FutureSynths KeySounds
What makes Justin Timberlake tick? Whether it's the first keyboards in his musical memories, the joys of the Rhodes, or mixing his mind-blowing arena show in surround, it's all about the sonic details.
by Stephen Fortner

    Let's face it: Justin Timberlake can do anything he wants, and that thing will seem cooler for it. This simple truth of the pop landscape should be obvious even to the haters — in fact, it's the reason they're haters. So when we saw him play a Rhodes electric piano back in the video for "Señorita," we raised an approving eyebrow. When we heard his synth-saturated, Timbaland-produced FutureSex/LoveSounds, we raised both. When we saw the FutureSex/LoveShow tour, we dropped our collective jaw — it's nothing less than a keyboard extravaganza. Far from pulling attention away from keyboards as many major pop stars' shows try to do, Justin flaunts them, and leaves no doubt that he, musical director Kevin Antunes, and keyboardist Charles Wilson III play their asses off all night. Not only are there at least a dozen keyboards onstage at any moment (most in active use), and not only does Justin spend almost as much time on a Rhodes or acoustic piano as he does on dance moves, but one of the highest energy peaks of the set is when Justin, Kevin, and Charles bring the funk on three Roland AX-7 guitar-style controllers during the bridge to "Sexy Ladies."

    At the San Jose, California show, Justin and Kevin graciously made time for a conversation with Keyboard editors Stephen Fortner and Michael Gallant about Justin's passion for keyboards and sound quality.

Stephen Fortner: I first saw you playing Rhodes in the "Señorita" video. How did you come to play it so much on this tour?

Justin Timberlake: We were in L.A., and I thought, "Man, I'd like to play some club shows. I'd like to take away all the production and just go in and rip it — just set me up a Rhodes and an acoustic guitar. We tried that, then it just became part of what we do.

SF: Is there a point in your life that you can remember first hearing a vintage keyboard or synth on a record, and then really wanting to make that sound yourself?

JT: Wow . . . probably when I first heard Quincy Jones' work with Michael Jackson. When I was six or seven, I got this Casio keyboard, and "Billie Jean" was the first song I picked out. You could split the keyboard, so I figured out how to go [hums the bass line] with my left hand, and [hums the string part] with my right. That's the first time I remember really paying attention to arrangement. Shortly after that, I went apes**t over the Eagles, which to this day is my favorite rock band. Hearing "I Can't Tell You Why," where Glenn Frey plays those intro chords on the Rhodes. You know, when you're young, you're like, "What is that?" That was the first time I heard a Rhodes, but the first time I heard a Rhodes sound really funky was "Me and Those Dreamin' Eyes of Mine" from D'Angelo's Brown Sugar album.

SF: His Voodoo record, too.

JT: Voodoo is a whole other level! The mix on that album, I feel to this day is one of the best ever done. Anyway, then I started studying where all of it came from — Stevie Wonder, Donny Hathaway . . . listen to Donny's Live — that's Rhodes played like it should be played! What's also a really cool effect for a Rhodes is patching it through distortion or other guitar boxes. Especially the way that accents the tones you get after you release the keys.

SF: The hammer letting off of the tine?

JT: Yeah, the little noise that almost sounds like a cat — rawr! On Macy Gray's latest album, I put a Rhodes through Line 6 Amp Farm on the Pro Tools system. I came up with a bass line, and started pounding on the Rhodes like I was playing a bass. A great use of distorted wah Rhodes is "Freetime" by Kenna, who's opening tonight. Chad Hugo of the Neptunes produced it.

SF: How about getting the synth sounds together for the tour? How did you duplicate or build on the sounds from the [FutureSex/LoveSounds] album?

Kevin Antunes: One example is that Justin had a cool idea for "LoveStoned," which was to take a patch called "V-Screamer" from the Roland V-Synth and . . .

JT: Love that, love that. I don't have the new one yet, [the V-Synth GT]. It's gonna change every producer up, I'm sure. Roland's the s**t, man.

KA: You're gonna want one. . . .

JT: [Laughs] I always want one! If there's a new synth, bing, I want it! Especially the V-Synth — the way you can mess with so many aspects of the sound at once. So this thing we did on "LoveStoned" was with the delay that the V-Screamer patch already had on it. . . .

KA: "We" didn't do it, he did it, and everybody should know that. This is why I wanted you to hear directly from Justin, because so many of the interviews he does are so based on other parts of his life that people don't see this side. They don't know the extent to which he gets involved in the music — for example, he's the one who asked me, "What's the bpm of 'LoveStoned,' so I can set the delay in the V-Synth?"

JT: I took the bpm, which is around 120, then I doubled the delay time on the V-Synth to 240, so it almost sounds like something [U2 guitarist] the Edge would play. It made it a little more drone-y, which live, sounds like what's on the record.

