Sound Page by Bob Doerschuk & Ted Greenwald
What happens when you take one world-famous rock keyboardist, add a lesser-known but eager and talented player stir in some basic theoretical differences of opinion, tone it down with the pure joy of making music together, drop the concoction in a recording studio, and let it sit for about four days?
If the famous guy is Steve Porcaro, and the newcomer is Amin Bhatia, you get "The Manor March", our Soundpage this month, along with the promise of more to come.
The original audio that accompanied this article was on a flexible vinyl soundpage included in the magazine. It was later updated to RealAudio and now Bhatia Music is providing it to you in MP3...-Ed.
[The Manor March MP3]
Porcaro's name is familiar to most Keyboard readers. Briefly, he had already built a name for himself as one of the top young players in the L.A. studios when he helped put together Toto, a powerhouse sextet whose synthesizer-sparked sound shot to the top of the charts on songs like "Hold The Line," "Africa," and "Rosanna." Bhatia, on the other hand, is generally known only to a more select circle. Some may have heard him lecture at Digicon'85. Others might remember his first-place finishes in the 1981 and '82 Roland International Synthesizer Tape Competitions, or his first prize at the Alberta Motion Picture Industry Awards this year in the musical score category for his soundtrack to Storm.
Though Porcaro and Bhatia both specialize in synthesizer performance, their ideas about it differ markedly. "My Dad bought me a Minimoog when I was 17," Bhatia sayas. "The very nature of the equipment I had, including a 4-track recorder, forced me to come up with some very unconventional techniques in building layers, and ideas about tape splicing that were beyond a lot of the stuff that Toto was used to working with."
Wait a minute. Beyond Toto? Does this sound like a promising attitude for musical partnership with a Toto-ite? Ask Porcaro; the answer is surprising.
"Amin is amazing," he insists. "He's incredible. From the beginning, I wanted to watch him work, to see how he does what he does. Let's face it. There are so many synthesizer player out there who think they know it all. When you get all your gear together and you've got a system you want to adhere to , it's easy to become close-minded. But I love it when some guy shows me something I don't know on the Minimoog."
Minimoog? Are we talking stone age with one of the most respected programming jockeys in rock? Absolutely. Porcaro's encounter with Bhatia was about going back to the roots, not just in terms of equipment, but in recording techniques as well. "The Manor March" is a formation stride into the past, from which two explorers return with fresh insights about the present.
This unlikely duo traces its origins back to Ralph Dyck, a renowned Caandian probrammer who also happens to be one of the judges in Roland's tape contest. Bhatia had been working as a radio producer and producing music for Canadian film productions on the side when his submission grabbed Dyck's attention. "Ralph has been helping me out with interfacing and things like that for years now," Porcaro relates. "He'd bring Amin's tapes down and they would amaze me. Ralph would brag that it was all four-track and Minimoog. He'd look at me with all my gear and say, 'You come up with something this good'. I just got tired of being amazed by this kid, so next time we were in Canada on tour I met up with him." Amin continues the tale: "Steve said, 'We should really get together so I can learn more about all this stuff,' so I flew down and spent a week with him in Los Angeles. The piece is the result of that. It was kind of like a one-on-one workshop."
After an abortive attempt to collaborate on a synthesized re-orchestration of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Porcaro simply turned Bhatia loose. "We didn't have a piano transcription, and we just didn't have the time or patience to put up with the score," Bhatia recalls. AT that point the seminar began in earnest, with upstart Bhatia initiating the seasoned professional into the arcana of low-tech mastery. "It was very hard for me sometimes," Porcaro admits, "because I was so quick to want to produce him. I had to stop and say, 'This guy thinks differently from the way I do, and that's why he's here.'"
First Bhatia showed Porcaro how to build the explosion effect: "That's all Minimoog," Porcaro reveals. "Amin's not afraid to put up fresh tape and fill 24 tracks, bounce down to two tracks, go back to 24-track, fill that up, and then fly it all in. When you listen to the original parts, it's not that he's got a magic patch or anything like that. The individual parts don't sound amazing in themselves. It's when he puts it all together that it's amazing."
"Steve comes from the school that says, if you want a very thick track, you just get a lot of keyboards and stack them all together in one pass," Bhatia observes. "If I want a very thick sound, I use one synthesizer and overdub it to death. What we arrived at was a beautiful compromise between the two." The flanging that animates the fireball was also done by hand - in Bhatia's words, "the old run-two-tape-machines-at-once rountine. Steve, of course, has worked with some ot the finest digital flangers around, and he still says the old rock-and-roll tape reel approach does a better job than anything else he's ever heard."
