Blog

  • Why Does A Keys Player Need A Pedalboard?

    This is something I get asked about from time-to-time… I know you don’t commonly see keyboard players using boards of effects pedals, like guitarists often do, but I have put a lot of thought into the setup I’m using on my gigs and I feel like this rig fits my workflow and my approach to my playing well.

    I enjoy using tactile pedals to add or remove layers of sound ‘in the moment’, shaping the tone of my playing to fit the contours of the song; I have tried to build something which allows me to achieve a wide range of sounds on the fly, whilst keeping load-in and setup easy and convenient.

    Check out the video for a full ‘rig rundown’ of the setup I’m using on my gigs at the moment.

    Click here for a full break-down on my custom rotary speaker speed-switcher pedal, as mentioned in the video.

  • More Sharma 2000 Modifications

    More Sharma 2000 Modifications

    The long-awaited follow-up to my original post from January 2020 on modifying a guitar amp channel footswitch to change the motor speed in a Sharma 2000 rotary cab is finally here! I will give a small précis of the 2020 post here, for context.

    The Sharma 2000 has a nine-pin Amphenol connector on the rear panel, and three of these pins are concerned with the speed of the rotary motor; grounding Pin 6 (ie. by connecting it to Pin 1, the ground pin) spins the motor fast, whilst grounding Pin 7 spins the motor slower (and with neither pin connected to the ground of Pin 1, the motor does not spin at all). I rewired a generic footswitch to use a TRS ¼” jack connector to change which pin was connected to the ground. Because I was doing these modifications in a bit of a hurry – just a couple of days before a gig on which I planned to use the Sharma rotary speaker – I left it at that. But I always planned to return to the project at a later point and finish the job.

    Despite all the unexpected free time afforded to me by lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, I only managed to return to complete this project within the last few weeks.

  • Happy New Year

    Happy New Year

    After a very difficult couple of years for the music industry and for our fans and supporters, I am looking forward to getting back out on the road more and seeing my students in person throughout 2022.

    I’m very excited for the new year and I hope to see you all again soon!

  • Practising For Permanence

    Practising For Permanence

    Practice makes perfect has always been a cruel lie; not only is ‘perfection’ in a musical performance physically unattainable, it isn’t even especially desirable. That so many music students appear to have internalised this unhelpful little platitude is becoming a source of great distress for me, as it actively hinders their journey learning and growing as musicians.

    The poet Sarah Kay wrote that ‘Practice does not make perfect; practice makes permanent’. In other words, it is just as possible to practise mistakes into your playing as it is to weed them out. However you play every single day – whether good or bad – ends up becoming ‘permanent’.

    Practice does not make perfect.
    Practice makes permanent.
    Repeat the same mistakes over and over and you don’t get any closer to Carnagie Hall, even I know that.
    Repeat the same mistakes over and over and you don’t get any closer! You never get any closer.

    Sarah Kay, Postcards

    At its heart, practising is an exercise in forming habits. The repetitive nature of practising a piece of music means that whatever you do over and over eventually becomes automatic (or ‘permanent’) when you sit at the instrument – including mistakes. In music, as in all areas of life, it is just as easy to form bad habits as it is to form good habits – sometimes, sadly, even easier!

  • Feeling Like An Artist

    Feeling Like An Artist

    This year has been tough in all sorts of ways. Playing music is all I have wanted to do, since I was a kid. I spent my early teenage years dreaming of being a session musician – going out on the road, playing on records, working for different artists and producers. It’s been nearly fifteen years now, and that’s been going pretty well.

    But 2020 has really knocked me sideways. I’ve struggled a lot with the lack of gigs, being at home so much more, and the uncertainty of the whole situation. I’ve kept myself as busy as I’ve been able to with remote studio session work and online music tuition, but I have missed playing shows so much and working with other musicians in amazing venues around the country.

    I’ve tried to channel some of that energy (and extra time at home) into writing more original music – and last month, I released my solo EP When The Autumn Comes, the second record I have released under my own name. They were songs I had started writing over the last few years and never got around to finishing properly, and it felt good to finally send them out into the world.

  • Gigging Through Coronavirus

    The past few weeks have been tough. The government says that jobs in the arts and entertainment sectors are ‘not viable’. In a huge slap-in-the-face to the thousands of artists, performers and technicians who have dedicated years of their lives to making their craft their career, they suggest we get ‘better jobs’.

    Plenty of people have written more thoroughly and more eloquently than I could about this tremendous insult to our industry, and the impact this sort of attitude is having on all our lives. On a personal level, I have felt angry and alone, misunderstood and taken for granted. It’s been a difficult time.

