![]() ![]() ![]() But even though they sometimes had two keyboardists, they were far less synth-happy than most 70s progressive outfits, usually either putting Martin Barre’s titanic guitar riffs up front or living up to their status as Rock Band Most Likely to Turn up at a Renaissance Faire. Jethro Tull obviously had exponentially more prog in their past than Rush and Styx put together. In this particular case, I held this one program down, and it made a ding ding ding sound and then I added a rhythm piece to it and I came up with ‘Roboto.’” The way it worked was that you could hold one note down and make it play any number of rhythmic patterns. I can’t remember the model, but it was the first synthesizer that had an arpeggiator on it, which is like an early sequencer. It was written with the aid of a Roland synthesizer. Roboto,” the Kilroy cut that became one of the band’s biggest hits, he told Thom Jennings in a 2010 Backstage Axxess interview that the song was “an unusual composition of mine because it was not based on the piano. But again like Geddy, DeYoung found that tech advances took him in new directions. They were on top of the world, with nothing to prove and no one to please but themselves. And for years before 1983’s Kilroy Was Here, there was nary a synth to be found in a Styx hit except the bass figure in “Too Much Time on My Hands.”Ī Gallup poll at the end of 1980 declared Styx the biggest rock band in the U.S. But the Styx frontline featured two wailing lead guitarists who were hardly spotlight-averse. Like Geddy Lee, Styx singer/keyboardist Dennis DeYoung had no compunctions about leaning into his synth for songs on the artier end of his band’s stylistic spectrum. Styx was in a similar slot around that time. Geddy’s huge-sounding synth lines just about knock Alex Lifeson out of the box until his lead guitar finally wails near the end of the track. The album’s next single, the alienated-teen anthem “Subdivisions,” was all about the electronics. ![]() Signals’ first single, it would become Rush’s only U.S. Burbling synth is the first sound heard on “New World Man,” and it ties the whole track together. Geddy wasn’t shy about showing what he’d learned. Then I got a Minimoog, and then bigger stuff, and as time went on, the more I learned about the use of sound.” When I first started, I used a synthesizer bass pedal to fill in the empty spaces in the band. This time, though, we decided on more synthesis…. In a 1982 interview with Scene, Geddy Lee – who was doing triple duty on vocals, bass, and keys – said, “Ours was basically a guitar-oriented sound with the rhythm section poking through and an occasional synthesizer line enhancing it. On “Tom Sawyer” from their 1981 blockbuster Moving Pictures, the synth even takes center stage for a hot minute.īy the time they followed that album up with 1982’s Signals, Rush was ready to take things to the next level. In the 70s, they weren’t afraid to slap a synthesizer on a tune if needed, especially on their proggier epics. Rush might have been among the more likely rockers to go synth crazy in the 80s. ![]()
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