SARAH DECOURCY Producing Kylie’s X2008 European Tour Kylie Minogue’s hugely successful X2008 tour offered fans the chance to experience a fresh take on old favourites as well as enjoy her very latest material. Linking it all together, at the heart of the sound production, is a collection of Korg’s most coveted sound-generation and performance tools, including the 88-note weighted-keyboard version of the M3 workstation, MicroKorg and RADIAS synthesizers, plus the latest KAOSS Pad processor. Thomas James interviews Musical Director and keyboard player, Sarah deCourcy, to find out more. Kylie is just about as successful as it’s possible to become in the music industry. In a career spanning more than two decades, she has gone from daytime soap-star to dance music diva, delivering scintillating live performances. Opening in Paris on May 6th, her 53-date X2008 tour visited all the major European cities, before completing its run in London’s O2 arena at the start of August. Fresh, exhilarating and innovative was what Minogue wanted her shows to be, and she achieved this by creating new arrangements of classic crowd-pleasers, using state-of-the-art stage lighting and video projection technology, and staging plenty of high-energy dancing. Musical Director, Sarah deCourcy, was given the tricky task of selecting equipment capable of recreate the diverse palette of sounds the live set demanded, and it was the Korg range she chose to do it all!
She explains what’s doing what. “I’m using the most recent version of the KAOSS pad as an audio filter system, sending quite a few samples to it and processing them in real-time; I’m not just taking a sample and playing it as a sample. Quite a lot of the dance tracks make use of filters and we’ve found that creating those effects live gives tracks a sort of DJ feel, so the KAOSS pad is very useful in allowing us to do that. “I’m also using some of the KAOSS effects, like the touch delay, which is really handy because you can just tap out the BPM live to the exact tempo and get a good little thing going. It’s really useful for little segue moments. “The M3 is good for getting warm string sounds, and a lot of the time I am using it for piano because it has a weighted keyboard. Some of the really rich piano ballads are coming from there, but there are also a couple of songs where I am playing deep, synth bass sounds on the M3. “Most of the heavy synthesizer sounds are from the RADIAS. There’s a song called ‘Nudity’ which has a sort of Moog-style bass sound. Everyone thinks that’s on a backing track but I’m playing that live. I’ve found the perfect fat sound in the RADIAS, which just sounds amazing. “I’m only using one sample from a record, every other sound I’ve recreated using the Korg instruments. You can do so much tweaking and changing of sounds with the RADIAS, for instance. You can manipulate a sound until it’s exactly what you need, save to memory, and that’s your sound! “Of the foot pedals, one of them connects to the M3 and controls a filter. For example, I use it to filter a piano sound in ‘Wow’. It basically filters the sound out to nothing at one extreme, and then to a really bright, high-pass, sound at the other – which is what we need. Another one is a volume pedal for the RADIAS and then the other two are just standard sustain pedals – so there’s enough going on! If I can’t control the filter because my foot is on another pedal then I can still use the KAOSS pad.” Rob Davis, producer of one of Kylie’s biggest hits, ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’, created much of that track using nothing more than a Korg Triton workstation. Sarah also owns a Triton but managed to emulate its parts using the rest of her gear. “I’m using all of my keyboards on that song, but the Triton has been left at home because I’ve not got enough fingers to play that as well as everything else! I considered taking it on the road but the M3 has got a lot of the Triton sounds inside so I decided to take that and the RADIAS, which is more up to date and an amazing instrument because it’s got everything. “The version of ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’, which we are doing in the show, has got the synthesized strings riff from New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ playing over the top, and I actually found almost the same sound in the RADIAS. The song also includes the bleepy riff as well and I found the sound for that in the M3. “I created some sounds using the MicroKorg, which works really well in that track. I was going to use its vocoder too – because there’s a lot of vocoder stuff going on – but we ended up just using the effect on the backing track because there were complications with sound interference from what’s happening on the stage. So that didn’t work out, but I do have the goose-neck mic with me to use for fun!”
“Kylie has had the same band for a long time but this setup is brand new. I auditioned players from all over the world so we have a Canadian guitarist, and American/Finnish bass player and an Australian saxophonist. It was my job to run all the rehearsals and make sure everyone was playing the right parts. If it wasn’t working I had to come up with ways of making it work. “Before the rehearsals started there was a lot of pre-production stuff to do. I had to roughly program all the sounds into my keyboards and then we adapted it as we went on. There were a lot of changes as we worked out what which was the best way for the band to perform the tracks. We just kept rehearsing for six weeks until it was all in the brain. I put the music together with a guy called Steve Anderson, who has been looking after Kylie, musically, for about eight years. We decided the order of the songs and how we were going to do them. Sometimes we’d come up with arrangement ideas together, other times I’d put together a sort of semi-remix version of a track which was pretty close to the original but with a few parts jiggled about. We planned it all with William Baker, the creative director. He’d say ‘Visually, I want this kind of vibe,’ and from that I’d suggest what we could do musically to suit his idea.” “There is a lot of full-on dancing and the music has to go with the choreography. During rehearsals the dancers were in the studio opposite us so there was a lot of me running across and saying, ‘OK, show me what’s going on at this point.’ We had get the timing right so I’d be asking ‘at this minute, what are you doing?’ and then I’d run it though with the band and record our rehearsal so that the dancers could use it for reference." “Kylie’s totally involved from the start,” adds Sarah. “She knows what she wants and what works for her as far as how much she’s gong to dance and how much she’s going to sing. The range of the songs is very important and she knows what she can do vocally.”
“In rehearsals I was telling everyone not to get used to looking at each other because we would be about 60 feet apart with dancers in between,” laughs Sarah. “There’s a click running in our ears throughout every track and that helps keep everybody in the loop. Usually the start of the song is four or eight clicks in. I start the show, stop and start the songs and control the click.” Although some of the songs are completely live, others include a certain amount of pre-sequenced material. “It’s kind of 50/50,” Sarah reckons. “On some of the dance stuff synthesizer layers will be pre-recorded because I’m playing piano and other parts and literally cannot play the string part as well, so that will be running with the click.
“The on-board module is not very good,” she reveals, “so we’re actually running a really long MIDI lead from my M3 on the riser, all the way under the stage up to the piano. I programmed in the perfect sound in the M3, so it’s nice and warm with just a touch of reverb. We also have a Korg SP250 digital piano right under the stage for use as backup if the long MIDI lead goes down!” It’s clear that the X2008 tour owes its success to a lot of hard work and preparation by a lot of talented and creative people. “There’s never a dull moment!” laughs Sarah, referring to the complicated rehearsals, but it also somehow seems to nicely sum up the show too.
It Will Be Alright On The Night! “We did pre-production with the stage setup in Wakefield, but we didn’t get to rehearse as much as we’d have liked,” admits Sarah. “In fact, we only ran the show from start to finish once in the two weeks we were there. Usually you run it about three times a day for six days. It was like, ‘I can’t believe we are opening in Paris tonight!’ The stage lights in the floor are pretty full-on too and make you feel like the whole platform is moving! It took a lot of getting used to. “So it was all nervous energy and took us about a week to settle in, but then Kylie started having the time of her life. She absolutely loves it! The dates we did in Istanbul and Bulgaria were the first full show she’s done outdoors. She thought it was amazing, playing in the heat with a view of the ocean.”
Sarah deCourcy
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