technically speaking
Point and Counter Point:
Keyboards in a Guitar-Driven World
By Kent Morris
Inthe liner notes of The Human
League’s 1981 album, Dare,
Phil Oakey proclaimed the
death of guitar-driven popular music. The British band’s
original lineup included four
synth players and a drum programmer, but
no guitarist, bassist or horn player. Given
pop music’s continued affinity for guitars,
Dare’s hit single, “Don’t You Want Me?”
could be asked by Phil Oakey to the music
world today. Oakey was clearly premature in
writing off the ancient guitar’s role in rock,
and the predominance of
guitars in worship music
serves as an allegory to
the continued retrenchment of keyboards as lead
instruments. On the other
hand, the reported death
of keyboards has also been
highly exaggerated. In reality, keyboards and guitars complement
each other similar to the way spouses do in
a healthy marriage. Each brings unique talent and ability to the table. So, then, how do
keyboards exert influence in worship without becoming, as another Human League
song says, “The Sound of the Crowd”?
Many Sounds, Few Tones
Even on keyboards with hundreds of
preset sounds, there are only five types of
tones: piano, organ, orchestral, percussion
and pad. Piano settings include the requisite grand piano samples (actual snippet
recordings of real instruments), emulations
of electric piano classics like the Fender-Rhodes Suitcase 73 and Wurlitzer 200,
electronic replications of digital benchmarks such as the Yamaha DX7 FM “bell
piano,” and an assortment of harpsichords
and other piano-esque sounds. Organ tones
include variations of vibrato and tremolo
laden Hammond B3s, moderately successful stabs at pipe organs and cheesy repro-
ductions of the equally cheesy
original Farfisa organ. Orches-
tral presets generally begin
with strings, ranging in tonal
quality from annoying bee-
like buzzing to pleasing vio-
lins and cellos. Next come the
woodwinds, with clarinet typically a stand-
out performer, followed by brass in solos
and sections, again, usually of high quality.
Finally, the once greatly overused orchestra
hit (think Yes’, “Owner of a Lonely Heart”)
rounds out the segment. Percussion presets
include everything from
tympani to bongos, either
in single strike samples or
tuned intervals. If the play-
er understands the original
instrument, the need for
expensive one-time rent-
als of specialty percussion
can be eliminated. Pads are
the basis for most music “beds” used to un-
derscore everything from primetime crime
dramas to corporate prayer. A pad is non-
descript, that is, it does not draw attention
to itself when played correctly. It is known
only in its absence.
Currently, the big three keyboard
companies, Yamaha, Korg and Roland, have
updated versions of their perennial best
sellers shipping to dealers. Yamaha’s MOTIF is now the MOTIF XS a serious upgrade
with newly unveiled Expanded Articulation
Voices, a method of synthesizer manipulation of existing parameters
that creates radically new sounds.
The XS also sports a larger format
color display, making the new stu-dio-style routing and mixing sequencer a breeze to use. Steinberg’s
upcoming Cubase AI software program is inside the box, a boon for
those waiting for a seamless way to
interface hardware and software aspects into a single project.
The Whole Package
Music workstations became a reality
in 1988 when Korg introduced the world
to the M1. By combining a synthesizer
with a sequencing recorder, an effects palette and a drum machine, the M1 provided
an all-in-one solution for song creation.
The M3 reinvigorates the workstation
concept by taking the sound generator (in
essence, the engine) from Korg’s widely
acclaimed top-shelf OASYS keyboard and
putting it into a mid-level product. Just as
pressing a large block V8 into a Mustang
makes it a street burner, so the M3 pos-sesses capabilities beyond what its pricetag
suggests. To add fuel to the fire, Korg threw
in a second generation KARMA function,
a new instant groove player called Drum
Tracks and the new KKS flexible routing
structure to configure the M3 in ways the
users feel best suits the instrument.
Roland has put a decidedly new twist
on an old idea. Their VP-550 takes the concept of a vocoder and sends it to another
level. In its classic form, a musical vocoder
(from “voice encoder”) uses a keyboard or
guitar signal as the carrier and the human
