Wim Daans: Keyboard and MIDI Tech

“Over the past year one of the main things, of course, is Night Of The Proms because it’s a returning tour,” explains Daans. “It’s interesting because it’s always in a season when most tours are stopping, like October and November. The Proms keeps the crew going every year until Christmas, so that’s one of my main things. But I also always do the summer festivals for the backline company Kick Artist Services as a crew chief or stage manager. We come out with one or two trailers of backline and do huge festivals that are like five or six stages over three days. I go there with some crew and it’s really interesting and is totally different work. It’s getting your hands dirty from early in the morning to the middle of the night, and it’s nice because you see all the new bands come through and you see new backline. It’s always a bit of a danger when you stay in one production like Ultravox or the Proms. It doesn’t matter what production it is but you just lose touch with the rest of the world. You just do your own thing and you don’t see what’s happening around you anymore. That’s why I really like doing those festivals; you see all the productions passing by, you get new gear in your hands and you get to try it all out. I also did two big tours with Ultravox and then Roger Hodgson from Supertramp. That’s the two big ones I did this year. That’s another reason that I like keeping the Proms because I met those two guys [Roger Hodgson and Midge Ure] there. I want to keep my foot in the door of the Proms. I’m also getting a bit older, I’ve got a family, I’ve got some kids so I want to be closer to home. In between tours, I do small jobs for Belgian bands and TV shows. It doesn’t matter what.”

“My parents put me through music school, I was a flute player really and I hated that,” laughs Daans. “So, when I was a teenager, I completely revolted and skipped all the classes for music and got in a punk band, like everybody else did, but I got tired of punk pretty soon. When I heard the first records of Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode and stuff like that, I got completely overwhelmed by all the synthesizers, got into synthesizers, played in a few bands and even toured quite a lot.”

Indeed, the biggest band Wim Daans toured with was Lords Of Acid, a group as renowned for their fetish-themed attire and x-rated lyrics as they were for their thumping tunes.

“Lords Of Acid was huge in America and sold millions of albums,” says Wim. “It was a studio project, but at one stage they decided they needed to get a band on the road and I was making albums of ambient music as Karma De La Luna for the same record company. They knew me and said, ‘Do you want to go on tour?’ So I spent a few years touring the States with Lords Of Acid, which was really heavy rock & roll. It was really rough music and all the lyrics were about drugs and sex and all the crowd were like hookers and pimps and I was so green behind my ears, it was really a crazy time!”

“I’ve always done [teching] really,” he explains. “I moved to Leuven, which is a city with quite a music scene. If you go out there and you know something about keyboards, people say, ‘Can you play in my band? Can you be a technician for this band?’ So I always did it in between, skipping between being a backliner and being a musician myself. But after Lords Of Acid I thought, ‘I’m not going to get anything bigger as a musician than this, maybe I’ll have to go back to playing in pubs and all that again!’ And I had my own backliners at that time, which was like a luxury, so I didn’t want to go back to playing in bars! Then I got some offers as a backline technician and that was steady work, because Lords Of Acid was really nice but it was touring for two months or three months and then nothing — so there goes all your money again. With backline, you just skip from one band to the other and if the band goes down, you just jump up to another train. It’s a bit opportunistic, I know, but it makes a living. That was my situation and I also wasn’t a very good musician to be honest, not like a classically trained piano player. I played Depeche Mode style with two fingers or three at the maximum. I’ve always been more of a programmer, making sounds and stuff like that.”

“When I started, I was hired as just a backline tech, taking care of keyboards and drums, but that got pretty boring after a while,” says Wim. “But then someone said, ‘We need a few samples and click tracks’. So I started working things out and said, ‘Hey, let’s do a bit more than just click tracks, let’s take a computer onstage and run a laptop and we can get to have some loops of audio running along. We can get some timecode for the light show and we could merge all kinds of MIDI instruments that are sending MIDI all over the stage’. And they bought this idea! It opened up a whole world of possibilities. James Brown did a Night Of The Proms show, I think, the last year before he died, and the year after he died we did a duet with James Brown video footage together with Macy Gray singing live, all in sync!”

“For the computers, I’m using Macs and running Logic and I need the flexibility because we’re editing quite a lot on the road,” explains Daans. “We can add a few bars for tomorrow’s show or we can get this bit a little bit faster or repeat this bit there. Also, the click tracks are sometimes really complex. They’re not just like a metronome. Classical pieces can be like two bars of 6/8, then four bars of 4/4 and then you could go to 16 bars of 3/4. There are always tempo changes and there’s only one way to really keep track of that and, for me, it’s Logic — it’s great!”

