My Tommy keyboard rig

April 8th, 2007 | Comments: none

We just passed the halfway mark with Tommy performances - 17 down, 15 to go. The show is going well. The band is tightening up nicely.

[Warning: minor Tommy spoilers follow.]

One of the most fun aspects of doing this show for me has been the chance to play a lot of different keyboard parts. The original production had three keyboard players, each covering a couple dozen sounds. Distilling that down to what I can cover myself was a fun puzzle. My solution is to run two boards: a digital piano and a MIDI controller driving my laptop.

My main board, a Yamaha 88-key digital piano, has a decent set of basic keyboard sounds: piano, rhodes, digipiano, pipe organ, harpsichord, legato strings, and straight jazz organ. It’s where my hands spend most of their time.

That covers the basics, but the show needed a lot more. For Hedwig I had used my old AKAI hardware sampler for the hammond parts, but its paltry 32 MB of RAM wasn’t going to cut it for this show. So I decided to go with software.

The second keyboard I’m running is a 61-key Korg controller driving my laptop. The laptop is running MOTU’s MachFive software sampler hosted by a great little program called Rax2, built just for hosting software instruments for playing live.

All of the samples I need for the show are loaded at once, and the bottom five or six keys on the keyboard are programmed to switch them as needed: marcato strings (which can be layered with a legato section via a button toggle), glockenspiel, horn section, tympani, classic fat synth, another organ, pan flute, piccolo trumpet, tuba, and various synth sweeps.

The synth sweeps were a key part of the original production. They’re heard during “Amazing Journey” and the “Pinball Wizard” reprise, most notably when [spoiler] Tommy rises up off the stage [/spoiler]. Also the “woosh” at the end of the first act. I had to program those myself, for which I used Crystal, then just sampled the result into MachFive. It’s quite satisfying to rip out some big farty blasts of sound.

Oh, and yeah, the CD is truly, really finished. More on that very soon.