Like most things, music goes incycles. Styles go in and out, andit’s the same for the gear too.All those analogue keyboards we sold offin the late ’80s in favour of new digitalgear are now making a comeback, not astenth-hand hardware, but in VST form.However, whereas these old classics weredesigned specifically for live use, as well asfor use in the studio, you can’t say thesame for software running on a PC or Mac.In fact, it would be hard to think ofanything less suited to the rigours of anon-the-road lifestyle than a delicatecomputer stuffed to the gills withpotentially problematic operating systems,audio drivers and application software. But itwould be such a shame if gigging musicianswere unable to take advantage of all theselovely emulations of old gear. Surely there’sa solution?

There is — but before coming to that, I’dlike to describe exactly why I’m so keen touse multiple VSTis on stage. First, we need totravel back to 1982…

Setting the sceneI started my career as a professional keyboardplayer using a Farfisa Compact Duo organ,a Yamaha CS15 monosynth and a Mellotron,although what I really craved wasa Hammond C3, a Minimoog and a Mellotron.Unfortunately, production of the Minimooghad ceased a few years earlier, so I eventually

May 200512

settled for a Sequential Circuits Pro-One, andadded a Roland Jupiter 8 and a Hammondimpersonator in the shape of a Korg CX3organ.With four reasonably manageablekeyboards at my disposal I was ready torecord and tour the first Marillion album.

During the recording of our first album,Script for a Jester’s Tear, I was encouraged byone of the A&R people at EMI to shell outaround £5000 for an Emu Emulator sampler.Clearly this guy wasn’t on the same planet asthe rest of us. At today’s prices, a newEmulator would cost over £25,000.Nevertheless, I bought one, followed a fewmonths later by a PPG Wave 2.2.Those werethe days! Looking back, the early 1980s wasa golden age for keyboards, and for keyboard

manufacturers. If you wanted an organ sound,you reached for the organ. If you neededa piano, you reached for the piano. Every timewe recorded a new album I bought one ortwo new keyboards, and when we went ontour I added them to the others.Within fiveyears my rig was stacked high on three sidesof a square and, as far as I was concerned,this was cool. Understandably, my keyboardtech wasn’t as happy!

The MIDI yearsIf things had continued as they were I’deventually have needed my own 32-ton truckto move the keyboards from gig to gig, butthe turning point was the appearance of MIDI.Layering sounds from two dissimilar but

Feature

SOUND ON SOUND LIVE

Mark KellyUsing VST instruments live

In an amazing quarter ofa century of giggingwith Marillion,keyboardist Mark Kellyhas seen musictechnology changealmost beyondrecognition. His latestsolution to keyboards onstage is a computerrunning Brainspawn’sinnovative Fortesoftware, which allowsVSTis to go live...

Taking VST instrumentson stage

Marillion’s Mark Kelly •Using Brainspawn’s Forte software

linked keyboards, such as a Yamaha DX7 anda Roland Juno 106 was new and exciting,although I still needed both pieces ofhardware at my disposal to be able to do it.But rather than continuing to add morekeyboards to the rig, I started to make sometough choices, replacing older keyboards asI bought newer ones.When I acquired aRoland D50, the Juno had to go. Next, theDX7 disappeared in favour of a tiny TX7module and the Jupiter 8 made way for arackmount MKS80 Super Jupiter.

As the 1980s rolled on, MIDI significantlyaltered the way that I — and most othermulti-keyboard players — approachedcreating sounds on stage. I had becomeheartily fed up with playing with one handand trying to stuff a floppy disk intoa sampler with the other, while at the sametime trying to select the next patch onsomething else, all in time for the chorus.Theprogrammability of my new MIDI controllerkeyboard (a Roland MKB1000) was the key.This gave me control over my growing rack ofmodules, and it enabled me to layer someinteresting sounds, while reducing thenumber of keyboards on stage. I particularlyliked the new approach of programming thechanges in the songs in advance andstepping on a footswitch to switch patchesduring the show. For once, my keyboard techand I were happy simultaneously.

Nevertheless, I soon became frustratedwith the MKB1000. I needed a more powerfulMIDI patchbay and router, so a friend offeredto write a program to my specification, to runon an Atari ST computer. In the monthsleading up to our next tour, the softwareseemed to be doing everything I wanted, sowith a few final tweaks I took it on tour.Disaster! It started to crash in a dramatic andembarrassing fashion, and I was soon underpressure to replace it. I quickly bought aprogrammable MIDI patchbay and saidgoodbye to the Atari.