It depends totally on the pop or rock band playing the Proms as to whether Daans has to program sounds for them into his rig during pre-production. “Some bands are just like Roxette and have got all their own sounds and that’s no problem. But sometimes I do get asked to program in sounds, and Toto was one of those cases,” says Wim. “We had them on the Proms and the keyboard player, David Paich, couldn’t be bothered using the original sound for this flute solo in ‘Africa’. He’s played it on a Rhodes or whatever so he asked me if I could do something about it, and I had a little chat with him and he told me how the original sound was made. They used a pitch shifter minus five and stuff like that, so I spent an afternoon on the Triton trying to recreate it and they were pretty happy with it. And Roger Hodgson, same thing, always wanted to play ‘Fool’s Overture’ with an orchestra but he never really did because he’d lost the original sounds that came from some weird kind of Elka and he could never track that instrument down again. So he asked me to make the sounds again and I spent quite some time on it, but I pretty much nailed it and, after that, he asked me to tour with him so he was pretty happy with that!”

“Pre-production is about a week, I think, and then it’s a week of rehearsals,” explains Wim Daans. “And I get all the files a few weeks before, so I start programming but it’s not like I’m programming for two or three weeks. It’s like I’m looking at this and that and I’ll do a few things and wait for two more days and do another few hours to get it all together. But it’s a pretty short pre-production really and it is a big show. It’s a three-hour show with a lot of artists, a lot of classical pieces and a lot of preparation, but the technology is helping. We work together and I work a lot with the arrangers. They work with Logic as well so they send me the arrangements and they send it to the band and they approve the sounds, so it’s already time-stamped. We don’t touch it any more but make a click track for it, which we send to the light guys and they can program it on a Wiziwig. At rehearsals we just get there and they play the song two or three times with the orchestra who are obviously trained musicians and they just play it from the sheet music. It still surprises me more and more that, after two or three takes, we just nail it — ‘Okay, bang, next song!’ And the arranger is there at the rehearsals, and if the band still want to change a few things he re-writes the score overnight, prints it out for the orchestra, sends me the new version with new instructions and new tempos, which I do, and then it’s sent to the light guys who spend the night re-programming it. The next day — bang — there’s a new version up there!”

“We do carry a spare Mac with a spare sound card, and that’s pretty much it as far as spares go,” explains Wim. “But how far do you want to go with spares? We do always have a spare keyboard — the Triton — which is the same keyboard that we use in the fake piano. So, in case something happens, we can just swap that over. We don’t have a spare Oasys because it’s a bit expensive to have two Oasys’ on tour. Two years ago my fabulous guitar-tech colleague dropped a glass of wine over the Oasys five minutes before show time. I thought it was going to make it, but I think a minute before show time smoke was coming out of it so we delayed the show by ten minutes, opened it up, we poured a whole glass of wine out of it, hair-dryed it, put it back together and it seemed to work, so we started the show. Then, half way through the show, it died again — just before the break — so, during the break, I had time to get the Triton out, program some sounds into it that were more or less similar to the Oasys sound and we did the second part with the Triton. There’s always a solution and sometimes carrying all the spares around is just more hassle than it’s worth!”

“Eighty percent of our job is actually psychological,” explains Wim. “Making the musicians feel at ease and making them feel secure that there’s someone behind them who can solve problems in case something goes wrong. Break the ice a little bit and offer them a drink. It’s just as important as nailing that sound down! But, no, making things reliable and as easy as possible for the live show is something that very few techs understand. One tech I worked with was a great computer tech, he was completely into Logic, he knew everything about MIDI and he was a good team player. But he just couldn’t do it live — it kept on crashing and it didn’t work. He forgot little bits and it wasn’t reliable and it wasn’t foolproof. There’s a way of thinking for live; stupid little things like putting tape on the backside of the keyboard, covering every output that you don’t use, every circuit that you don’t use, so you can’t possibly plug into something wrong because, after 40 shows, you will. Just tape everything down so that nobody can knock out a cable. If that happens, perhaps you’ll lose power and you’ll need two minutes to reboot again. It’s not technical, it’s just common sense. It’s making things foolproof, making sure things don’t fall over and don’t break.”

Wim believes he will be coming to the end of his time on the road a few years down the line so that he can spend more quality time with his young family. However, there is one band that he would never turn down if they offered him a technician’s job.

“I think working for Depeche Mode would be really great,” he enthuses. “I don’t want to tour for 16 months anymore like they do, and I don’t think I could sell the idea even to my wife but, if Depeche Mode said they wanted to have me, I think I’d have to try. It’s through Depeche Mode that I got into keyboards, they’re my all-time heroes and that would be really great. But I’m happy with what I do, I’ve got enough work, it’s interesting work, I’m working with nice people, I’ve got enough money, I’ve got enough freedom — hey, I’m happy, you won’t hear me complain!”  0