So I’ve been watching Rick Wakeman videos.
Most of the older ones are too poor in quality to tell for sure what kinds of keyboards he has around him if they even capture a view of the whole keyboard in the first place. I spotted a Korg T1, a Roland D50, a Yamaha V50, I think a Roland XP80, and even an Ensoniq of some flavor, possibly an ESQ1 from the color of the case. (Ensoniq made some decent sounding keyboards with a lot of great features a while back. The company was founded by the guy who designed the SID chip for Commodore. They were bought by Sound Blaster, er, Creative, which also had swallowed Emu, another synth maker. Creative merged Ensoniq into Emu as the Ensoniq division, they released a final keyboard which was essentially an EMU Proteus sound module with the sounds from the final Ensoniq keyboard (ZX) included, packaged in a case that happened to have keys on it. Shortly thereafter Ensoniq division ceased to exist. And as far as I can tell, EMU is only making top end computer sound cards now - the kind professional sound engineers would use that cost an arm, a leg, and a lease on your firstborn.
The one item that I note he hasn’t switched out of his rack is the Mini-Moog. That’s been there for years. In the latest videos I could ID a Korg Oasis, a Korg Kronos, and a Roland Fantom X8 (the 88 key version of the keyboard I use.) And of course, the ever present Mini-Moog (sometimes two of them.)
Nothing sets the mood like a Moog.
And, IMO, nobody really used synthesizers as anything other than an oddity except for Wakeman and Yes.
So, I went out to IMDB to look at the quotes for the 1980 edition of Fame because of this absolutely wonderful interchange between the music teacher / symphony conductor and Bruno Martelli. Martelli is explaining how tired he is of having to rehearse with all these other people when he could do the very same thing in his basement with a couple of synthesizers.
The instructor said something I’m not sure I can type on a family thread, but it was absolutely CLASSIC.
“That’s not music, Martelli, thats (censored).”
Anyway, I always wondered if Wakeman was Martelli’s idol.