Dream On

Guitarists can have Jimi. We’ve got Jordan.

by Michael Gallant

Meet Jordan Rudess, Keyboard Hero. He can scorch note-for-note with the best six-stringers out there, cool down with a Beethoven sonata, then give you tips on tweaking your Minimoog and programming your Triton.

It’s all in a day’s work for one of the most raging and innovative cats to lay fingers on a set of keys.

Dubbing someone a Keyboard Hero is heavy praise indeed, and we don’t use the title lightly here. Musically speaking, Dream Theater’s keyboard-meister is the total package – combining meticulous finger technique, extensive improvisational chops, deep programming skills, and the drive both to further his musical knowledge and share it with others. Hanging with the man in his upstate New York studio, we got the scoop on Dream Theater’s newest disc Octavarium (Atlantic), Jordan’s recent foray into music education publishing, and his experiences with some fantabulous cutting-edge gear.

Octavarium

After 20 years in the progressive rock game, Dream Theater continues to create epic compositions that display equal amounts of heaviness, lyricism, and virtuosity. Octavarium keeps true to the band’s legacy, introducing tracks that drive as hard as anything Metallica ever recorded, but also showcase the sort of conservatory-trained chops and compositional experimentation you might expect from a Pat Metheny/Lyle Mays collaboration. And while pieces like the disc’s title track roll through furious metric and harmonic changes, the band also sought to create shorter, lighter-spirited works within their signature aesthetic. The ballad “The Answer Lies Within,” for example, channels the quintet’s skill and intensity into a delicate, effective, sub-five-minute package. Similarly, the catchy “I Walk Beside You” showcases Dream Theater’s distinctive qualities in a compact, almost U2-ish vibe.

As with previous Dream Theater discs, Jordan’s keyboard presence is strong, possibly stronger than a casual listener might guess. Since a good portion of his work involves crunchy, wailing, pitch-bent lead tones – played in tandem with guitarist John Petrucci – it’s easy to mistakenly attribute some of the disc’s keyboard content to 6-string sources. And with several of Jordan’s new toys, the lines get even blurrier. But more on that later.

On Octavarium as well as Dream Theater’s worldwide tour supporting the disc’s release, Jordan’s agile fingers work symbiotically with his meticulously-customized synth programming. Searing lead tones and ethereal choral patches commingle with esoteric strings and ethnic percussion in rapid succession, leaving you befuddled as to how so many sounds can be controlled so effectively from a lone keyboard instrument onstage. “My job is very complicated,” says Jordan. “And I’ve added even more complexity to it because I want to do everything from a single keyboard. Whether I use racks or not, that means a lot of splits and a lot of things placed on different keys and knobs.”

Each composition presents new challenges that Jordan must program around. “‘Panic Attack,’ a new song on the album, starts out with this growling riff that goes E♭, C, low C, then strings come in above it,” he says. “I can’t possibly play the riff I wrote as written and the strings at the same time. You just can’t do it with two hands, so I remapped one of the low notes. I’m actually playing E♭, C, G, and the G is the low C.”

To help him remember the details of his song-specific programs, Jordan attaches a FreeHand Music Pad to his keyboard and uses the touch screen tablet as a cheat sheet. “I use my Music Pad as a little reminder of where sounds are mapped,” he says. “It’s such a wonderful savior. It’s so elegant and clean-looking that nobody really even knows what it is.” When asked what purpose the tablet serves, his answer tends to be mischievous. “Ya know, I look at porn and stuff....”

School Of Rock

In addition to that whole international rock-star thing, Jordan invests much time into music education, a pursuit that resulted from his eccentric, self-motivated musical evolution. “My background is strictly classical,” he says. “I would escape to Juilliard practice rooms and do my secret world of improvising.” Though he was enrolled at Manhattan’s most prestigious music school, Jordan learned much outside the classroom, taking lessons from both his peers and idols. “As I grew up and listened to different types of music, different chords or modes struck my ear and I’d think, ‘Wow, that’s really interesting. What’re they doing?’” From Keith Emerson, Jordan found motivation to learn suspended chords in every inversion and every key. Similarly, a jazz-playing schoolmate inspired an exercise that explores the relationships between sharp-9 and 13th chords via II-V progressions and chromatic passing chords.

