Tommy Mars

Interview with Tommy Mars TM: Well it’s just amazing, when I did my audition and Frank said “You brought some gear with you?” I brought my Rhodes, and I brought my Electrocomp, and my Taurus bass pedals, and he said “what’s this?” and I undid it and I played something, and of course my signature sound was a French horn kind of brass sound that it did, it was my kind of signature, and his jaw dropped . I don’t think he’d had ever heard a synth kind of do that kind of sound in that kind of expression that it was able to have.

And I said “this E-mu you that you have?”, and he was just like so proud of his E-mu, this is so funny man!), and the only sound that he had on it , which is the easiest sound in the world to make, was a little pipe organ sound, an eight foot and a four foot, no envelope, no nothing, I said “you mean with all this that’s all you got?”(laughs), and he says “Yeah?” and I said “Well I don’t think you noticed that the Electrocomp is very similar, I could set this sound up exactly for you on the E-mu, and then you’d have five voices, you’d have complete polyphony”. And in those days that was like, you know, going to the emerald city, like follow the yellow brick road!”

Interview with Tommy Mars TM: ‘The Blue Light, there’s some vocoder stuff on that man, and I always liked the Korg vocoder versus any other one, there was something real sensitive about it. Actually Korg throughout the years have done pretty darn good products.

Interview with Tommy Mars TM: And pitch-wise it could run a large gamut. So I had the SynDrums connected to the bottom keyboard, and the minimoog connected to the top keyboard, which was you know OK but you couldn’t do any expressive stuff, you couldn’t add vibrato obviously, there was no touch sensitivity in those days, or polyphonic after-touch, or anything.

So, I, the thing I loved about it though was Frank did buy another (set of Taurus bass pedals), I came to the table with my set of Taurus bass pedals which I keep under the piano, but I said “Hey can we put the Taurus bass pedals under the organ, and then have the last octave of the organ also have the bass pedals on the manual. They hooked it up that way so I had the bass pedals under the organ, and it also would be the last octave of the upper manual.

Interview with Tommy Mars TM: Well it’s just amazing, when I did my audition and Frank said “You brought some gear with you?” I brought my Rhodes, and I brought my Electrocomp, and my Taurus bass pedals, and he said “what’s this?” and I undid it and I played something, and of course my signature sound was a French horn kind of brass sound that it did, it was my kind of signature, and his jaw dropped . I don’t think he’d had ever heard a synth kind of do that kind of sound in that kind of expression that it was able to have.

And I said “this E-mu you that you have?”, and he was just like so proud of his E-mu, this is so funny man!), and the only sound that he had on it , which is the easiest sound in the world to make, was a little pipe organ sound, an eight foot and a four foot, no envelope, no nothing, I said “you mean with all this that’s all you got?”(laughs), and he says “Yeah?” and I said “Well I don’t think you noticed that the Electrocomp is very similar, I could set this sound up exactly for you on the E-mu, and then you’d have five voices, you’d have complete polyphony”. And in those days that was like, you know, going to the emerald city, like follow the yellow brick road!”

Interview with Tommy Mars: TM: That was kind of a strange thing with the Polyphonic E-mu portamento, how it would logically go from one note to another. That’s another great thing about the CS-80, how it approached the Portamento, that’s quite a sophisticated process, you know. Portamento when you’re dealing with polyphony; it’s weird enough anyway when it’s just a monophonic axe but with polyphony, as a player you have to adjust to the time involved with it.

Interview with Tommy Mars TM: And pitch-wise it could run a large gamut. So I had the SynDrums connected to the bottom keyboard, and the minimoog connected to the top keyboard, which was you know OK but you couldn’t do any expressive stuff, you couldn’t add vibrato obviously, there was no touch sensitivity in those days, or polyphonic after-touch, or anything.

So, I, the thing I loved about it though was Frank did buy another (set of Taurus bass pedals), I came to the table with my set of Taurus bass pedals which I keep under the piano, but I said “Hey can we put the Taurus bass pedals under the organ, and then have the last octave of the organ also have the bass pedals on the manual. They hooked it up that way so I had the bass pedals under the organ, and it also would be the last octave of the upper manual.

Interview with Tommy Mars: TM: It always changed. I never knew what I would get. Sometimes he wouldn't want the Hammond, sometimes not the Rhodes. Most of the time, he liked to have the CP70 piano, the Electrocomp, the Vocoder, the Mini, two sets of bass pedals. The coolest thing was the organ man when we had a voltage control so I could use two sets of Syndrums. Both keyboards had a set of Syndrums. They were wired in so that every note on the organ had a Syndrum with it. It was a totally revolutionary sound. I loved that about Frank that he was in the avant-garde and you'd never know what kind of vision would come next. Sometimes I would try to couple things and he would nurture that with me.

interview with Tommy Mars:

TM: That was kind of a strange thing with the Polyphonic E-mu portamento, how it would logically go from one note to another. That’s another great thing about the CS-80, how it approached the Portamento, that’s quite a sophisticated process, you know. Portamento when you’re dealing with polyphony; it’s weird enough anyway when it’s just a monophonic axe but with polyphony, as a player you have to adjust to the time involved with it.

Interview with Tommy Mars

TM: And you were mentioning about the (Hammond) organ?

ZG: That’s another one of the keyboards that is unique from what I understand…

TM: Oh! Unbelievably unique! The thing is, is that when I joined the band we had a standard B-3 and then Frank started getting into the SynDrums, and they had a module for the SynDrums that they had for keyboards and I said “Frank, wouldn’t it be great if we could…” He had already cut-down the B3, and also had it voltage controlled, and the problem, unfortunately, with the cutting down and the voltage control process was I had to lose the 1 foot drawbar. You know, if you’re an organist, that drawbar, it puts the icing on the cake, you need that, the other ones are great but that one foot is the highest drawbar, and it’s the most sensitive. But that’s the drawbar they needed to make it voltage controlled, for some reason they had to use that high root drawbar, the one foot, so I never had that and it was sort of a thorn in my side, being an organist, but – to have the SynDrums on the organ was incredible, and a lot of times people didn’t know that I was making that sound, they would think it would be the SynDrums, but it was actually coming from the organ. Having tuned SynDrums that were an ensemble, you know what I mean, a drummer would have at the most maybe six or eight SynDrums, but this is having 61 SynDrums, right (laughs).