This may not be for everyone, but if you`re interested in the instrumental side of Wakeman in the 70s, then this one is for you.
Read on!
Synthesizers
By John Boulton
RICK WAKEMAN’S musical armoury on his last tour consisted of five Minimoog synthesisers, two Mellotrons, Fender Rhodes 88 Electric Piano, RMI Rocksichord, Baldwin Electric Harpsichord, Steinway 9 Grand Piano, Hammond C-3 Organ, Godwin SC/444 Organ and a Hohner Clavinet.
“Most people know about Moogs and the basic electric pianos,” he says, “but it’s the adaptations you can have done to instruments and things to use with them, to change the sound, I find interesting. I’ve got a box which has got various built-in pedals made by Systech. They’re all built into the one case and linked to the various instruments that I use, so you can literally switch in an envelope folder, phaser, flanger, or a digital delay, into any instrument you want to, or permutations of each.
“I would advise anyone going to buy instruments to look very closely at what sort of pedals they can put with them, because the days of playing an instrument with straight sounds are really gone. This is because of all the clever things you can do in the studio, for when you go out on the road people expect to hear them, so you have to have the same sort of equipment.
“Moogs are basically straight-forward. There are so many different sorts of synthesiser that you can’t really recommend one against another, as it’s purely a matter of personal taste. It’s virtually why one person chooses to drive a Vauxhall and another a Ford. There are now some Polyphonic synthesisers on the market, but I’m not sold on them yet. I own a Moog polyphonic, and I’m very biased towards Moog but I don’t think it compares as well to all their other products, the modified Moogs, the Synthi, the Mini Moog and the P1, P2, P3 and the C series.
“To me professionally, they are really good instruments that you can rely on. I know that the polyphonic Moog has the same components basically but for some unknown reason it’s not quite right yet.
“Ironically, one way you can find this out is by just multi-tracking Moogs. If you track say 24 Moogs, you end up not with the sound of 24 Moogs but something like a church organ sound with all the stops out. That’s of course if you have the same setting and the same sound. If you have different sounds, then that would be great, but they don’t actually work like that and I think that until they do, rather than have a single manual Moog that was polyphonic, I would rather see a double manual or a three manual Moog and that I feel would be more advantageous.
“Concerning other instruments that aren’t that common, there is one that my company makes that will be on the market in January called the Birotron, which is an instrument that recreates orchestral sounds very reliably, with very light action, touch, and no delay. The other thing I like is the RMI computer piano. It’s bloody expensive, about $7,000 to buy, but it really is incredible.
“You’ve got computer cards and you can feed all these cards into the card reader, so you have four different readings of whatever instrument you want. So let’s say you do alto sax, a bell, a sine wave and flute. You have the four and combinations of the four and add in other little novelties that they’ve built into the instrument, and it contains twelve memory banks so it will retain anything that you ask it to do, providing that you play it.”
What about the amplification side?
“Well I either use Crowns or SAE’s and a Soundcraft mixer, everything gets fed into them, and there are three feeds, one to the monitors, one to the desk and then one to me, that goes into the SAE’s or the Crowns, and don’t ask me what these speakers are, but we developed the ‘trouser fluffer’, which really is something else, and it’s in a not particularly large cabinet that I have down in front of me and with two horns on the top. Exactly what the speaker is I couldn’t tell you, but it ain’t ‘alf bloody good.”
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