I'll happily support Weaver & Argent - the former was arguably a better fit for Strawbs than RW had been & helped to make Grave New World a true classic ; whilst I saw the latter with Zombies a few weeks ago and he is still fantastic.
I'll happily support Weaver & Argent - the former was arguably a better fit for Strawbs than RW had been & helped to make Grave New World a true classic ; whilst I saw the latter with Zombies a few weeks ago and he is still fantastic.
Always thought Peter Jennings from Cressida was a great organ player with beautiful tones.Quite similar in style to Rod Argent.
Dave Stewart was a great organ stylist, but i never liked his synth or electric piano playing anywhere near as much.It often leaned towards a muzak'esque jazz-lite approach...the electric piano on stuff like yes no interlude and underdub, or throughout much of the first album is nowhere near as creative or stylistically powerful as his organ playing on those albums, or with Egg, Khan etc
Rick Wakeman
Keith Emerson
Patrick Moraz
Tony Banks
Peter Bardens
Just missing the boat:
Rick Wright
Tony Kaye
Kerry Minnear
Hugh Banton
Jon Lord (not really prog but wanted to mention him anyway)
Not because of the ELO thread, but I was always partial to Richard Tandy's playing. The guy had both Prog Chops ( "Daybreaker" and "Poker" for example) and, like many Prog keyboard players, blended Classical in as well, but also had pop and R&B chops which is something I never heard Emerson or Wakeman do (this, of course, is not saying that they couldn't ). Like Emerson, he liked technology and used it as it became available.
One of the things I like about Tandy ( besides insisting to use a Mellotron live which annoyed the stage-hands who would have to align the tape-heads every concert) is the Stomp Box board he used in conjunction with his Wurlitzer. He literally made the Wurlitzer into a pseudo-synth by intellgent use of flangers, distortions, envelope followers, choruses, and delays. I love the analog-synth-style filter sweeps he gets on cuts from "On The Third Day" or on "Eldorado" which -at first - sounds like a polyphonic analog synth (not available at that time) but is actually the Wurlitzer with a wide Flanger setting
Last edited by klothos; 07-06-2013 at 02:15 PM.
Did Tandy ever play Mellotron on any of the studio albums, or just live?
Studio as well, although - with the Munich Symphony Orchestra, real choir, and all the other layers of over-production in a typical late 70s ELO song - I can't pick out where he uses it. Some of the albums from the late 70s, like "Out of The Blue", ELO liked to list everything that they used in the liner notes to make an album. Tandy played a Mellotron M400
EDIT: This is an excerpt I just read from a Mellotron site:
"Mellotron-spotting on ELO albums is a futile activity, to be honest. Despite Richard Tandy's instrumental credits on both these albums, I'm absolutely assured that there's none to be heard. A correspondent of mine (hi Colin) used to know Hugh McDowell, one of the band's two cellists, who confirmed that not only is all the choir/strings work on the albums real, but the band's three-piece string section rarely featured, either. In fact, the album credits look far more like the band's stage setup than studio (what, they used their stage PA for recording?), so those two mentions of a 'Mellotron 400' can effectively be discounted."
I guess this answers the question for both of us and affirms what I just said in my post above . However, there are some live albums where it can most certainly be heard
Last edited by klothos; 07-06-2013 at 03:58 PM.
1) Rick Wakeman
2) Keith Emerson
3) Peter Bardens
4) tony Banks
5) Kerry Minnear
Don Cassidy
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Mark
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Joey
1. Les Dawson
2. Reg Varney
3. Russ Conway
4. Mrs Mills
5. Donald Swann
Surprised no one has mentioned Bobby Crush & Lieutenant Pigeon !
second 5:
Don Shinn
Kips Brown
Bob Jackson
Leary Hasson
Terry Howells
Honorable Mention should go to-
Eddie Spence (Strange Days)
Steve Milliner (Aardvark)
"and what music unites, man should not take apart"-Helmut Koellen
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