 For as long as humans have made music, we have been dissatisfied. For hundreds of years, musicians have searched for the next sound, the next evolution that could change everything. And more often than not, the solutions and foibles have been basically technological in nature. Technological advancement in music has always been a fraught process. Sometimes it's an overt success with lasting impact, like when Beethoven decided to add trombones to the orchestra for his 5th symphony. And sometimes the influence of technology in music leads to mixed results. Just ask any Rush fan about the 1982 album Signals. I've been privileged to perform in some of the world's most famous concert halls, but it's always just been me and my clarinet and anywhere from a few to a hundred or so colleagues. Traditional classical music, and I do mean the stuff written by dead white guys, is, by definition, unplugged. I've always been interested in the interplay between technology and music. Electronics found their way into the symphony orchestra as early as the 1920s, and after all you can't put on a great rock show without a backline and the support crew of techs and engineers it requires. The great jazz drummer Freddie Gruber once said, you can have a beautiful body and look marvelous, but if you're not breathing, it's not alive. So what happens when circuits replace physics in musical performance? Is it still alive? Martin Yee is a drum tech based in New York City. Without people like him, rock shows simply don't happen. Martin's been on the road with some of the biggest acts in the world, including my personal favorite Rush. His job is to bridge the gap between technology and talent. So you've been doing this for a long time. You've worked with Rush. You've worked with Rush. You've worked with Rush, Sting, Seal, all kinds of people. How was technology different when you first started helping people with their drums and now? Right after the 90s, we went through this whole thing of sampling and triggering. Check one two in the house. Right on. We're ready to go. It's how you embrace it just like anything else. Can you use technology to make a drum kit simpler? Oh yeah, absolutely. Tony Royster, for example, he shows how to incorporate in a basic five piece kit all the sounds you need just by changing samples. So do you ever worry about the long term impact of technology on drumming or music in general? Because it's sort of the responsibility of players and musicians to keep the humanity in the music making. I feel it's always humans playing the instruments. It's always, it's kind of like the whole Matrix thing. Either you let the machines take over or you, or the humans take over. I spoke with Kenny Arnoff about it. He's one of the top session players ever. And I asked him, so do you think it's ever going to change? He's like, I don't think it's ever going to change. If they want me to play, I'm still going to play. Technology in music advances because it has to. Musicians demand it. Jordan Rudis, the keyboard player from Prog Rock Mainstay Dream Theater, has always been interested in what the future holds. He even develops his own music making apps and has worked with Rollie on an instrument called the Seaboard Grand. I spent my whole life learning how to play the piano. I went to Juilliard when I was nine years old. My upbringing was very, very serious. As a matter of fact, I was a closet improviser. I would go and I'd play my Beatles songs and my jazz music. I'd bring the kids into like a practice room and say, shh, don't tell anybody, but here we are. Right. But really, my focus was to be a closet pianist. Learning the piano was everything. But as I got older, I started to become more interested in sound and synthesizers and different possibilities. Eventually, I ended up leaving Juilliard and looking for other ways to express music. When you first started using technology to augment or enhance or to evolve what you were doing with acoustic instruments, were there new skills that you had to learn? Did you have to make sacrifices or was it a whole new world? I can remember vividly when my high school friends brought over a Moog Sonic 6 keyboard to my house and also my mother's face when she saw my friends carrying this because she was like, what is that? It was like the devil has arrived at our house. But we brought it into my room and I plugged in headphones at the time. And it's a traditional kind of keyboard, but it has a pitch wheel on it. And the pitch wheel discovery was major. I started to move the pitch wheel and I went, oh my god, I think my brain literally exploded. And I realized then and over the years how important pitch is and amplitude. The two very basic things, controlling amplitude in real time and controlling pitch, is a major part of expression. Growing up with a piano, which is you play the note and you're not changing the pitch. What you play is what you get, which is so different than so many other instruments like a guitar where you play a string and you can add vibrato or a wind instrument like a clarinet again or a saxophone or anything like that. Pitch is such an important part of music making. When you think about guitar players, you look at Jeff Beck. Steve Vai. You think about their vibrato, the speed of their vibrato, the way they attack the note, the amplitude, it's everything. It creates the style. So here we are with the C-board and as a keyboard player, I'm able to do that. I sit here today in front of a Steinway piano and this C-board is really pretty amazing. Although I've been involved in the exploration of sound and all different kinds of ways to make sounds and starting out as a classical pianist, this is really the first time that all that exploration has come to a point where I can really use my piano skill and take it to another level musical expression wise. So tell me at a technical level how this instrument works. The C-board is basically poured silicone and underneath the silicone are these sensors. So when your finger lands on the surface, it's actually triggering the sensor that's below it and the sensor will recognize position and will also recognize pressure. So as I press into it, it knows that. And what's really cool and very different than traditional synthesizers these days is that every note that I play is an independent message that goes out. You can bend one note, not the other. You can play a three note chord here and then just slide down with this one. This enables keyboard players or anybody who is familiar with the keyboard as a concept to add the kind of expression that we would want from a musical instrument. Technology is at a point right now where we can really measure touch and the experience and make it so sensitive, really as sensitive as we want and it keeps on getting better. It's important for people to realize that technology is no longer this kind of distant robotic type of thing where it lacks expression. We're actually becoming closer to the organic, physical, real human experience with instruments like this than ever before. And that's the whole point. Instruments exist because the human voice alone has never been enough to create the sounds musicians hear in their heads. That's really the beginning and the end of the lifelong struggle that is music. And no matter what, technology can't replace collaboration. Music has always been a conversation that happens among human beings. It's as true now as it was 300 years ago. Artistic genius alone cannot overcome physics. But genius is often the impetus for technological breakthroughs. The keyboards that Jordan Rudess plays today exist because composers like Mozart and Beethoven needed more from their instruments, and their aspirations and achievements motivated craftsmen to push the envelope. Technology isn't a substitute for musicianship. It's a tool. Electronic instruments have potential, maybe even great potential, and who knows what the next truly great Canadian power trio will come up with. But in the end, technology makes noise. And turns it into music.