Rick Wakeman’s Six Wives of Henry the 8th (A&M) and Patrick Moraz’s work with the band Refugee turned the budding improviser onto the revolutionary sounds of the Minimoog. And thanks to the united gift-giving power of Jordan’s father and uncle, a unit soon landed in his teenaged hands. “When the Moog synth came into my life, my whole focus went into that sound. It was so organic that I could really feel connected with the idea of creating my own sounds. I started developing finger exercises based on different settings of the Moog. I’d take the decay and sustain-time down and then play a scale, for example. If I played legato, it would all be smooth and it wouldn’t re-attack the sound, so it would really stick out if I happened to lift up between the notes.

“The old Minimoog didn’t have a retrigger function, so you had to actually retrigger the envelope with your finger. In that case, I’d play scales, lift up, and leave a little space between the notes. The Minimoog was key to moving my technique to yet another level by connecting it with the sound and technology.”

After years of developing more individual exercises Jordan decided it was time to share some of his technical and harmonic insights. “I started to document them – just keeping a log of everything I came up with,” he says. His exercises found a home first at his Online Conservatory (www.jroc.us), and then in print with Total Keyboard Wizardry (see “Selected Works” at left). Both are excellent resources for musicians at a wide range of experience levels: If you’re looking to increase your dexterity, add to your improvisation toolkit, or just don’t think Hanon’s doing it for you anymore, Jordan’s offerings are well worth the look.

Six Into One, Plus Two

Earlier this year, Jordan sent murmurs through the keyboard world by signing on as the first big-time user of Korg’s OASYS workstation. In fact, he currently has three – two for his road rig and the prototype in his studio. And for Jordan, the choice to dive into the OASYS was a natural one. “My system started small,” he says. “I realized I could get great organs out of the K2600, but it wasn’t really flowing to have rotary simulation going and also really different effects set up in the same patch. So I thought okay, I’m going to have a keyboard and a rack. And then, of course, all of a sudden we’re running a lot of samples, so next thing you know, I’ve got two racks. And over the years, it’s grown.

“I used to be very focused on my Kurzweil,” Jordan continues. “My whole thing is that I’d play one keyboard. I have a rotating stand and I just control the world from that one instrument. Offstage, I was eventually using three K2600 racks and a Triton rack as well. Also, I’d use the Korg Karma, but only because it’s not available as a rack, and I’d have that off to the side.

“I wanted to scale down my system ever since it got really big. So with the OASYS coming out, I was immediately hoping that it could be a great solution for me. I knew that the OASYS had a gigantic ROM in it and I knew that it also had a substantial area for RAM samples and I figured that, being the programmer that I am [and with the help of assistant Bert Baldwin], we could make whatever sounds we needed. And anything we couldn’t make, with the design and the instrument’s parameters, we’d just sample.” Simple, right? “When we got the OASYS, I didn’t even know how it worked. That thing is a monster – I know there are screens I haven’t even seen yet. Apparently it’s a 16-track hard-disc recorder and I’m sure it’s wonderful, but I don’t have time to look. I need to know how to build combinations, assign effects, and sample.

“This process is so crazy – when I fly out [to begin the tour], six instruments have to be taken down to one. We had 28 songs on the list and most of them are ten minutes or longer, so we’ve been just banging through it. The process is getting quicker, though, because we have a lot of our core sounds already built.”

Not only does Dream Theater’s tour mark Jordan’s first professional use of the OASYS, it also introduces two other new musical tools – a lap-steel guitar and a Haken Continuum/Roland V-Synth XT partnership – both of which are featured on the Octavarium’s title track and let the keyboardist scream and soar in ways that get his work even more confused with that of John Petrucci.

‘The Continuum is so flexible and the idea of being able to get to any particular pitch, even if it isn’t a tonal center, is so interesting,” says Jordan. “I wanted it to be a fretless keyboard, meaning I could play a B and slide it to an F#.” Getting the instrument to accomplish his goals took some customization though, and after experimenting with various sound sources and working closely with the Continuum’s designer Lipphold Haken to redefine the controller’s rounding and quantization functions, Jordan was ultimately thrilled with the results. If you won’t get the opportunity to see him wail on the Continuum live, check out the demo he recorded with the instrument: www.Cerlsoundgroup.org/continuum. And check out Keyboard’s review in the Aug. ‘04 issue.

Building The Track

Though his touring rig is tight and efficient, the setup Jordan used to record Octavarium occupied a hefty footprint. “It was like a music store,” he says. “I had all the toys there [in the studio] – a Yamaha Motif a Triton Extreme, a K2600, my computer, my Roland V-Synth, a piano. Unlike when I play live, I just really want to hear something and be able to get there quickly.

