Tech Sounds
Bruce MacPherson is an employee of Yale Music Technology Labs; he’s also a keyboard player and technician who’s worked with everyone from Fleetwood Mac to Philip Glass.
CS: How did you get started in music?
BM: Back in the ’60s I wanted to be a drummer. I used to look at the Sears catalog, at drum sets, thinking how cool they were. I was also a big Beatles fan; I loved Ringo. So I persuaded my parents to get me lessons. They brought me to a typical music school, and said that if I wanted to learn any instrument, I had to take six-weeks of accordion first. I took six weeks of accordion, and I started to like it. My aunt bought me a 120-bass accordion that I still have to this day. I moved out of New York State into Connecticut and I wanted to continue with my lessons — but I couldn’t quite find the right teacher so I kinda lost interest in it. So after that, I had some keyboard skills under my belt. I dropped out of accordion lessons and by then I was 12 or 13 and I was really getting into rock-n-roll and all my friends were starting bands. But I had no keyboard that could compete with the level of a drum set and an electric guitar and bass. So I got left out. I’d play acoustic piano, start a song up but once the drums kicked in and rock-n-roll guitars came in, you couldn’t hear the keyboards anymore. Then I decided to get an electric piano and an amplifier. Finally when I was 17 that very same aunt gave me enough money to get one, and I got one. That’s when I started playing in bands. So I got an electric piano and I was able to finally get amplification and start playing with bands, which I immediately did. But I really liked the jump to big rock-n-roll. I liked Jan Hammer, Keith Emerson from Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Rick Wakeman from Yes and these keyboard icons. So I followed all those guys, I didn’t take it lightly. I wanted to emulate some of these greats. That led me to the path where I was able to work with Yes.
CS: Can you talk about some of the work you’ve done with groups like that and how you got involved?
BM: After I turned 18, it was time for me to make money on my own. I went through a number of other different bands until finally, I found one that worked. We [were] a Bruce Springsteen tribute band called Thunder Road. We started out slow, but then we got really popular where it got to the point that at every club we were playing, there was a line out the door. I stayed with them for at least five years, just trying to get ahead. We went out and also played some originals, but none of them got traction, so I started doing studio work for extra money. This was when technology was just getting around. When I got into a studio I would bring my computer, set up the drum machine, set up the mini synthesizers. I had recorded all the parts previously which saved artists money. I would hit the spacebar on the computer and all of these machines would play whatever I had recorded previously into the sequencer. They’d connect everything to the mixing board and start to roll tape. And when they rolled tape they’d record the whole thing. After that, we’d overdub with guitars, other instruments, and vocals. I got really popular as a session keyboard player and also as a computer guide since I was learning the technology…. [then] I got into pro-audio because I knew about computers and how to connect musical instruments. I got a job with Sam Ash Professional. So the professional department only worked with the cream of the crop of the music industry. Guys like James Taylor would come into our shop.
CS: What year was this?
BM: This was 1990. I got to work with James Taylor because he wanted to make a mobile recording rig. I helped him pick out the gear. Stevie Wonder was one of the guys that used to always come in. We’d guide him with the equipment and then he’d play. At the end, he’d sign up this huge sales order and buy everything. Computers then got the ability to record audio — and that’s when everything changed. I got really interested in that and thought, “Wow, I can start to integrate all my instruments.” Philip Glass hired me as a tech guy to come to his studio and keep all his computers running like a top. One day, we were hanging around and he had a MIDI Minimoog, a synthesizer. He wasn’t able to get the sound he was looking for and I said, “Phil, what are you looking to get?” since I had a Minimoog since the ’70s. He realized I knew what I was doing, so he hired me to do sound design for his record.
CS: Wow.