As each album came and went, so did thekeyboards. But far from finding life gettingeasier, I was becoming buried, as the bandexpected me to recreate ever-more complexkeyboard arrangements live.We wanted to beable to reproduce the sound of our CDs onstage, without resorting to tapes or backingtracks. In 1994 it took me no less than sixweeks to program my keyboards and samplersin an effort to reproduce both the analoguesounds of our early material and thecomplicated, modern layers of sound on thethen-current album, Brave. It was time foranother new approach.

The introduction of VSTisIn 1995 we began to record our albums at ourown studio in Buckinghamshire, initially using

Tascam DA88s, but later upgrading to a ProTools system with a Logic front end.We allhave Logic at home so, for the first time, theact of recording became something we wereable to do independently from one another,and in our own time. I really enjoyed workingin this way, and it gave me the time and thecreative freedom to start experimenting with

sounds in ways that were previouslyimpossible.This was when I started tobecome interested in soft synths. I realisedthat their scope was enormous: from simplerecreations of my old Minimoog andMellotron, to the DX7 and PPG that I had usedfor many years, and way beyond, they could(almost) do it all. Suddenly I had a huge

13May 2005 SOUND ON SOUND LIVE

Feature by Mark KellyPhotographs by Joe del Tufo, Studio MInfo

For those who haven’t a clue who Marillion are, hereare a few of the bits I can remember from the last25 years…

The band was formed in 1979 by guitarist SteveRothery and drummer Mick Pointer. I joined twoyears later, by which time vocalist Fish was frontingthe band and doing his best to secure gigs in everypub, club and student union bar that would have us.Pete Trewavas (bass) joined a few months afterI did, and the five of us spent the next 18 monthsslogging around London and the South East ofEngland. In 1982, a dozen sold-out nights at thelegendary Marquee club forced the record labels torecognise that we might have a future.

We struck a deal with EMI, and our first album,Script For A Jester’s Tear (1983) sold well in the UK.Nevertheless, we parted company with Mick Pointerat the end of the first tour and former SteveHackett drummer Ian Mosley joined us in 1984 forour ‘difficult second album’, Fugazi. This didn’t sell aswell as Script, so we were packed off to Berlin (tokeep costs down), to record Misplaced Childhood, in1985. This was a turning point for the band, becausethe first single from the album, ‘Kayleigh’, wasa huge hit all over Europe. We were No. 1 in manycountries, and everyone’s favourite for 15 minutes.But despite appearances, all was not happy onplanet Marillion and, following the tour thatsupported 1987’s Clutching AtStraws, Fish quit the band to pursuea solo career. After six months ofsearching, we found a replacementvocalist in Steve Hogarth. Lookingback, it seems we spent a couple ofalbums settling down with our newline-up, at the same time movingaway from our old sound with thealbums Season’s End (1989), andHolidays In Eden (1991).

Two of our best albums were to follow. Brave(1994) proved hugely popular with our fans, and wefollowed this soon after with Afraid Of Sunlight(1995). Our fans felt that we were on great form, butEMI nevertheless ‘let us go’. We then signeda three-album deal with an independent label, but

began to regret it almost immediately, as the labelwould spend little on promotion, counting on ourloyal fans to seek out our work. This resulted inslowly diminishing sales and what we considered tobe a bleak future for the band.

In 1997, I posted a message on the Internet,informing our US fans that there would be noAmerican tour to support our next album, simplybecause we couldn’t afford to lose any more moneytouring North America. In response, a fan instigateda whip-round on the Marillion mailing list. Theyraised $60,000 and made it possible for us to tourafter all. This woke us up to the potential of theInternet, and we made plans to set ourselves freefrom our record label. Having released two of thethree contracted albums, we had one more album tomake under the existing deal and we called itMarillion.com (1999) to advertise our newly-launchedweb-site and record label.

This was when we also dreamed up the idea ofasking our fans to pre-order and pay for therecording costs of our next album, some 12 monthsin advance of its release. It was a revolutionaryconcept and it hit the headlines in 2001.Astonishingly, over 12,000 of our fans pre-orderedand we struck a deal with EMI to market theresulting album, Anoraknophobia, in the shops. We

launched a similar campaign to fund ourmost recent release, Marbles, but thistime all the money raised (£350,000)went into the campaign fund topromote the album. It worked. In April2004, we had our first top 10 hit since1987 with ‘You’re Gone’ (which reachedNo. 7) and followed it with ‘Don’t HurtYourself’, which reached No. 16 in thesummer. Some DJs accused us of

cheating because we used the internet toencourage our fans to go out and buy the records.I couldn’t quite understand why that was cheating.Oh well…

If you want to decide about Marillion for yourself,you can hear what we do by visiting our web site,www.marillion.com. We’ll even send you a free CD,Crash Course, to introduce you to our music.

