Christine McVie

The Yamaha CP-30 now satisfies McVie as a replacement for the Pianet. She recorded with it for the first time on Tusk, and approximates the Pianet sound live by engaging the first three stops on both groups of stops and using more bass than treble. Her model was modified to eliminate a loud hum that occurred when the volume pedal was opened all the way, but otherwise she has had no complaints about it.

"It can sound a lot like the Hohner," she says, "and it can sound like a Rhodes, really pretty and clean. It has great variety, a volume pedal, a nice sustain, and a dual pitch control where you can tune it just a little out of phase with itself to get a fatter sound, which I like to do. You can use it for so many things I used to have; where I needed three keyboards in the past, I only need this one now. Besides, I think it would be pretentious of me to have a huge stack of keyboards, since I'm not a brilliant keyboard player. I get by, but I'm by no means a genius, and I don't pretend to be. I don't want to come off like Keith Emerson. So long as I can get the sound I need, I'm happy to just stay with the keyboards I have onstage now."

The B-3, the instrument she most frequently plays, has been parabolized by Keyboard Products. Christine has no settings that she regularly favors. "I use the drawbars a lot; in fact, I don't think I've ever used anything else but the drawbars," she admits. "Sometimes I perk it up with a bit of percussion too. But I don't think there's any particular sound I go for every night. I try to get whatever sound suits the track best when we're recording, and I just look for something that sounds good when we're playing live."

"But we have recorded with some synthesizers — we've used a Minimoog and an Oberheim. And I remember using a Multimoog on 'Crystal' [from Fleetwood Mac]. It wasn't even mine, though. There was some mad little professor guy running around, twiddling all the knobs for me while I played it. I think he slept with the damn thing," she adds with a laugh. "But we don't really need them too much. I cover most of the sound that we use on records with what I have. And people tell us that we still sound pretty big for a band with four instrumentalists."