JR Moog Workshop [Archive] - Jordan Rudess' Community Forums

mlunapiena01

06-25-2006, 12:05 AM

I just want to impress upon anyone who reads this that these are my memories & recollections from 4 days ago. I've had a lot happen since then & now & my memory is not the greatest, so I may have misrepresented something or gotten something wrong. I don't think that's the case, but I just wanted to make it clear that it was possible that I did.

Ok, so first up at the Moog workshop was Roger O'donnel formerly of the cure, and now a solo artist. He had some interesting music and his demonstration seemed to mostly be him coming up with different loops & sequencing them in logic then using the moog's realtime controls... Can't say with absolute certainty though as he did not seem to realize that the mic was not loud enough for him to be heard and the Sam Ash staff didn't seem to care about it despite several people bringing it up. One thing I did catch was that when he was recording, he didn't save any of his sounds as presets and so he had had to rebuild them all from scratch, which was tedious, but taught him a lot about those sounds and how he could create them.

So then next up is Jordan Rudess. From the start, you could tell he was very proficient with all the technology in front of him, which is always inspiring to see. Additionally, it was clear that he was used to giving presentations from the way he moved around as he spoke and his awareness of the audience. He started off by playing some very floydian sounding stuff on the Little Phatty, was pretty neat. From there he went into a story about his Julliard days. The two comments he made that stick out in my mind from that are: "It's debatable whether my technique got better or worse after I left Julliard" (from there he mentioned something about making it his goal at the time to become the human sequencer) & the other was that his friends had come over to his house one day carrying this strange looking object with one objective: to turn Jordan on to the Moog Synthesizer. From there he talked about late night radio shows that he used to do with his friends, playing non-pitch based music, was a neat little inspiring story. I meant to ask him, but forgot to, what it was like to play non-pitch-based music while having perfect pitch..

From there I'm having a lot of trouble remembering what he talked about specifically as I have absolutely no familiarity with Moogs and have had a very busy last four days... I do remember he demonstrated a lot of the realtime controls including octave buttons and a programmable pitch wheel (he mentioned he generally likes to have one end assigned to a step away and the other to an octave). One of the neat things about the workshop was that he would discuss something, and then he would play something to demonstrate his point. I believe some of the things he discussed included changing the wave form and the sequencing abilities of the moog and the ability to synchronize different sequencers. There was a neat little exercise he demonstrated that oculd be useful for practicing certain staccato passages (I think that's what it was for... don't really remember). The idea behind it was to set the moog up to only trigger once so that if you hadn't lifted up the previous finger appropriately, you would get a legato sound instead of a staccato one (I can't really guarantee the accuracy of that, but I think that's how it worked). Additionally, to conclude the workshop, he played instectsamongus, which was pretty neat, even though there were some sound issues with the oasys only running through one speaker while the Little Phatty ran through both.

The most interesting points for me were getting to see the way Jordan got into the music he was playing and getting a vague conception of the man who was behind the music and how his brain worked. It was very interesting to see the way he moved with the music and when he visibly kept count by bringing his leg up and down. Also, interesting for me was getting to actually hear a moog synthesizer & what it could do as well. As a result of that, I'm very interested in moogs and whiel I've always been interested in synths & synthesizers, I'm strongly considering purchasing a moog as my first one some day and learning as much about analog synthesis as I can in order to get a ground up approach to synthesis (in the meantime, there's a program called MiniMouge VA online I'm gonna mess around with as soon as the internet's set up in my room).

Before and after Jordan was very social, conversing and taking pictures without objection. I asked him what the continuum was like and he said that the fingerboard was made from the same material as a diver's jumpsuit that that one could slide across it without accumulating too much heat.

If anybody else from here was actually there, I was the kid with the dream theater/octavarium hat... I think I was probably wearing black shorts & a black shirt w/ very chinese looking dragons, though 4 days ago is way back for me to remember.

I just want to impress again that these are my impressions and memories of it and it's possible there were some things I got wrong or that I'm not on the right track about or misunderstood, while I don't think that's the case and I've represented everything as accurately as I can remember it, I know memory (particularly mine) can be very fickle.

I hope you found this informative & I'm sorry I don't remember more about the specific things Jordan discussed. Some of them were slightly over my head b/c I lacked the knowledge to completely understand them & others have escaped my memory. It was an awesome experience though & Jordan seems even more interesting now that I've met him in person.

Edit: another thing I meant to ask jordan but forgot... his shoes looked extremely comfy, I was wondering where they were obtained... oh well, guess I'll have to remember if I ever get to meet him again...