Marillion backgrounder

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The whole band during the Philadelphia leg of their recent US tour.

May 200514

keyboard rig at my disposal, but it weighednext to nothing.

I was left with a dilemma. For the first time,I had access to all the sounds I wantedwithout resorting to that 32-ton truck. Butthe means for running them — and, inparticular, running lots of them at the sametime — was far from suitable for stage use.Of course, many VST instruments are capableof running as stand-alone applications, and itwould have been easy to tuck awaya portable PC somewhere on stage, butI found that running and controlling morethan one of these at a time was problematic.I needed a program that was capable ofmanaging all the audio and MIDI routing formy multiple VST instruments.

I started to experiment with Steinberg’sV-Stack. This allowed me to play multiple VSTinstruments simultaneously, but it wasn’t ableto store patch and routing settings for recallduring a gig, so it was quite unsuitable forwhat I needed. At this point, I seemed tohave hit a brick wall, but I couldn’t believethat I was unique in my needs, so I spenta few days searching the Internet anddownloading various bits of shareware andfreeware, with no luck. I was close toresigning myself to sampling the sounds I’dcreated on my soft synths and taking my oldhardware rig back on the road, but whenI was on the point of giving up I came acrossBrainspawn, a small US software company,and their Forte Live Performance Workstation(only available from www.brainspawn.com).I can’t say that I was too inspired when I readon the web site that the staff “spend aninordinate amount of time relaxing in a hottub, and maybe, just maybe, release a productor two”, but I downloaded the demo to see ifForte would do what I needed. Pretty soonI realised that they spent less time in the tubthan they claimed. Forte seemed to be justwhat I was looking for. [Ed: Forte has alsobeen used in the Open Labs Neko instrument,reviewed in Sound On Sound January 2005.]

Forte on the roadDespite my horrific experiences with the AtariST, I prepared yet again to take a computeron the road. Once I had determined that thiswas the way forward, I decided to build myown rackmount computer, so that I could beconfident that it would be powerful andreliable enough for touring. In the end, I builttwo: one for regular use, and the other asa permanent backup. Inevitably, I neededa high specification to handle the number ofVSTs that I wanted to run simultaneously, soI chose a motherboard with a 3.2GHz P4processor and 3GB of RAM.This specificationwould easily allow Forte to host and run 18VST instruments through six stereo busses,which would be adequate… for now.

The user interface of Forte is an on-screenrepresentation of a rack of modules, referred

to as a ‘rack file’. There are various choices ofskins, none of which look great, but beneaththis unappealing exterior Forte has a set offeatures specifically designed for live use.

Before taking Forte on stage, you create asmany ‘scenes’ as you need to represent yoursongs or, if they are complex enough torequire this, parts of songs. Forte scenes arereminiscent of automated mixer scenes: theygive you the ability to recall an entire setupwith a simple press of a button or footpedal.A scene change can do a number of things toyour rack: change the settings and sounds oneach VST plug-in, alter your MIDI routing andfiltering, modify tempo for sync’d effects, andchange a VST instrument’s audio-bussassignment. Furthermore, it can do all of thisfrom a single MIDIprogram change.Thisallows you to set upa complete set list ofscenes, each namedafter a song or a partof a song, and runthrough them withlittle or no interactionwith the computer onstage.You can evenconfigure Forte to startup when Windowsloads, automatically

loading and selecting the first rack file andscene you need. So by simply turning on thePC you can be ready to play the first song inyour set. This was exactly what I was after:there’s no need for a keyboard, mouse, oreven a display, which is something that I waskeen to avoid, because I want to look like amusician on stage, not a computer geek.

Forte has a very simple but useful featurecalled Sceneview.This is a full-screen,high-contrast display of the scene list,displayed in a huge font so that you can readit in the most adverse conditions. Even on thetiny monitor that I use on stage (see ‘MoreAbout Monitors’ box), I can see the previousscene, the current one and the next one. It’slike my own personal prompter, letting me

Feature

SOUND ON SOUND LIVE

Mark KellyUsing VST instruments live

»

Forte 1.5 showing Mark’s rack file from the Marbles tour.