KA: A lot of artists don't think about how sounds from their records are going to translate into an arena setting, which is something we've been doing for years. We try to explain it to musicians — it's like, the more you play, the less the audience is going to hear. Because they can't hear all this and all that [guestures to represent different instruments] over screams, and within a mix that's loud enough out of the PA to be heard over screams. That's why we have so many unison lines, parts where we stop in sync with each other, sound effects, all that stuff — we need sonic moments that'll grab people.

SF: I've heard a lot of bands, major pop acts even, deal with that "live factor" by taking a tight, recognizable hit in kind of a "jam band" direction.

JT: Then everybody kind of loses the feeling — everybody's like, "Huh?" I have a really cool, broad audience, and they deserve to come in and — you know, if you go to the movie American Gangster, you want to see Denzel kickin' somebody's ass! If you go to my show, you don't want to hear "remix" versions of my songs. You want the versions from the record. Especially in this day and age when we have all this technology we use on the record. With a song like "Sexyback," or "FutureSex/LoveSound," or "My Love," the synths and their arrangement is such a part of the character of the song, that when a beat drops, and that opening synth pad or line cuts in, the audience recognizes that.

SF: So do you duplicate the sounds from the record exactly? Same keyboards, same patches, same samples?

JT: The thing is, when you're playing arenas, the sound's swirled around and mashed together by the room itself. So you have to think, is the patch gonna cut through and give people the experience they remember from the record? Kevin's so amazing at making sure this happens. Before we started rehearsals for this tour, I asked [producer] Timbaland, "Give me the sounds so I can get 'em to Kevin," then Kevin re-programmed those sounds into his rig and Charles' rig. Everything has to start out as close to the record as possible, then we ask ourselves what we can add to what the fan's ear already knows as the song. What can we add to give it more —balls, basically. That's where the "V-Screamer" patch came in on "LoveStoned." I thought, "This guitar sound on the V-Synth cuts through, and it cuts through in an arena."

KA: That one patch led to the whole transition from "LoveStoned" to "SexyBack," to the creation of a whole live arrangement. It moves from Justin's keyboard solo, where he uses the D-beam and X-Y pad to modulate the patch, to a sort of pulsed surround sound. This uses two sounds I programmed in MOTU Mach Five and tracked in Digital Performer — one moves clockwise, the other counterclockwise. At that point, the arrangement borrows from an '80s rock vibe for the intro to "SexyBack." Throughout the show, I love using opposites for dramatic impact: from nose-bleed volume to a complete stop where you can feel your heartbeat in "Like I Love You;" tempo maps to seamlessly make transitions from songs of various tempos for "Summer Love" going into "Losing My Way" with its ticking clock transition; morphing several styles into one song like in "My Love" where the song goes from an acoustic guitar/string intro, to the extended dance break, to the heavy rock unison line towards the end.

JT: I played Kevin a lot of the record as it was being mixed. We put it in the car and drove around Mulholland in Los Angeles, thinking about the upcoming tour, saying things like, "Okay, this will have to be a such-and-such kind of synth."

KA: From that day, I can remember hearing "SexyBack," "FutureSex/LoveSounds," and "Sexy Ladies."

JT: The production around those three songs is, like, new age meets Morris Day and the Time! [Laughs]

SF: I was going to ask about those, actually. When the three of you are going at one on "Sexy Ladies," wearing those Roland AX-7s, it's such an old-school, P-Funk vibe.

JT: That's what we were going for!

KA: Straight-up Morris Day, or Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. That's where it came from.

SF: What sounds and parts are each of you playing at that point? I'll stop short of asking for patch numbers.

KA: I'm controlling the V-Synth at that moment. Justin is triggering a Triton Studio, and Charles is playing a Clav sound, a rhythm part that's sort of inside of what we're playing, from one of his Fantoms.

JT: Kev plays a fuzzy bass patch. When we're all syncing together, I'm playing a synth lead off the V-Synth, Charles has the Clav, and Kevin has the fuzzy sound. It's perfect, too, because I'm on the high range, Charles has the midrange, and Kevin's kicking the low end. So you hear 'em all together, and it's so thick.

Michael Gallant: When it comes to the acoustic piano, which is a really rich sound with lots of overtones, how do you get that to work in the arena setting?

JT: Out of everything I play onstage, the piano is the biggest challenge as far as mixing goes. I give a lot of credit to Andy Meyer. He's awesome.

KA: Andy's our front-of-house engineer.

MG: Do you have to keep your playing sparse, or do you just sort of play what you feel?

JT: Well, we spend so much time in rehearsals working out the parts that would mix well. Our setup at Center Staging [a rehearsal complex in Burbank, California] was that we had a huge band room, and in the next room, Andy was there with his computer, his Digidesign Venue console, and four speakers, because I wanted to mix in quad surround.

