my MacBook to my rack mount. Easy, cheap, flexible and – to date – accident free.

Similarly, I adhered all three keyboard pedals onto a 11” x 14” canvas board (painted black) with Velcro strips. This keeps my pedals from sliding around, and it’s light and easy to carry.

All you Apple lovers out there who told me that MacBooks are the best and I would wonder why I didn’t switch to Apple years ago, I cry bullshit. My MacBook freezes and crashes at inopportune times just like my PCs do. It’s a computer, and an inflexible and overpriced computer at that, but I wanted to use Mainstage to play live so I had no choice. Fortunately the most significant problems have occurred during rehearsals and not during live performances.

Speaking of which, Mainstage is an amazing value but also amazingly frustrating to use. Yes, everything can be configured if you have enough hours in the day, but it could be oh so much better. I am not a MIDI guru – I know just enough to be dangerous – and this is no doubt the source of much of my frustration, but Mainstage makes me work very hard to do some very simple tasks. Still, once you get things set, there’s nothing as wonderful as pressing a button and having all of your song settings appear. I no longer spend my time on stage trying to select the correct patch at the correct time, and I enjoy performing live much more as a result. 

Mainstage is impossible to learn well without help, and I found two on-line sources to be invaluable: http://brian-nagel.com/ and https://brianli.com/.  I owe them big time.

The sounds that come with Mainstage – particularly the organs and synths – are amazing and allow for endless tweaking to get the sound you need. I purchased SampleTank to help supplement some of Mainstage’s shortcomings, particularly the horns and strings, and for piano, Rhodes, etc. I use my Casio’s internal sounds, and although they’re not as strong as my SV-1’s patches, they’re certainly sufficient and enjoyable to play, and they're much better than Mainstage's pianos.

I have odd ear canal sizes and I wasn’t able to get my Shure headphones to stay in place consistently and block out enough room noise. Rather than having proper in-ear molds created, I purchased Radians ear molds and created my own based on some youtube videos I watched. Cheap and effective.

All in all, the switch to a laptop based system has achieved what I’d hoped for: a lighter rig with better sounds and more flexibility. It’s been a source of frustration to be sure, and I don’t even want to think about how many hours it took me to learn how to use the gear properly and to program patches for my bands, but ultimately it was a challenging and rewarding experience. In a way, it helped me to reengage with music that had become a bore to play and allowed me to examine each song’s potential, challenging me to make the song sound as good as possible. Performing is much more fulfilling as a result, not to mention less back-breaking, and I also feel like this is a rig that can grow with me rather than being bogged down with a expensive keyboards that only do certain things well.