Forte’s Scene View, offeringon‡stage prompts for theband’s set.

know what’s coming next so that I canprepare for the next song, or for the nextsection in the current one. If you need moreinfo to be displayed, you can loada background JPEG image for each scene,with lyrics and prompts, or a picture of yourgirlfriend if that’s what you need to get youthrough the gig!

In addition to all the above, Forte offersextensive MIDI translation features.You canconfigure it to re-map and filter channels,filter keys by range, transpose notes andre-map MIDI controllers. Should you need todo so, you can do this independently forevery VSTi in the rack and every MIDI inputport. To top it all off, you can havea completely different MIDI translation foreach scene.This is amazingly flexible, andmakes it possible to configure and controlsoft synths in ways that would be all butimpossible using traditional keyboards andequipment. Another useful touch is Togglemode, with which you can configure a MIDIpedal to toggle a VST parameter on and off.I use this primarily for speeding up andslowing down the rotary speaker effectwithin Native Instruments’ B4 organ, but thereare many other uses for it.

On stageOnce I got to grips with Forte, I found ita dream to program, although it crasheda number of times while I was settingeverything up.The guys at Brainspawnreassured me that it would be morevulnerable to crashes during the programmingstage, because of the way in which differentsoftware developers implement the VSTstandard.This can be ‘loose’, to say the least.

By this time I had also become comfortablewith computer-based samplers, so I ditchedmy Akai S6000 for Steinberg’s Halion, of whichI have three copies running simultaneously onstage, all hosted by Forte. One of theseprovides sampled instruments such as pianos,flutes and so on; one provides sound effects;and the third is dedicated to loops. I was alsoable to bring my Minimoog out of retirementin the shape of Arturia’s VST soft synth, andI have two copies of this running: one for meto play the widdly-widdly bits and the secondcontrolled by MIDI bass pedals played by Pete,our bass player. Of course, Pete isn’t limited toplaying Moog Taurus bass-pedal sounds(although there are lots of these during thetwo hour gig), so — taking advantage ofForte’s MIDI routing — I have configuredeverything so that he can use the pedals totrigger plenty of samples throughout the set.This simultaneously takes some of the loadoff me and keeps him out of trouble!

Nevertheless, none of this would be ofmuch use if I had to mix everything ‘live’within the computer. I could balanceeverything perfectly in rehearsals, but thatwould be no guarantee that things wouldn’t

need tweaking at each venue. Happily, this isno problem at all in practice. Using Forte’saudio-routing capabilities, I can direct thestereo output from each ‘soft’ instrument toa different pair of outputs on my Delta 1010soundcard, and from there on to separatestereo pairs on my Yamaha 01V digital mixingdesk.This has the added benefit of allowingme to use the 01V’s on-board reverb ratherthan a power-hungry PC plug-in. Let’s face it,I don’t want to drop out of real time in themiddle of one of the loud bits!

Once everything was configured, thesystem proved completely reliable. Duringa 43-date European tour, followed by a further

15 dates in North America, neither the PC,Forte nor any of the VSTis crashed once.Thismeans that I never saw Forte’s safety feature.Called Advanced Performance Recovery, thisis a separate Windows application thatmonitors Forte’s health by listening for a signalfrom it every few seconds. If APR stopsdetecting this signal, it will forcibly kill Forte (ifit still exists in a running state) and restart itwith the last rack and scene it was using.

From version 1.4 to version 1.5…The Marbles tour, in 2004, was performedusing Forte 1.4. However, as a result of severalconversations and a visit from the Brainspawn

15May 2005 SOUND ON SOUND LIVE

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In truth, the idea of not having a monitor on stageis too scary for me, so I have two of them tuckedaway, although you’d never know that if I didn’t tellyou about them.

The first is a seven-inch LCD mounted on the sideof one of my keyboards. This allows me to see which

scene is active, and read which one is coming next.However, this display isn’t big enough to edit scenesor to make changes on the fly, so I also have a largeflat-panel display placed out of view for soundchecktweaks, or just in case an emergency crops upduring the gig.

More about monitors

This view of Mark on stage from the side shows his flat-panel ‘safety’ monitor, tucked away at floor level but stillavailable for visual feedback if anything needs tweaking mid-show. Photo by Michiel Koolen.

May 200516

guys (who came to see our show in Chicago),there is now Forte version 1.5, which offersmany enhancements over the previousversion.

