Why Geddy Lee never considered himself a “keyboard player.”

Geddy Lee of the rock band Rush explains why he by no means regarded as himself to be a keyboard participant regardless of enjoying a position within the team’s tone. Lee explains that he was once by no means officially skilled in keyboard enjoying, and that he was once by no means assured enough quantity to name himself a keyboard participant. He states that he handiest ever realized two songs at the keyboard in his complete while, and that he was once a lot more relaxed enjoying the bass guitar. He is going on to mention that he perspectives himself principally as a bass participant, and that the keyboard was once a device he impaired so as to add colour to the band’s tone. Lee additionally explains that he regularly impaired guitar pedals to procedure his keyboard sounds, growing a singular sonic ground for Rush.

Geddy Lee has earned a cast recognition amongst musicians and enthusiasts similar over his 50 years as a certified musician. Very best recognized for being the bassist and govern singer for Canadian determined rock titans Rush, Lee’s transition from Nineteen Seventies guitar rock to Nineteen Eighties synth-pop was once reasonably easy in comparison to his friends. That’s as a result of Lee has been all for synthesizers for years, going again to the 1977s A See you later to Kings.

Lee’s roles in Rush went past his bass enjoying and making a song. At the side of guitarist Alex Lifeson, Lee composes the entire tune and tunes that seem in Rush’s catalogue. This accountability of constructing melodies proved harder for the bass, so Lee started experimenting with keyboards and in the end introduced them into Rush’s tone to discover untouched sonic horizons.

Via the occasion Keyboard Novel interviewed him In 1984, Lee performed keyboards as a lot (if no longer extra) than bass on degree. This ended in a captivating query: did Lee imagine himself a bassist or a keyboardist? When requested at once, Lee gave a solution that helped let fall some luminous on his self-image as a musician.

“I still see myself as a bassist, but I put more effort and time into playing keyboards,” Lee unmistakable. “Of all the instruments I play at home, I play keyboards mostly because it’s such a challenge. It’s also more satisfying than playing bass alone. While I love playing bass, I’d rather play it with someone – a bass is a lonely instrument in its own right. But with keyboards, especially synths, you can line up a sound and bathe in it. Who needs anyone else?”

“My actual keyboard skills are somewhat limited, and I don’t see myself as a keyboardist, although I enjoy playing synths,” Lee added. “I consider myself more of a melodic composer with a synthesizer. As a keyboard player, I can’t play a lot of complex chord changes or move through a very complex structure, but I can find many, many melodies. I can write many songs on a synthesizer. I can focus on the sound I want and let it speak for the mood I want to create; that is my role as a Conjoiner.”

Lee didn’t have the formal keyboard coaching that a lot of his fellow musicians had. A couple of piano classes as a kid had been the one publicity Lee needed to keyboards in his early life. Excluding studying the fundamentals of instrumental tune in class, piano classes didn’t start up the rest radical in Lee. In lieu, it was once the rock tune of the occasion that made him embody tune as his calling. As such, Lee by no means regarded as himself excellent enough quantity to confer with himself as a “keyboardist”.

“I find that more and more people who aren’t accomplished musicians as keyboardists are synthesizer players or synthesizers,” Lee mentioned. “However, a guy who doesn’t have a musicality isn’t going to do anything worthwhile. If you don’t have a musical sense or a musical feeling, you can have all the toys in the world, but you still won’t find anything.”

“What I believe in most as a musician is musical sense or musicianship, not how many notes you can play or how many schools you’ve been to,” Lee concluded. “What can you do with your knowledge? Some people with very limited technical knowledge can do amazing things – they can speak musically. In fact, you can make music with very few notes. After all, there aren’t that many notes at first.”

Within the mid-Nineteen Eighties, Lee impaired those few notes to radically redefine Rush’s tone. Embracing synths alienated a few of Rush’s longtime enthusiasts, a lot of whom had been interested in as pioneers of determined steel. On the other hand, the band’s synth-heavy segment proved to be any other future for a band that has developed and reconfigured a number of instances during their profession. Having a look again, Rush’s synthesizer future proves to be simply as revealing and remarkable as any of the band’s alternative (or extra prevalent) eras.

Take a look at Lee enjoying the keyboards in a reside model of “Red Sector A” beneath.

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