Bhatia's whooshing thunderbolt effect inspired the rest of the piece. Immediately after the pair had set foot on musical terra firma, however, Bhatia led Porcaro away from the beaten path of his usual compositional methods. "Nothing was writtne down," and exasperated and slightly bemused Porcaro reports. "Me, I get out my custom score paper, my data logs, my sounds - we didn't use any of that stuff at all. The only thing he put down on paper was the snare part, on a napkin. That's it. Everything else is right out of his head."
The piece was worked out in short segments, an approach that also grew out of Bhatia's work with four-track equipment. "When you have a four-track machine, you have so many patch changes and keyboard changes that anything longer than a minute of continuous tape restricts you. If the first 30 seconds will be a string quartet, and then you want to introduce the brass from 45 to 60 seconds, and then bring in the entire orchestra, you've got to be thinking about that entire orchestra section right at the beginning when you're laying the strings down. I found, out of necessity, that it worked better to do a piece in 15-second sections. I start out by scoring an entire section, listen to that, and then take another section on another piece of tape and score that, and so on. Then a few weeks later when I have something that I really enjoy, I overlap the sections in a two-track situation, in their final mix stages. These little 15-second clips just segue over each other."
Bhatia's novel way of composing based on his experiences with severely limited - at least compared with Toto's resources - equipment, is complemented by his equally anachronistic reliance on just one or two synthesizers. "We experiemented with combining different instruments," he explains, "but for the most part, it was the Minimoog with the DX every now and then. We threw an Emulator in just to give things a more realistic presence." Porcaro supported the choice of instrumentation; when Bhatia admitted that he wasn't very adept at programming the DX7, the session veteran responded, "That's not the point".
"We've come to the realization that there's no match for that fat Moog oscillator sound, which, as you well know, has been loved over the years," Bhatia insists. "While we added to it and tried other things, there still wasn't any substitute." Another dinosaur that figures prominently in "The Manor March" is the Polymoog. Its full polyphony (compared with the 8-and 16-voice instruments available these days) allowed the harp glisses towards the middle of the piece to sound without any voice-cancellation. Tape manipulation is another bazooka in Bhatia's arsenal of production techniques. "We slowed the tape down, went for a run, and speeded it back up again," he says of the lightening-paced lines that spark the march's introduction.
Although the point of the exercise was to introduce Porcaro to these methods, it turned into more of an exchange as he patched Bhatia's Minimoog into his extensive MIDI setup. "That was a joy for me," states Bhatia. "I don't have a lot of MIDI keyboards up here [in Canada], but Steve has all of that equipment. It was a thrill to be able to trigger the DX7 and the Oberheim Xpanders."
But what about the time it takes to plug in all that pre-MIDI equipment? And all those overdubs - they must have taken weeks, you might think. On the contrary: "The meat of the piece was done in about a day," Bhatia reports. "We put the sound effects together the day before, and we did some horsing around on the mix the day after, so for the most part we did the entire piece in a day and a half." If anything held the two keyboardists up, in fact, it was a state-of-the-art Synclavier system. "Albhy Galuten [a Los Angeles-based record producer] has one of the more advanced Synclaviers in the city, and he brought it over and blew us away with the demo he did," Bhatia recalls. "He left it with us, and the next day Steve and I spent half the morning trying to put a program up. We couldn't get it started. But there was the Minimoog just sitting there, and there was Steve's curiosity about how we would manage to pull this off, and we said, 'OK, screw the Synclavier. Let's do it on the Minimoog.' And so the thing sat there collecting dust for the entire week."
Bhatia is quick to point out, however, that the pair would have gotten around to the Synclavier if they had had more time together, and that his personal approach to technology doesn't rule out that instrument by any means. "It's not a quistion of the approach as specific to the instrument," he asserts. "You can use this approach for whatever you're going." The important thing, he emphasizes, is not to let the human element get lost in the shuffle of patch cords and recording tape. "Do not forsake the beauty of human randomness," Bhatia admonishes. "I don't care how many Harmonizers you've got. Give it just one patch on one synthesizer and stack it up, if you're going for an ensemble sound. It will have that human meat." From all indications, Porcaro agrees. In fact, he claims that the exercise has had a profound impact, one which is bound to show up in the next Toto album. "I can already hear his influence in what I do," he states with admiration. "It has greatly affected my work." With Bhatia already planning his return to L.A. for more collaborations with Porcaro and Toto, it's clear that we'll be hearing a sequel to "The Manor March" before long.
Reprinted from KEYBOARD Magazine - June 1986