BM: I had been working with Leslie Gore. She was a very famous young artist who had a breakthrough hit in 1963, “It’s My Party And I’ll Cry If I Want To.” I was already friends with Leslie; she saw me on TV, and she goes, “You know what? I want you to be my musical director.” I started in June of ’96. I took my band, Pantheon, and I taught them all of Leslie’s material. She hired us to go down for a week at Bally’s in Atlantic City and we had a blast. It was immediate success. We had never played with Leslie but we learned all her records and we did it very meticulously. Even when she had sent us all sheet music, we didn’t really go by it; we went by the original records and their arrangements — and she loved that. Most of the bands she’d been working with were cookie-cutter. Everybody had their eyes peeled on the sheet music, playing these very rigid parts. And my band brought life right back into the music! I played with her until 2002. And at about 1998, I met a guy named Will Alexander. He was the keyboard tech for Emerson, Lake & Palmer. We met at an Emerson, Lake & Palmer show — one of the last ones they had done before they broke up for good — and I threw my card onto the stage. He picked it up and he nodded at me. We became quick friends. In 2002, Keith Emerson put out a solo record called Emerson Plays Emerson and I got a credit on it. Will needed things for all these famous bands that he worked with — you know, he worked for Emerson, Lake & Palmer, No Doubt — and he kept on getting different gigs. He got a gig as a keyboard tech for Chuck Leavell, who is playing with the Rolling Stones. So, I go in and I start working with the Rolling Stones. I’m helping design the 96-track recording that they used for their Double World Tour in 2005–2006 tour, and I helped design Chuck Leavell’s keyboard rig. In 2009, I got a call. Will was working with Fleetwood Mac at the time, and Fleetwood Mac had six to seven dates that they couldn’t fulfill because Stevie Nicks got sick. So, they had to tag those dates onto the end of the tour. At that point, Will had already been contracted by Yes to leave Fleetwood Mac and start working with Yes so he asked me to do the job — which involved being a keyboard tech and also being the second keyboard player for Fleetwood Mac. My first gig was Madison Square Garden; my second gig was Nashville. I got to play with Fleetwood Mac. That was really cool, because I got to meet all the people that I loved since I was a kid — I got to meet Stevie Nicks, I got to meet Lindsey Buckingham. Fast forward to 2014. Will Alexander was in need of tracks to complete the sound design work for one of Yes’s biggest albums ever, Fragile. And they didn’t have time to put the sounds together in these backing tracks for their tour, so Will called me and asked me if I could do it. I recreated all the synthesizer sound effects from Fragile, which involved wind sounds and crazy synthesizer sounds from the seventies. So, I put together all those tracks — and they’re still using a lot of those to this day. In the meantime, I’d been doing music for television. Back in 2005, I did another side project where I composed music for this hour long special called Springer: The Orphan Orca Whale. It was a PBS special, a documentary. We saw the footage for the documentary and it was gorgeous, really sprawling views of Puget Sound and these majestic whales in their pods, and I thought, “We gotta make this music really good.” We did, and the production company loved it and they put everything together really nicely. The show went on to win an Emmy. The reason why I’m at Yale and not still a full-time musician is because my dad died in 2013, and my mom had a house that she was living alone in — it was up in Connecticut, even though I was living up in New York. I decided I was gonna quit my job — I had a really good job with a microphone company as a national sales director, but I needed to find a different job where I could stay with my mom as much as I could. I found a job at Yale and I started as a casual, working in the AV department — that’s how I met everybody here at Stoeckel Hall [the Department of Music] because they would have daily problems with the AV systems and I would come in and fix their problems. I became friends with all the people in the building. Everything was going great, my mom was still alive, and it couldn’t be better. But unfortunately she died last June, so now I’m in a limbo, deciding what I’m gonna do here.
CS: Yeah. Have you enjoyed working with students and being able to teach them everything you’ve learned?
BM: Yeah. My love for music is first. And everybody who comes to this department as a student or a professor also loves music. There’s that common denominator right there, so every time I interact with the students, there’s an immediate connection.
CS: What are you most proud of that you’ve done in your music career?
BM: Probably my own singular compositions — that’s what I’m most proud of. When you write a song or a piece of music, no matter what it is, it’s so personal. When it gets accepted by your peers and by whoever is listening to it, that’s where the most satisfaction comes from.
CS: So, what does your day-to-day at Yale involve?
BM: It’s really making sure that the building is up-and-running and ready for the students to get to class, that everything’s working and there’s no delays and there’s nothing to ruin their day. Making sure the professors are able to commence class seamlessly, without any interruption. I come in every morning, I go through the rooms, I go through the labs, I make sure everything’s working. And I’m here, on call. If any of the classrooms have any trouble, I come down and make sure that the class can commence without any wasted time. So that Yale can continue to do its best work.
