Let us please Hancock, Zawinul & Stanik!

Danzig in The Hague, The Netherlands, is a great club for jazz music. Every Tuesday some great musicians are hanging out there.

The last few weeks I hang out a lot with Juraj Stanik at Danzig. Juraj is one the best keyboard-players who played with cats like Jaco Pastorius, Mike Stern, Toots Tielemans, you name it! Juraj is also using apps like Propellerhead Reason. He also uses the Clavia Electro, Nord Lead as well as other synths live. Juraj is very much interested in my work as a sound designer for Reason 3 and has a lot of interesting ideas about sound.

During patching for Reason 3, last year, I noticed that when I programmed a patch with full velocity, most other sound designers would tell me to use less velocity. Why is that? If you can play your keyboard well, you want maximum velocity because that gives you a more expressive tone. Keep in mind that a synth in general is a lot more one-dimensional sounding than something like a guitar or saxophone where playing the same note in repetition creates a slightly different sound for every note. So limiting the key-velocity, or even worse: already applying a compressor on it in a Combinator-patch will create a problem for these live players. If Propellerhead wants to see Reason being used more on stage, they should reconsider these things.

So the only reason for wanting less key-velocity is when you are not such a good keyboard-player, right? Guys like Juraj, the really deep and heavy cats, like to play with an expressive sound.

A lot of modern samples, patches and loops are lacking expressiveness. They sound much like a recording, but not like a sound source which begs to be bend into shape. Creative musicians don’t want stuff to sound like a record, no they want an interesting tone which THEY can bend into shape. Because they really want to PLAY that sound!

I understand there’s a big difference between the ‘let me hit a button’-player and cats like for example Juraj, Hancock and Zawinul. Don’t get me wrong, I like minimal techno and house, Akufen and stuff like that, nothing wrong with it. But keep in mind that there are still players out there who can really play and are expecting people like me to create expressive patches for them. Which is cool!

Juraj also told me he wasn’t really happy with the Clavia Electro. He loves the Electro’s Rhodes sound and felt it was only limited by the fact that the Electro has a cheap synth-like keyboard. But the acoustic piano sound of the Electro he hated. He really felt it could be done a lot better. I told Juraj we might contact Clavia about it. Maybe we should create a better piano for the Clavia. Maybe I can do one for both the Clavia and Reason, because I am not impressed with that one either…