Honed through years of collaboration, Dream Theater’s compositional process involves well-defined delegation. “We dive into it as a group,” Jordan says. “John and I write the notes and harmonies, and there’s a lot of interaction and back and forth between us.” Once a solid musical snippet is put together, it finds its place in one of the band’s typically epic compositions. “[Dream Theater drummer] Mike [Portnoy] is like a movie director,” Jordan continues. “He’s a great architect for our music and as soon as you feed him a couple sections, he has five choices for how the piece could be arranged : ‘Okay, we can use that as the C part. We need a pre-chorus. Composers! Write something else!’”

Along with the melodies, counter-melodies, and harmonic and metric progressions he creates, Jordan faces the added challenge of sculpting tonal colors for Dream Theater’s rapidly-evolving songs. “On synthesizers today, there’re so many amazing starting points,” he says. “I’ll call up a sound that’s inspiring to me, a sound that’s in the ballpark. I’ll know that I want to tweak it further, but it gets me the energy to create the part I need.

“At this point with Dream Theater, I have a certain collection of hard, grungy sounds,” he continues. “If we’re in the studio and we’re talking about something really heavy, I’ll go over to my heavy bank of sounds and I’ll start doing it.” Once a general idea is laid out, sonic surgery can begin. “I’ll say, ‘Ya know what? The guitar already has a lot of high frequencies, so I really don’t need that, but I do need a little more percussion; the guitar’s playing a fast line and it sounds really legato, but we want to hear something really attack. I’ll make that layer, set the decay to be exactly what I need, and add a little impact on top. I’m totally into that – the starting points are great, but then everything gets modified, designed to fit the composition and orchestration.”

In preparing to record Octavarium, Jordan also took time enhance his sonic palate with a variety of soft synths: Spectrasonics Atmosphere and Synthogy Ivory, among others, played large roles in the studio experience. “I had my favorite soft synths loaded in to the Muse Receptor, and it was such an awesome way to have easy access to all these unique plug-ins,” he says. “I worked with the guys at Muse on some ideas for the interface that tie all the separate plug-ins into one very playable performance environment It’s designed so I can do all my crazy splitting and layering on it.”

Rawk!

Does virtuosity indeed have a place in a form of music that often prides itself on rawness? “I have a different perspective,” says Jordan. “You have to keep in mind that I’m coming from a classical, Juilliard-trained background, but I think that the better the musician is on an instrument, the more he can effectively express himself. So if somebody’s raw, what does that mean? That some thought you have, you’re not going to be able to play? What if you happen to be thinking of something that’s blazingly fast? Or that has some really amazing, intricate quarter-step bends on the guitar?

“To me, being a great musician means that you can play slower than anybody and if the passage you’re thinking of demands some blistering 128th-notes, you can play it better than anybody else, too. When I practice scales, it’s not just to play fast. My goal as a musician is to be able to play as slow, as fast, as expressively, as melodically, as well as I possibly can.”

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Custom-built, rotating stands let Jordan swivel and move around as he plays, making his performance all the more dynamic.

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A Muse Receptor houses Jordan’s soft-synths and a Roland V-Synth XT provides sounds for his Continuum.

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Jordan’s mighty, heavily-programmed Korg OASYS, complete with the FreeHand Music Pad for reference (or porn...).

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Guitar envy? Not when you can bend, slide, and distort on a lap steel and Haken Continuum controller like Jordan does. A set of Roland PK-5A pedals let him trigger chords on the OASYS while his hands are otherwise occupied.

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Wherever Jordan faces while jamming on the OASYS, he’s got sustain pedals and Boss FS-5U foot-switches ready for action.

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What was Jordan’s worst gear nightmare?

It was the first year of my being part of Dream Theater and it was a pretty big show. It was during the song “Home,” which uses this electric sitar sound; it’s a really big keyboard feature. Every time I went to use the sitar, there was this [Makes crunchy static sound.] sound that I just couldn’t get rid of. It was coming from one of the Kurzweil racks and I didn’t know what to do, because it was buried in the patches and different MIDI channels. And I couldn’t turn off the rack because it was supplying most of the sounds I was playing.

You know that feeling of just wanting to bury your head in the sand? That was really, really, really bad.

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Jordan’s tip for touring

Don’t go! [Laughs]