KA: When Justin first said he wanted to do this concert "theater-in-the-round" style, I thought about the guys from MOTU. I thought, "Digital Performer can mix in surround," but wondered what the speakers would be like in a large, live setting. Justin simply said, "Make them go around in a circle." Roger Waters did surround in a more traditional sense, where the audience is facing the stage in the usual way, and he put surround speakers in the back. But I'm not sure who else has put the stage in the center and four speakers pointing outward at the audience in a circle. The last time you saw us ['06 in San Jose], you heard the words "future," "sex," "love," and "sounds" each coming out of a different speaker stack as the show opened. The acoustics in some arenas can really destroy that sense of direction. So this time, I gave time code for each word to our lighting director Nick Whitehouse, so he could hit each quadrant of the crowd with lights right when each word comes at them — a visual element that reinforces where the audio is.

JT: There's a real north-south-east-west component to the mixing of our show. We started mixing like that at rehearsals, and again, it was a matter of, "How do we make this song pop?" How do we give it, like I said before, the balls? For every sound effect, every patch we layered on, I said, "Use the surround panning to the maximum of its ability at certain spots."

SF: Speaking of Digital Performer, I saw the Macs and MOTU rigs under the stage earlier. With all the fuss about backing tracks these days, especially when something goes wrong, why use them? From what I heard at rehearsal, including the backup singers a cappella, this is one band that doesn't need them.

KA: The MOTU rig mainly provides SMPTE time code for the entire production and adds extra audio support. The stage has several moving sections — a circular center lift, four band pods, two outside lifts, and several scrims for video. Justin, [choreographer] Marty Kudelka, and I programmed these to elevate, slide, and rotate throughout the show using the time code from Digital Performer as the master clock source. On the audio side, DP playback does the surround effects, the orchestral strings on several songs, and the gospel choir in "Losing My Way" and "Cry Me a River."

SF: So, do the live inputs get mixed through DP to be in surround?

KA: For those, Andy has subgroups on the front-of-house console, which is a Digidesign Venue. He pans from one subgroup to another to achieve the same effect, but it's a different routing system than what we have coming off the MOTU rigs underneath the stage.

MG: During this show, you play "What Goes Around" on piano. That's the song that stuck with me the most from preview shows. Could you talk a little about developing the piano part?

JT: I was at my house one day on my piano, and was just messing around with it, as though I was doing it "unplugged." I played these chords, and then I came to Kevin and said, "Listen to this. This sounds cool to me, and I think it might translate well live." Even with the guitars playing the line they usually play.

KA: It's a cool-ass part of the show. It just stops the entire audience. Then they realize that he's playing, and they get caught up in it. That part has become so fluid for him that now he's changing it night after night. It's not usually the little eight-bar groove before the verse that I come in. My keyboard riser is facing somewhere else at that moment, so if he's playing something that's real cool then, I kind of wait an extra eight bars, look over my shoulder, and I can see he's smiling!

SF: The finale, "Another Song," also focuses on Justin at the piano.

JT: I always wanted to end the show by just sitting down and playing, with everything stripped away. Especially after giving such a . . . specific production with so many visual elements. At rehearsals, we started jamming on "Another Song" with the acoustic piano, and it became the obvious choice.

KA: I think that's one of the best parts in terms of a focal point in the concert. Before that, we've built up the show so hot, then it gets so quiet in the arena, and everybody is watching him play that one part. Then that little line turns into the entire arrangement of the song. All from one piano.

SF: When you and Timbaland were working on FutureSex/LoveSounds, what were the major influences and inspirations?

JT: Timbaland had mainly made hip-hop before we worked together, with Aaliyah being an obvious exception. So what I'm about to say may sound out of left field, but seriously, go back and listen to the record and it'll make more sense. We were listening to a lot of Pink Floyd and David Bowie! I was digging on early Talking Heads and was like, "What drugs was that guy doing? I don't want the drugs but I want the high!" For "SexyBack," Tim and I were thinking, "What if I was Bowie, and you were David Byrne, and we did a duet? But let's be the 2007 versions of that." Of course there was the hip-hop influence, but I always wonder what Elvis or Sinatra or anyone else might have sounded like if they'd had the influence of hip-hop, or of a Quincy Jones.

SF: How do you feel about people seeing you as a hip-hop or R&B artist, which they tend to because of your work with Timbaland?

JT: Frankly, that's a consequence of my putting out two records in six years — only 25 songs or so for people to reference to me. I think, though, if you listen to FutureSex/LoveSounds compared to Justified, you hear a drastic change in the sonics. "SexyBack," "My Love," and "What Goes Around" are my favorite singles because I think we've managed not to sound quite like hip-hop, not quite like pop, not quite like rock 'n' roll. I just sound like me. What I really love about FutureSex/LoveSounds, though, is the synths. I love the staccato synths, the big, wide, ambient synths, the leads, all of it. And the next one'll be even more different.

SF: Sonically and musically, do you have a vision for the next one you want to talk about yet?

JT: I do want a lot of guitars on it, but keyboards will always be a huge element of what I do. They sound so big, and there are so many things you can do with them. And I don't have any rules. I think the mission is to keep taking what you loved about what you just did, and bring a little of that forward into something new.

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