Bill Wilcox
The worship band I’m in had to play Jaci Velasquez’s
“We Can Make a Difference.” As resident synth guy,
I recreated three separate parts for the song. The
other keyboardist would do the Rhodes part on a
Kurzweil PC1X. I used my ever-faithful Ensoniq
SD-1 and Alesis Ion. The octave-jumping part
underneath the vocal “do-do-do” bits was an Ion
program named “Hollow Moog,” which is a sine
wave patch programmed by one of the talented folks
on Yahoo’s Ion user group. The high string note held
during the chorus was an SD-1 patch I’d edited to
take on a Mellotron feel per a suggestion in an early-
’90s article in Keyboard. The challenging part was
the tremolo guitar from the pre-chorus. Some seatof-
the-pants programming involving a guitar patch
and rotary effects did the trick. A keyboard split on
the SD-1 put the guitar and string patches close
together, as I needed to go from one to the other
quickly. I’ve come to appreciate the SD-1’s intuitive
interface for creating performance setups. A Roland
JV-1080 and E-mu Vintage Keys join the party as
well. An Alesis NanoVerb sweetens up the Ion and
Vintage Keys, and an Alesis DataDisc stores programs
for them.