Especially for those into music technology: Keane is three-piece band made up of a keyboardist, drummer and vocalist. They used to have a guitarist, and when the guitarist was around, the keyboardist played bass. After the guitarist left, the bassist/keyboardist felt, hmm, he couldn’t play bass. Who was to fill in the mid-ranges? So he went back to playing keyboards. So the band relies on click tracks to help boost their sound.
Read more about Keane here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keane_(band)
Official website: http://www.keanemusic.com/
The Power of Three
By Bronwyn Jones
http://www.apple.com/uk/pro/music/keane/
Sometimes the hand of fate feels more like sleight of hand.
Most eager young bands knocking around from gig to gig in a transit van would be horrified at the idea of their lead guitarist pulling a Houdini during the Quest for the Great Record Deal. But if the whirlwind success of Keane is anything to go by, perhaps they should reconsider.
Since Keane’s debut album, “Hopes and Fears”, hit shelves in May 2004, it has sold more than four million copies. The band has played to capacity crowds around the world, headlined major festivals and supported stadium rock giants U2 during their sold-out European tour. No mean feat for a bunch of boys from East Sussex, who, after their lead guitarist left the band in 2001, staged a stealth attack on the charts using only drums, keyboards, vocals and a fair measure of ingenuity.
Born Again
While Keane’s transition from guitar band to piano-driven pop powerhouse was partly a result of circumstance, songwriter-keyboardist Tim Rice-Oxley, drummer Richard Hughes and vocalist Tom Chaplin couldn’t have planned it more brilliantly. For Keane, necessity was the mother of reinvention. And as Rice-Oxley tells it, Apple’s Logic Pro played a major role in that reinvention.
“When we were a guitar band, I was playing the bass”, says Rice-Oxley. “But when there was a big hole left by the absence of a guitar, I decided to go back to playing piano. Obviously, that meant I couldn’t play the bass and piano at the same time on stage, so rather than interfering with the chemistry of the band, we decided to use Logic to play back the bass parts”.
Preserving that chemistry resulted in a pared-down, three-piece line-up that still manages to produce big sounds both inside and outside the studio. Both as a composition tool and an aid to live performance, Logic Pro gives Keane a creative edge it might otherwise have lost the moment it ceased to be a traditional four piece.
Catching Lightning on a Laptop
Rice-Oxley’s electronic experimentation starts long before the band takes the stage at major venues such as Wembley Arena. “The live stage, obviously, is the final incarnation of what we do”, he says. “The initial stage of writing a song is something I always do just on a piano or a guitar. But as soon as I get an idea for a song, I’ll start working on it in Logic”.
For a band whose sound relies so heavily on emotional urgency, reducing the lag time between idea and execution makes for more honest songwriting. Composing electronically helps Rice-Oxley preserve for posterity those magic moments when inspiration first strikes. “When you do a demo for a song, you’re often trying to capture the initial inspiration”, he explains. “And those initial ideas are often the best ones. So for me, it’s brilliant being able to catch those early on”.
Best of Both Worlds
Music journalists make a lot of fuss over that piano. But what Keane accomplishes musically has less to do with a conscious no-guitar strategy and more to do with the successful melding of the traditional and the thoroughly modern.
Hearing Keane’s emotional balladry, you might not guess that the band’s songwriter cites synth-pop legends Depeche Mode and Pet Shop Boys as his musical influences. Then again, if you listen closely to the atmospheric electronica simmering just beneath Tom Chaplin’s soaring vocals, you begin to realise — as the band has — that when the songs are good, it doesn’t matter what you play them on.
“People are so snobbish”, laments Rice-Oxley. “You’ll get people who think, ‘It’s gotta be guitars, it’s gotta be made in a dank rehearsal room, it can’t have anything electronic on it’. But really, it’s the blend of the two that I think is the future of music. For me, coming from a reasonably conventional band background, it’s an absolute revelation simply to put in a bar of drums and press the loop button. Applying the capabilities of a program like Logic to more classic band sounds is a blend that opens up a world of possibilities that I feel I’ve just barely scratched the surface of”.
