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Jordan Rudess – the Synth and Software Interview
Dream Theater’s pioneer of keyboards and music software uses AI
Jordan Rudess is celebrated as one of the most technical – and certainly one of the fastest – keyboard players out there. While best known for his role in the progressive metal band Dream Theater, he also contributes to scores of other band projects, in addition to developing and helping to promote music software and hardware products.
His recent solo album “Permission to Fly“ on the European label Inside Out ties in with some very advanced video graphic material.
“We put a single ‘Shadow Of The Moon’ up on YouTube first. It’s a very piano-led piece, the original idea was actually formed on the piano. But it really has a science fiction feel to it. I’ve been an ambassador for a company called Lightricks for a few years now, and they had a new platform coming out called LTX Studio. It’s a software platform to create full stories with visuals out of a text prompt. It will enable people to have their creative visions come to life in a new way.
“With this particular video they had a competition offering a $150,000 budget to someone who could come up with a really good idea and images for a story around a music video. They got different entries, and a guy named Manny Walker won, and they flew him out to Serbia to film for this music video.”
It’s well worth seeing the video on YouTube. It combines Jordan’s playing with moving, semi-transparent backgrounds in a very eye-catching style. “A combination of filming real actors and using this software to kind of flesh out the ideas. It’s AI software that is capable of creating great imagery, so the video is a real combination of all the different elements. And it was really unusual because it’s not easy for a normal musician to have that kind of a budget to make a video.
“I feel like it turned out so beautifully and people responded to it all over the world. It looks fantastic, and like a lot of these software platforms, you have a choice of giving it entirely a text description or giving it a picture to start with, and you can then say ‘animate this picture,’ so I guess they were often filming something and then telling the software to animate it further.
“So I could go to LTX Studio and type in ‘Jordan Rudess takes his keyboard under his arm, flies to the moon, meets aliens and hypnotizes them with a wave of frequencies coming out of his keyboard.’ And all of a sudden there’s electric blue glowing lights that happen and illuminate everyone.”
So how was your part shot for that video? Were you over there or over here, standing at an actual keyboard or not?
“I was actually at Dream Theater headquarters. We set up my keyboard in front of a big green screen, and I did all my footage that way. I also brought out my Keytar for it, and then sent all that footage to the Lightricks folks. There’s one scene I loved where you have these space travelers floating in the air, and all of a sudden one of them is floating into the room where I’m playing.
“After that we were done with official videos for a time. I had made a video for a song called ‘The Alchemist’ that’s also online, that was made by Wayne Joyner who does a lot of the work for Dream Theater and videos for different musical artists.
“So between ‘Shadow of the Moon’ and ‘The Alchemist’ you get a real feeling for the album, because one is more song-oriented, the other more of an epic, more prog kind of thing that has some length to it and odd meters and all kinds of different stuff going on.”
I thought ‘Shadow of the Moon’ sounded more like band in action than a track from a solo album.
“Yes, well, that’s wonderful to hear because my approach in doing this album was to get a band vibe in it. That’s why I reached out and had Joe Payne sing the vocals, a wonderful guy and a great singer, I actually discovered through Roy from Prog Report. I was hunting for a singer that I felt would be symbiotic with my musical energy, somebody that I could entrust to have the right kind of sound to go along with my music.
“He was awesome, and I just think his voice does blend in beautifully with what I do musically. And then I also had Darby Todd the drummer, who I met when Dream Theater was on the Dreamsonic tour. My music tends to get fairly complex, so you got to get somebody who can handle that and has the time to dig in. He said ‘they hire me for the hard stuff, that’s what I do, I play the hard stuff,’ so he became a core member of this lineup, along with Steve Dadaian on guitar – he’s a full time dentist when he’s not rocking out with his electric or acoustic guitars, and he and I are good friends.”
I’d heard that Jordan took on a few guitar parts himself.
“Yes, I played three guitar solos on the album. It was my guitar debut on my recordings, because I’ve been in this serious guitar playing hobby over the last few years and I thought, you know what, maybe I’ll put some of my own guitar playing on it as well.”
Jordan’s facility for taking on new instruments can’t be hindered by the facts that he has both a classical background and perfect pitch.
“Well, I realized I had that when I was very young. What I didn’t know is that everybody didn’t have it, because to me, it felt feels very much like you look at a color and think, that’s blue, that’s black. That’s an E, that’s a C. No big deal until my teacher at some point said, ‘oh, you have perfect pitch.’ So what do you mean? ‘Well, everybody can’t do that.’ I was like, oh, okay.”
There’s a video on YouTube of Jordan analysing a piece by the band Animals As Leaders.
“I remember doing that. Very complex parts, including the time signatures, but instantly picking up what the pitch was for each of the little melodic parts. Then I can score on paper, though on this album I sent MIDI files to the singer, so there wasn’t anything on paper. My finger drumming in Logic I sent to the drummer. But with Dream Theater I can often just get out my pencil and score paper and write.”
On the subject of Dream Theater, what’s coming up?
“Well, we worked on a new album ‘Parasomnia’ and toured with that back in February. It’s been a very exciting time in the Dream Theater world because we got our original drummer Mike Portnoy back after 13 years. And it’s been it’s been so wonderful to have him back where he belongs.”
Apart from playing keyboard instruments, Jordan has a long history of involvement with software projects.
“The Korg Kronos is still my lead instrument [he has also played the even more upmarket Korg OASYS, sometimes on a rotating podium despite its massive weight] and I have my signature sounds on there, like my lead sound, and the way that I use the joystick and the ribbon and all the controller stuff is very personal. But when I’m in the studio creating, almost all of it except for my leads is basically done with software synthesizers. I’m very much working inside the box.
“I use a lot of software, different ones like the Spitfire orchestral libraries and East-West libraries, and another library of Vienna instruments. CineSamples is wonderful, and my friends at Heavyocity make some great virtual instruments. Another favourite is Spectrasonics Omnisphere, and I use Modalics software to flesh out all the drum parts before I sent them to Darby. For piano stuff I’ll use Synthogy Ivory software, which is amazing sounding.
“We live in an amazing time when the sound palette is just incredible. I’m working on a bunch of cool stuff myself. My company, called Wizdom Music, has a musical instrument application called GeoShred that I’ve used on Dream Theater albums and my own albums, on iOS and now on desktop. It features beautifully realistic physical models that are really organic and great sounding.
“Also I work as an ambassador for a company called Moises, and through their AI platform I released my first single from ‘Permission to Fly’ called Embers. You upload a stereo waveform to their system, and when you get it brings the individual files, and you can say I want to have the vocal, I want to have the bass, I want to have guitar, piano.
“So we had a contest where people could remove a part and play their own part instead. It was really pretty fun, a lot of people entered.”
While many musicians are wary of the possibilities offered by AI, both in terms of video and audio creation, one musician definitely at the cutting edge of the field has to be Jordan Rudess.