Wichita musician Bryce Abood is probably best known in music circles as a drummer. But for his latest release, “In House,” he’s turned to keyboards, namely ones that his father, Peter, had many years ago and had long ago discarded.
Intrigued by the vintage instruments, the younger Abood had them refurbished and then set about composing and recording on them as a kind of tribute to his father.
Abood recently visited the KMUW studios to discuss “In House” and more. The EP is available via Bandcamp.com, including as a limited-run cassette.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
There are a lot of people who know you primarily as a drummer and this is a project that primarily involves keyboards. Tell me about that.
Most of this gear on the record is stuff that my dad had laying around that I fixed up with some help from some guys from Phil Uhlik Music and Mike Metz [Thesis Audio]. We refurbished these two synths, the Ensoniq Mirage [1984-88] and ElectroComp EML101[1972-82]. The Casio that’s on there is one that I’ve had for literally my entire life. My grandpa gave it to me on I think, the day I was born.
It was a way to work in this gear that’s been around and in my family for years. I’ve always noodled around on that one Casio, so I have little bit of experience working out a melody or bass line on a keyboard instead of an actual bass guitar or something. I just kind of sat down and used the keyboards that I had.
Was this gear just sitting in the corner of your dad’s basement?
One of them, he’d actually been storing at a friend’s house for years and then the friend was moving and said, “Hey, Peter, I don’t want this thing anymore.” My dad said, “Hey, Bryce, do you want this?” The other one, he was going to throw it away. That was the EML, which Mike Metz fixed. It was in pretty rough shape. I just thought it looked so cool. When I took it from him years ago, I was going to just use it as a movie prop or something because I knew it wouldn’t work and that it would take a lot of [effort] to get it up and running. It was way too cool looking to throw away. That one was sitting in my room for over a decade. After a certain amount of time, I said, “I’m going to fix this up. I really need to do that.” It was just taking it to Mike Metz and giving it to him and letting him do it.
I wonder if you can describe these keyboards physically and talk about some of the properties they have. Different synthesizers had different sonic possibilities.
The EML is a panel of probably 30 or 40 knobs that are vertical, and then in front of you horizontally, you have the traditional looking black and white keyboard. But so many of these knobs and settings are designed to make the keyboard work as a sound producing instrument and not necessarily a melodic keyboard. You can do things like change a 12-note octave to 60 notes being contained in the same portion of your keyboard. It goes up just a fraction of a step as you climb the entire scale of the keyboard. There are lots of things that make it completely irrelevant if you have piano training, even though you’re looking at a piano keyboard. My dad had to come over and show me how to do it. Halfway through, he said, “I don’t know why you’re using this piece of junk; you should probably just get some newer gear.” I said, “No, this is cool!”
He had to show me, “You produce sound with this thing and then after it’s a blanket sine wave, then you can adjust that. Here’s an oscillator, here’s a filter.” There’s like a work order on the chain of events on the panel that makes it easy to follow once you know what you’re looking at.
The Ensoniq Mirage was originally a floppy based sampler. All the sounds were on floppy discs. If you wanted drums, you’d find the drum floppy and flop it in. When I got the drive and all the discs, everything had been degraded. That was the [keyboard] that had been stored in the garage for years and years. As I was putting in these discs, trying to get it to work, I realized that [it] wasn’t going to be stable to use as an instrument. The guys at Uhlik helped me. I ordered a floppy drive emulator, then we took the drive out and put in the emulator, so now there’s a bank of sounds on there.
The problem with that is that there’s literally a thousand sounds on there, and they’re labeled A1, A2, A3. You don’t know if it’s drums or vocals or whatever. I spent six weeks writing down [what each setting contained]. I’ve got this notebook [with all of that now]. [Laughs.] A couple weeks into it, I thought, “I probably should have been doing this on computer!” But, yeah, I’ve got a notebook, and I wouldn’t be able to use that keyboard without it. Navigating all those sounds is way overwhelming unless you have some kind of guidebook.
So that’s gear that goes back to at least the ’80s.
There’s one, that drum machine, that’s newer than 1987, the year I was born, but everything else is that or before.
Did you use vintage gear to record the music as well?
No. I used Audacity and recorded it on my laptop with a $40 interface made by Behringer. Even though the music is kind of groove and loop based, I didn’t loop anything. I played it live. If you hear something that [sounds like a loop], I was actually playing those repeating notes. It was an old school mentality because that’s how you’d record on analog.
Has your dad heard the EP?
Yeah, he has. I think on an emotional level and the level of, “I see value in my son paying tribute to me through [my old] gear,” a sentimental level, he totally gets it. On a technical level, I think he thinks, “There’s way better gear out there, there’s way better recording software out there, you should really look into getting some new stuff!” [Laughs.]