Live and Well
Of course, during an average show, Keane go way beyond the basics. They’ve come a long way from the early days of “a fold-up picnic table and two pieces of sponge with a laptop on top of it”, laughs Rice-Oxley. These days, the band uses dual-synchronised PowerBook G4 systems (see sidebar) running Logic Pro alongside their live instrumentation. Every aspect of the band’s performance is carefully choreographed to integrate the necessary elements of Logic Pro without compromising the atmosphere and excitement of a truly live experience.
“I’ll get all the multi-tracks from every song on the album, turn each one into a song, put in a click track that Richard and I both have in our ears, then delete everything I can because we want to keep things as live as possible”, explains Rice-Oxley. “The bass always stays because it’s such an important part of our sound and I just don’t have enough hands to play it live. Then there’s normally a couple of string parts, the occasional bit of electronica and some doubling of piano riffs if I feel that I’m not digging in enough or making them ring out. We have the bass on one channel, the click track on another channel and then a stereo channel of everything else”.
This Logic Pro-meets-live strategy certainly works. Far from feeling like a diminutive three piece accompanying an electronic symphony, Keane come over as an accomplished trio of musicians whose surprisingly large sound requires little more than electronic subtleties. Rice-Oxley plays like a man possessed — hands, feet and tousled head a blur of kinetic energy. Hughes never misses a beat. And Chaplin captivates the sell-out crowds with his seemingly effortless range and charisma.
In-Flight Studio
That kind of energy comes in just as handy off-stage as on, considering Keane have been on tour for the past 18 months straight. Life on the road doesn’t end with an encore. During the downtime, Rice-Oxley needs to find time to write and record demos for the band’s next album. Luckily, he has the advantage of a portable studio in the form of Logic Pro running on his PowerBook G4.
“My PowerBook is the best thing I’ve ever bought”, he says. “I spend every waking hour playing around, doing demos. And if I hadn’t been able to do that, I’d be in panic mode now because we’re going to be making a second album and I wouldn’t have been able to do any demos since we’ve been on the road the whole time. When I get on an 11-hour flight, I can just open my laptop and work on songs. The time goes quickly because I’m doing something that I love more than anything else in the world: creating music”.
Logic Pro Live
For Keane, two PowerBook G4 systems and Logic Pro do double duty as live instruments, playing anywhere from 8 to 24 audio tracks per song. But running Logic Pro in a live setting poses unique challenges for programmer and technician Geoff Kakoschke. For maximum flexibility, Kakoschke builds each song separately using Rice-Oxley’s pre-mix album tracks lifted from Pro Tools.
“Because I’m using Tim’s original audio files”, explains Kakoschke, “I decided I didn’t want to get to the end and go, ‘Right — that’s the mix. It’s set in stone’. I do all of my processing in real-time. I use the Overdrive plug-in a lot to create valve warmth. There’s also at least one PlatinumVerb in every song. And then there’s a ton of automation to keep the parts — especially the bass parts — coming in and out nice and clean. Because of the power of the program and the power of the hardware we’re running it on, doing everything in real time is great. And it means I can change something if I want to — at a second’s notice”.
With audio requirements that vary from venue to venue, this on-the-fly programming proves essential. “Maybe we’re in a TV studio and the producers say: ‘We want you to do a 45-second intro of music to start the show’”, says Kakoschke. “So we’ll do an edit, and bang, within five minutes, we’ve made a new intro song. With any other system, we couldn’t do that”.
Using a keyboard and mouse with a Lindy USB/Cat5 extender and a mirrored LCD screen to control Rice-Oxley’s on-stage setup from his off-stage location where the second PowerBook G4 setup resides, Kakoschke loads the show. “We have a few acoustic moments where I load the songs in sets. For each set, the songs come up and we just switch between them. The songs are saved in such a way that they automatically load on-screen in the order that they will be performed”.
As for the dual-PowerBook configuration he has devised, Kakoschke explains that “unlike a master-slave relationship, they’re running completely independently — two systems running in sync, but unaware that the other exists. So we have this facility that if a system does have a problem, I can just hit the other system and on it goes”.
Luckily for Keane, Kakoschke’s Logic Pro skills extend beyond the live arena. Throughout the band’s recent European and US tours, the band performed a new song, “Nothing in Your Way”, which was entirely recorded in a hotel room. “We got Tim a bass”, says Kakoschke. “We put the bass parts down. He gave me some other programming he’d done and it was a demo. Then I worked it into something we could use live and we’ve been touring with that song for six months”.
