WESTENDERS - THE KORG M3 IS PROVING TO BE A BIT HIT IN THE WEST END

The Korg M3 is proving to be a big hit in the West End. Cliff Douse discovers that it has already been featured in Grease, Never Forget and Footloose...

Grease The Musical uses the Korg M3 - Watch video

Chris Egan is a successful orchestrator and musical arranger, working on music for TV, film and theatre. His company, Vivace, has produced the music on a number of popular West End musicals including Grease, Footloose and the Take That musical, Never Forget. Chris works in close collaboration with Trystan Francis, Vivace’s lead programmer and designer, who creates all of the keyboard and synthesizer sounds for the musicals on a Korg M3.

“Trystan has to make all of the sounds I want from scratch,” explains Chris. “I’ll send him the scored music and then we’ll discuss the sounds needed for the piece. For example, I might say that I need a lush electric piano with a bit of sparkle to it, a nice sustain and maybe a bit of tremolo. On other occasions I’ll play him an original recording and point out specific sounds that need to be recreated. An average piece in the Take That show has about 20 to 30 keyboard patches and sounds, which works out at around 600 patches for the whole musical. And the M3 has done the job beautifully.”

“It’s great”, agrees Trystan. “I’ve always had a little bit of a problem constructing patches on waveform-based synths in the past, but I certainly had no problems finding very specific sounds for the Take That show on the M3”

“We’ve tried various different rigs in the past but always found that they couldn’t do everything we wanted. So the M3 turned out to be a godsend, really, because it coped with everything we threw at it. Even little things like the 16 Programs per Combi feature were fantastic because they enabled me to set up complete templates for Grease. In that show there’s a lot of brass and strings, so I used Programs 9 to 14 to create generic brass and string sections, which I just left in the background, turning them on and off when needed. I’d use Programs 1 to 8 for the ‘regular’ instrumentation.”

Trystan is also impressed with the fact that you can disable any of the M3’s features that you don’t need for a particular live performance: “We had problems in the past with other keyboards, when people pressed buttons and strange things started happening during shows,” he says. “Arpeggiators and patch finders were suddenly turned on when sheet music fell off a stand and hit a button - so being able to disable all of those things when you don’t need them is fantastic. I also like the fact that the M3 has seven user banks of 127 programs that are completely blank which you can write your own programs into, without writing over any original sounds. Having all of that user space without running the risk of overwriting something has been absolutely brilliant.

A host of effects
“Another great feature is the internal effects routing. On the Roland Fantom X8, for example, you’ve got one or two effects that you can use on your sound and that’s it. But on the M3 you’ve got five. You can also route the effects through each other non-consecutively. I’ve been able to import complex effects routings from other patches that I’ve used. There are lots of useful onboard effects as well, and within those effects there are lots of permutations - it’ll do anything, really.” So how is the M3 used in conjunction with the West End show band in Grease? “For Grease we’re using two keyboard players with M3s, alongside a trumpet player, a saxophone player, a drummer, bassist and guitarist,” says Chris. “The M3s do the pianos, organs, strings, pads, effects and other versatile instrumentation. With the Take That musical, Never Forget, it’s more complicated and we’re using the M3s closer to their full capacity, where we have three keyboard players, drums, bass, guitar and percussion. While Grease has quite a traditional sound, Never Forget has all of those synth-based Take That sounds. Take the lead synth on Pray, for example - that’s a very iconic sound, so we had to make it sound just like it does on the recording. The M3 coped fantastically.

“We took a huge leap of faith with the M3s because instead of having our usual six weeks to program a show we only had two. Luckily, they behaved flawlessly – they were intuitive and didn’t crash once. To be honest, if they hadn’t worked, there wasn’t really a Plan B! I have to admit this is the first time I’ve been properly excited about a keyboard in more than a decade. The sonic quality and the action is fantastic. I’m looking at replacing all of my studio’s master keyboards with M3s.'