The most obvious new feature is thatscenes can now be organised into set lists.Each scene is considered part of a song,which is part of a set list.You can re-ordersongs in the list very easily, and Forte will thenshift the scenes around automatically for you.Even if you have a song with 10 scenes ormore, everything will stay in the correct order.You can have more than one set list in therack file, too, although only one can be activeat a time. In the past, I would always protestwhen the rest of the band suggestedlast-minute changes to the running order.Depending upon the equipment used bya band, changes of this nature can be trivialfor a singer or drummer, and at leastmanageable for guitarists and bass players,but they are a technical nightmare if you’retrying to reconfigure something with thecomplexity of my rig.With Forte 1.5, I canadapt much more easily to last-minute crises.

One of the few difficulties thatI encountered with Forte 1.4 was that itre-loaded the patches in every VSTi when itchanged scene. Since some VSTis (particularlysamplers) can take a long time to load, thiscould have been a real problem on stage.I managed to find ways to work around this,but I found that these also negated some ofthe power of the system. In the end, I triedside-stepping the problem by selectingdifferent MIDI channels for changing patchesas I used to play them. But even this wasn’t acomplete solution. For example, Atmosphere,my VSTi of choice for strings, is unable to

respond to different channels for notes andpatch changes. And, since this was one of thepackages that was slow to change patches, Iended up with six copies of it runningsimultaneously, all with different patchesselected.

Happily, none of this is necessary usingForte 1.5, because it’s now possible to set upeach VST’s response to each scene change.This means that a given package will onlyload a patch at a scene change if the new

scene requires a new sound.What’s more,I can now send MIDI program changes to eachVSTi at a scene change, so instead of loadingnew patches I can, for example, pre-loadeverything into the samplers and switchbetween patches rather than loading newones. Another huge benefit is that scenechanges can be much smoother and can beplaced anywhere with a song, because if nochange is being made to a given VSTi, youcan sustain notes over the scene change…something that was not previously possible.

MIDI filtering is also more powerful inversion 1.5.You can re-map a single incomingMIDI channel to several layers on the sameinstrument (in 1.4 you could layer across VSTisbut not within a single instrument), each with

independent key filtering,transpose and controllerre-mapping. Additionally,you can now mapincoming MIDI controllersto several layers, eachcontrolling differentparameters. For instance,you could map a knobsending CC11 to alterseveral parameters ona VSTi simultaneously, andeven make someparameters react inverselyby setting up an inversescale where the minimum

value is 127 and the maximum is 0.What’smore, Forte 1.5 allows you to use MIDIcontrollers to start and stop VSTi arpeggiatorsand other tempo-synchronised instruments.This allows me to do things like start andstop rhythmic sequences simply by pressinga footpedal.

If you want this kind of flexibility andpower, you’ll have to work for it, becausesetting up such a degree of control can bequite complex. If your needs are more basic

there’s a Quick Route feature that rapidlyconfigures a VSTi to respond to an input portand channel. There’s also a channel-routinggrid where you can set up more complex MIDIrouting quickly and easily — a nice touch.

Finally, for the non-test pilots (and to takeaway some of the worry of using VSTis), Forte1.5 includes a built-in ‘stress tester’. This willrun simulated MIDI and scene changesthrough your rack file, to help you buildconfidence in your configuration before youtake it on stage.This is a significant benefitwhen you consider how many componentsmust be working correctly to do a show: notjust the PC, but Windows the MIDI andsoundcard drivers, Forte itself, and all theVSTis you’ve chosen to use.To be honest, it’sbest not to think about it too much or you’llnever take the plunge!

ConclusionsFor me, what’s really exciting about the latestVSTis is that some manage to surpass theoriginals, while preserving the sound thatmade the old synths special in the first place.But whereas the originals were eminentlyuseable, surely no-one in their right mindwould ever consider taking a bunch of VSTison stage — and certainly not on a tour ofEurope and the USA — would they?Computer crashes, glitches, power surges andbrown-outs, the guitarist tripping overa power lead… so many things could gowrong. But this is exactly what I did in 2004,without once leaving the rest of the band towonder why the keyboards had suddenlygone horribly silent.

If you decide to take this route, I think thatyou’ll find the benefits of using VSTis liveoutweigh the risks. For me, that’s thanks toForte, which I’ve found to be robust andpowerful. I can heartily recommend it to anykeyboard player wanting to go ‘virtual’ onstage.ß

Feature

SOUND ON SOUND LIVE

Mark KellyUsing VST instruments live

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Mark Kelly and Marillion frontman Steve Hogarth, on stage during the Philadelphia leg of the US Marbles tour.

A Forte screen showing how MIDI controllers can be re-mapped.