Braving It

Brash and melodic, the Bravery’s music more than fulfills any expectations set by their forceful moniker. Electronic dance-rock is the flavor brought by the New York quintet and, though only one album deep, the band has already made quite a rumble nationwide, recently shaking down Madison Square Garden while on tour with Depeche Mode. Not bad for a bunch of guys who recorded their now-hit record for the price of an Apogee converter.

John Conway handles the Bravery’s keyboard duties with finesse, leading with tweaked-out synth lines and filling with arpeggiated textures. A gentleman as well as a geek and a rock star, he gave us the story on synths, recording, and his master plan for the Super-Cool Rig.

What’s been in your CD player on this current tour?

We don’t have CD players. We don’t even have iPods, even. Our iPods keep breaking. The last thing I’ve been listening to. . . . I finally found a record I’ve been looking for for years. We Got Latin Soul: Volume 2. It’s like ’60s New York Latin soul stuff which has people like Joe Cuba and some really good piano stuff on it. I’ve also been going through my Depeche Mode collection, since we’ve been on tour.”

How’d you get into rock and electronic music?

I was in middle or high school when I started hearing bands like Guns N’ Roses and I was like, “Wow, this is something totally new and different. I want to do this.” And then my older brother got me into bands like Kraftwerk. I was mostly a sax player and bass player going into college, but then electronic music really opened my mind up. I saw myself as a sound designer — more than a musician — and the infinite realms of possibility you can get with a synthesizer was really attractive to me. The ones I started with were monophonic vintage analog lead synths. I found that very similar to playing bass or sax. That kind of led me to where I am now.

What analog synths were you using back then?

A Moog Rogue, a couple Korgs, a Roland Juno-60, and whatever else I could get my hands on

What gear do you have on the road right now?

I have two Access Viruses, an Indigo 2 and the new Polar TI. I was excited to get my hands on one of those.

What do you think of it?

It’s still brand new and those things take months to sit down and go through. My mod wheel’s broken straight out of the box, so that’s a pain in the ass. I might have the Depeche keyboard tech take a look at it because he’s kind of a master of all that stuff.

But I really love those synthesizers. I used to try and lug other things around, but I like short ones. When we started out playing in bars and little teeny stages where you could only have one keyboard, I wanted one that could do everything. And especially as a live musician, it’s really important for me to have all the controls — the filters. LFOs, pitch and mod wheels, and even volume — where I can work them all with one hand and still play a note, a line with the other.

I like to have a setup like that with analog synths. But [unlike analogue synths, the Viruses] don’t go out of tune and, if you like, you can play organ or piano on them. They don’t break and they have effects. For a lot of our sounds, I use reverb or delays, so instead of having a guitar pedal board like with my old synths, I use the built-in effects. It’s pretty easy to deal with on these keyboards.

You also have a laptop up there when you play live.

I run sequences out of Digital Performer, which is the brain of what we do. It’s what we record with, write in, and do our editing and sequencing in. It’s easy to keep it all the same [as when we recorded the album]. I just run that out of a MOTU 828 on stage.

And that’s all the gear that you have?

That’s all I have. Simple. Less stuff to break.

You mentioned playing saxophone and bass before getting into keys. Can you tell me a little more about your musical background?

When I was four or five, I started violin with my sister and two family friends who thought they could make a string quartet out of all the kids, but it didn’t work out.

Aw.

Then I took piano for a couple years but wasn’t really interested in it. That’s another advantage of synths: You don’t have to be a classical pianist to have fun with it or really contribute to a band. Or if you have more of a programmer’s mind, you can get away with a lot of stuff and have a lot of fun with it.

Is that more your approach?

A little bit. I’d never consider myself a super-serious pianist, but I think synthesizers are a little different. I’m more interested in the sound engines than the interface being a keyboard. When I played saxophone, I had a [Yamaha] WX5 wind controller. I used that for recording. In a way, they’re more expressive than keyboards because you can control so many parameters at the same time. And that’s the way to get — I don’t want to say more realistic sounds, but ones that have more characteristics of acoustic instruments, which usually tends to make things more emotional or natural. You can adjust the tone or vibrato or volume all simultaneously.

Did you use that on the album?

I think I broke the mouthpiece by the time we made this one, so it was just the keyboard. I might get another one. They’re pretty cool.

That’d be neat to see on stage.

Yeah, I’d like to see if I could take it out on tour. Maybe for solos.

You use arpeggiators a lot on the album. How’d you approach getting those synced up with the rest of the band, both live and in the studio?

It’s kind of hard to get things to line up right. We used the [arpeggiators] on a bunch of keyboards: an Access Virus and an Yamaha EX5, which has some pretty cool arpeggiator things on it. We sort of had the caveman approach to everything. We don’t really know what we’re doing, so we just set, you know, a tempo. All our songs have even tempos, so it’s easy to do half-time or double-time, sync that up to the keyboards, and try to do MIDI sequencing. But sometimes it got more interesting just to hold down the arpeggiators and record them as audio, so we’d play it live and things would then kind of get off. The patterns would start a 16th-note or an 8th-note off, just when you move your fingers, and sometimes that would lead to really interesting things. So we rolled with that, goofed around, and went back in the sequencer and picked out the measures we thought were interesting patterns. Or we cut them together as audio and made our own sequence out of it. And then you can trigger that through MIDI or as audio on stage live.