    But this weekend I was on the road, gigging with 90s Jam for the first time since the beginning of March. Even just a couple of days before, I was convinced the gigs would not in fact go ahead as more and more restrictions on events were announced during last week. At times over the past week, it has felt like the government were deliberately making arts jobs ‘unviable’ by placing as many obstacles as possible in the way of us being able to do our jobs, whilst not actually locking venues back down again.

  • Sharma 2000 Modifications

    Sharma 2000 Modifications

    In November I achieved a small dream of mine, as a keys player – I bought a genuine old vintage rotary cab for gigs and sessions where I’m mainly playing Hammond organ-type parts. My studio setup has evolved so that I try to stay away from emulators, and capture the sounds of real hardware and genuine components, wherever possible. So to be able to record and play live with a real rotary speaker for that sweet bluesy organ tone was a really exciting prospect for me.

    The speaker I got is a Sharma 2000 – Sharma was a British firm which was a competitor to the famous American Leslie cabs during the ’60s and ’70s. It maybe a lesser-known brand, but the Sharma speaker still sounds just like the organ tone I’ve always wanted from my playing, and put a huge grin on my face from the first moment I sat down to play organ through it. (I’m playing it from my workhorse Nord Stage 2 keyboard setup as a B3 emulator – you can’t avoid emulators altogether! – but with the Nord’s built-in rotary function switched off.)

    The Sharma speaker has the same 9-pin Amphenol connector you get on Leslies which carries input signal, volume information and various other program-change style controls.

  • I was recently asked whilst chatting with a colleague of mine in music tuition “What first got you interested in music production and recording?”

    I’d never really thought about that. But it was certainly an intriguing question, and I thought about it a deal more over the next few days. I realised the reason I hadn’t considered that before was that it had always felt like a perfectly natural thing for a working musician to be be involved in. Almost like asking a taxi driver what first got them interested in steering.

    The music world is becoming more digital – more online – all the time. In fact, you can remove the word ‘music’ from that statement altogether. Technology is a fact of life in every business, including ours.

    I like to think that, throughout my career, I’ve tried to take the approach that if somebody asks you to do something which you don’t currently do, you can choose to turn it down and stay in your little niche – or you can choose to learn how to do that thing, and expand your skillset and add another string to your bow. You never know where that might take you.

    When I was asked to run a line-up of Ultra ‘90s a couple of years ago, I knew nothing of programming lights for stage, nothing about DMX, or MIDI control of DMX – but I took it on, and I learnt.

  • Cake Cutting

    Cake Cutting

    I don’t usually write about my personal life on this site. Anyone keeping an eye on the Calendar page might have wondered why I wasn’t gigging as regularly as usual during August; my summer this year looked a little different from normal, as I took on the role of being my sister Kerry’s “Maid Of Honour” for her wedding on 24th August. That may have been a weekend without a gig, but that was a wonderful day and I wouldn’t for the world have swapped my chance to play such a big part in it all – nor to see my little sister look so happy.

    Arriving At The Ceremony With Kerry · Tim Stephenson Photography
    Arriving At The Ceremony With Kerry · Tim Stephenson Photography

    But I wasn’t going to let a Saturday night go by without doing at least some DMX lighting production!

    One of the things Kerry asked me to do for the wedding was to bring some drama to the cake-cutting ceremony – so I had the chance to put spotlights, moving heads, colour washes and a layer of haze into the incredibly characterful old crypt underneath beautiful 12th Century Langley Abbey where the wedding reception was held. It was a gorgeous space to work with – and the textures in the walls and the shape of the ceiling really lent themselves to creating interesting and atmospheric lighting scenes.

  • New Studio Open For Business

    New Studio Open For Business

    You may have noticed that the Studio page of this site has been down for the last couple of months – with just a placeholder image teaser and no information… I was hoping to have everything completed before now. But things get in the way! However, the last few months have seen some pretty radical changes in my little studio space, and I am so happy with how it’s all coming together that I am very excited to reveal the new look to you all.

    My workspace has expanded, and now fills a little alcove one side of the chimney breast. I have a wonderful new desk to sit and work at; this desk was custom-built for recording studios by my friend and colleague (another Ultra ’90s drummer!) Curtis Aaron, with built-in racking for studio rack gear and a large surface area to work on. The addition of an external GPU has allowed me to move to a three screen setup when working at the computer, giving me extra flexibility for working on studio projects. And the mix position has been treated with acoustic sound absorbers and bass trapping (also made by Curtis) to help me to get the best-sounding mixes possible.

Kit Marsden // Musician