CS: Have you gone to any musical events at Yale?
BM: I haven’t done as much musical attending as I would like, but I’m very encouraged to see how much talent is around here. With my pro-audio skills, I was able to record the Yale Symphony Orchestra. To hear this stuff from this Orchestra, it’s really cool. It’s made me feel that this generation is fully capable of writing the world.
CS: Of carrying the torch of music.
BM: Yes. It’s really cool, Yale has been extremely enlightening in that way.
CS: What do you think about all the new technology-based, live-based music?
BM: I’ve watched this technology mature over the years. And knowing where these kernels started — I’m pretty open-minded to all of it. So, the answer is: yes, I like it. And I also see how the current generation has skipped over a lot of the tediousness of the technology, to the shortest distance between them and expressing themselves — I think that’s really cool. Now, your instrument is the computer. When you see technology being used in that way, it’s incredible. Every generation sees different things — they had jazz in the twenties, then they mixed it with rock, then rock got mixed with jazz again. Then they got hip-hop. Then they got rap. It’s like this big circle, but it all comes down to expressiveness. Just like a kid would walk up to a string instrument and pluck a string; now, a kid is gonna walk up to a computer and hit the spacebar. It’s the same thing! And now — you’ve got touch screens. I don’t know if you know, but in one of the labs that we have up there, they have something that is actually looking at what your hands are doing on a platform. You can see on a screen what your hands are doing on a platform. You can build, you can draw, you can use your hands and really get analog with it. Because we’re analog! No matter how much digitizing there is, we’re still analog. So yeah, we’ll see what happens. Professors are teaching their students how to use this technology now… But all of it’s garbage until you get the human mind involved.
CS: Would you say that a lot of the music you’ve done is for yourself? Or for others to enjoy?
BM: Well, it’s good to be selfish with your music.
CS: Yeah?
BM: Yeah. If I’m doing something specifically for myself and I like it, I probably have a better chance of other people liking it, too. If I fool myself into thinking that I’m going to write something for somebody else because that’s something they’ll like, they probably won’t like it. Because how could I be right about that? I can’t.
CS: It seems like the nice thing about music is that there’s something for every emotion.
BM: If you’re depressed and you bring out your instrument and you try to make yourself happy, that might not work out. Sometimes you just have to leave things alone, and wait. Have a good meal, get a good night’s sleep. Take care of yourself. There is a moment where sometimes you just can’t, and you just have to give it a break. If I’m just with my keyboards and I feel physically well, then I can usually channel an emotion into some kind of tangible piece of music.
CS: Do you still play a lot?
BM: Yeah. I mix it up, too. I have a lot of synthesizers and they all have different characters. When I started out, you used one synthesizer at a time and make one sound at a time. What’s great about technology now, especially computers, I can have 50 synthesizers going simultaneously. I can hit one note and trigger all 50 of those synthesizers at the same time. There’s sometimes when you can just let your imagination out of its cage and go crazy. It’s wonderful.
CS: You mentioned in the beginning that you don’t really know what’s next for you. Do you have any ideas?
BM: Well, you know, I’m approaching 60. I really want to be physically able to continue to play. When you’re young, you think you’re going to be the same your whole life. That’s not how it works. I have to warm up a little bit more than I used to. In the past I could just put my hand on the keyboard and go, but now I have to ease in. I want to make sure I maintain all that, but I have huge expectations of being wowed, motivated, and having my desire to continue in music increased by technology and where it’s going. Every year, we get something better. And a lot of the analog synths that are still being manufactured. You can see that even 40 plus years later, that particular technology hasn’t been exhausted. It can be applied differently now because people have different perspectives on approaching it. When you hear something produced from computers and go back to an analog synthesizer made in the ’60s, you’re gonna start making your sounds from a different perspective. You’ve seen what digital can do. But now, we’ve got the combination of the two, together. We’re building, right now, a modular analog synthesizer that would patch cables and everything like that. You’ve seen those consoles with all the knobs, the switches, all the inputs and outputs. You can use a computer to manipulate a piece of analog gear, and you can have the analog gear be analyzed by the computer or randomized or whatever else might happen. It becomes this incredible behemoth. It’s only natural that our brains are going to have to expand.
CS: It’s going to be a sound nobody has experienced.
BM: Exactly.
