In the shows I've seen (MSG and NJ), Renato does a solo of "Sometimes It Snows In April."

He appears to be playing only one keyboard, yet you can hear strings underneath..... I know you can layer sounds on a keyboard but the strings sound like chords being held, and his hands are moving up and down the keyboard. And noone else is on stage.... so wondering how he does this???

On a similar note, at the NJ show I noticed that at the end of the Purple Rain encore, aven after everyone left the stage, you could still hear the strings/piano tinkling that sounded like the record. So are they playing a DAT of that?

I was thinking the same in Las Vages-BUT someone told me that THE GREAT ERIK NARWAL has been playing the strings from a lower part of the stage.Prince hooked up with Narwhal for the 1st time at CLUB BLACK back in March.The only problem is Narwhal has a problem he is super SHY-HE CAN NOT STAND IN FRONT OF LARGE GROUPS.
I hope this helped u !

ravewithdawn said:

Yes thanks! Who is Erik Narwal though? A keyboard player?

That wouldmake sense cuz I was watching Renato's hands and it didnt' seem like he could've been holding those string chords.

And I guess he's playing out the pruple rain outro too after one leaves the stage?

On a certain DVD, you can get a good look at Renato playing the muzak-al intermezzo. First off, he starts
a tape with the PR-lines. There might be backgroundmusic on that tape, but not necessarily.

Then he plays the instrumental, with piano and, probably, layered strings. He did this very regularly on
the ONA (after)shows, which made perfectly sense, seeing as he was the only keyboardist.



[edit]
I don't know about the great Erik Narwal bit, one must have a serious ego problem to have a third keyboardplayer hanging about just to fill in some strings during a costumechange.

Heh.
[This message was edited Fri Jul 23 8:08:15 2004 by deMatthijs]

Haven't seen the performance you're referring to, you can get sustain pedals that will sustain whatever your playing at that point in time, but not what you play after it. So he could be playing the chord, sustaining it, then playing piano without sustaining it, then repeating this when he changes chords.

Just a thought.

L

Could be a little Pro Tools help from offstage.

[b]Like i stated before-Prince met Erik Narwhal at the Club Black shows.Since then Mr.Narwhal has been Playing from under the stage.Check Narwhal out 2nite at the after show!

GaryMF said:

No...The back stage keyboardist is name K.Joseph Smallwood.
He first hooked up with prince back in the 80's. He was a studio musician for the late great Clare Fisher, whom provided a lot of, if not all of his strings and background sounds. He is a great studio man from Washington DC.

All such things can be easily accomplished by having samples loaded into a keyboard or rack sampler on or off stage. Once the samples are set up, he can simply push a key to playback specific sounds, such as the tinkling at the end of Purple Rain. Also, keep in mind that there is no real limit to the length of time a sample can last. If you have enough RAM and hard drive space a single push of a key on the keyboard can trigger a sample that lasts several minutes. Therefore Renato could have pushed a key to trigger the string chord sound, then played the other keyboards along with it to match the rhythm.

This is one way such things could be done. Or as another mentioned it could be programmed into Pro Tools and played back, or--God forbid--taped and played back as a tape (which Prince seems so adamant about dissing when others do it).

..who knows, I hardly remember... I was waiting for Prince to come out and play