Emerson does unthinkable to his moog.
Emerson does unthinkable to his moog.
I going to assume that it's a moog synthesizer, maybe it's a mellotron. What's interesting though, is that I opened this live performance to play in the background and randomly noticed what Keith was doing to that poor instrument.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u4HgJatKOY&t=891s (14:51) he jumped behind it and started tickling moogs innards, which resulted in a terrifying sound.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u4HgJatKOY&t=1182s (19:42) is just violent... Keith jumped on it's keyboard and started rocking it.
Jokes aside. ELP lives are quite interesting. There are these strange moments, improvisations, Lake might slide in a quatrain from Epitaph. In Karn Evil 9 there is a computer with wings.
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Getting to talk about ELP and other prog is definitely one of the things I miss from the old site.
The keyboard you’re seeing him abuse is a Hammond L-100. It’s a type of tonewheel organ, meaning it actually has a set of mechanically spinning discs inside that generate the sounds of each note. It’s a technology that dates back to the 1930s when it wasn’t economical to make tones for an entire keyboard from electronic circuits. So when you see him fiddling with the switch and making that long, dipping howl, he’s actually switching off and on the motor driving the tonewheels making them slow down and speed back up again.
The organ also incorporates a spring reverb, which is another electromechanical solution from the pre-digital world. The sound is actually driven through a set of physical springs inside the organ, and the wiggling of the springs results in a reverb-like sound in the final output. That crashing sound you hear when he’s throwing it on the ground and putting his hands in the back of it is the sound of those springs being physically knocked around and moved way outside the range of what they’d usually see from just audio signal.
That organ’s job was to get beat up every night on stage. The keyboard tech would fix it up every time and replace whatever was broken. You’ll even see where it’s been repaired and reinforced with steel plates. On the other side he had a Hammond C3, which was a much nicer tonewheel organ that didn’t get as abused.
That computer with wings at the end of Karn Evil 9? That thing is the Moog synthesizer.
Thanks, very interesting details! I watched newer live recording, in better quality, today and it definitely looks like that Hammond seen a lot in it's life.
Keyboards seem very confusing to me, they sound very close to each other. Eg. Fire Fortellinger has a lengthly list of keyboards, but I am not able to tell most of them apart. So that's very nice to find out something new about them.Cool, thanks for mentioning that album. I hadn’t heard of him before. Definitely some Keith Emerson influence in his style.
By all means, dig deep into those instruments at your own pace.
Especially in the digital age, lots of people think of MIDI controllers or big do-it-all workstations when they think of keyboards or just think of them as instruments that imitate other instruments. But there are tons of unique, distinct sounds that only certain keyboards can make, especially among acoustic and electromechanical keyboards like the ones on Fire Fortellinger.