Did you use any vintage synths on the record?

Yup. I had a Minimoog. I still had my Rogue at that point. Maybe we had a Korg MS-20. . . . [singer] Sam [Endicott] had a Kurzweill K2000. He uses that a lot. It was mostly the Viruses and the Yamaha and the couple of Moogs.

Did you face any challenges recording with the older pieces of gear?

No, I just treated them like guitars. I had to tune them pretty much between every take. I just ran them through a microphone preamp and then through a [Line 6] Pod or a [Electro-Harmonix] Big Muff or whatever kind of guitar pedals we had, and then straight into an audio interface. We did our whole album just with that first generation MOTU 828 and some $200 preamp for vocals.

So the entire album was done at home.

Yup. Yeah, the whole thing, like halfway between my house and Sam’s house. He had an iMac G4 or G3 at that time. Not very much equipment. We would literally take a headphone mini adaptor on the end of a guitar cable and put it straight into the microphone jack of an iMac and track the guitar that way. And just use plug-ins. Not even fancy plug-ins — just stock plug-ins in Digital Performer. We got pretty good at tweaking those around. You can do a lot with just reverb and a preamp.

Stock plug-ins can sound pretty cheesy if you don’t know what you’re doing.

It’s really just a taste thing. And sometimes I think the less you know about how things work, the more freedom you have and happy accidents come up. We just run any instrument through anything. You can have preconceived notions of what you can use on what or where you’re supposed to use it — to make things sound good you have to do this or it has to be these high sample rates — but if you ignore all that goof around, you’re going to come up with a lot of crap, but out of that mess, you can select things that are hopefully unique and really interesting.

So we would just do that. And the advantage of doing it at home on really cheap equipment is we had the luxury of time. We would spend hours goofing around and twisting knobs whereas if you’re in a studio, you’re counting dollars every minute so you don’t really have that freedom.

You have a spot in a song you’re recording and you want to lay something down. How do you approach getting the right tone?

When I’m trying to add a part to a song where there’s a lot of stuff going on already, I approach it first as a mixer would. What type of sound is not going to conflict with what’s there? If there’s a lot of distorted guitars and really buzzy stuff and you want to lead, if you go and put a big fat sawtooth thing on it, it’s going to get lost. So if you use a big triangle wave sound, it’ll jump out against the guitars a little differently. I look at it as, “When this gets mixed, what’s going to make it easier and what’s going to give everything separation?” in addition to, “What’s going to help the mood of the song?” That’s the advantage that synth players have. You can really draw so much and shape the feel or emotion more than, say, a bass player, who doesn’t have as much freedom in tone.

Do you improvise on stage, either tonally, or with your note choice?

We play a show pretty much every day, so on certain tours the sets stay the same for a certain number of weeks. But you can’t do the same thing all the time, so all of us experiment and push things around in a limited environment. All the lead stuff; that’s all played live. I’ll do different stuff with filters and sound, kind of solo around differently every time.

I hear you’ve been recording the next album on the road.

That’s the way it started. The first album we did in our apartment and . . . well, none of us have apartments anymore. We’ve just been touring non-stop, so we traded in the iMacs for some laptops. When we have time backstage, or even on our tour bus, or we can get into a hotel room, we’ll start tracking, all the time. That’s the way we did things at first and even if you don’t go back to something for three months, it’s just great to be able to get a guitar part down or some idea and maybe someday go back to it. Maybe two things you’ve done come together and it makes one song. What’s interesting for us is, historically, those tracks end up on the record. We do a lot of remixing and a lot of arranging and a lot of processing, but we never re-record parts. A lot of people spend a lot of time getting the sound right or the tone right or the performance, and then they record it and then that’s it. We take advantage of how much you can do to something after it’s tracked.

Do you have separate instruments for the recording process?

I wish we had room for separate stuff. Yeah, it’s just whatever we have on the road with us. I have a little keyboard I use on our bus. It’s an Alesis Micron. That’s a neat thing. For $400, it’s a good little synth.

What’s your vision for the Bravery keyboard rig in the future?

I’ll say this here, before anybody else beats me to it. Now that we’re playing on bigger stages, me and the drummer are kind of hammered down to our stations and we watch our singer and guitarist and bass player run around. [“And do all the work,” interjects guitarist Michael Zakarin.] And do all the work. I’m going to help them do all their work out there. I’m trying to mastermind the super-cool keyboard rig based on a Segway. I want the wireless keyboard on the handlebars of a Segway . . . and I’m gonna roll around, and give Rick Wakeman a run for his money on keyboard showboating.

That sounds awesome.

Keytars are out! Segways are in!