“Normal life? What’s that?”

Vince Jones flashes a sly smile as he navigates the labyrinth of backstage corridors at New York’s Madison Square Garden. For more years than he can count on his arpeggio-wrangling fingers, places like this have been his stomping grounds — even more than his home base in Vancouver or his apartment in Los Angeles. Piano and organ player, synth wizard, engineer, producer, mixer, sequencer; touring musician, studio musician, working musician — Vince Jones is used to living out of a suitcase.

Only these days, his suitcase is getting smaller and lighter.

Featherweight Champ

That’s because these days, he’s relying more and more on his PowerBook G4 laptop loaded with Logic Pro 7 — both as an instrument and production studio — to get him through his gigs, which range from arena tours with songstress and fellow Canadian Sarah McLachlan to sessions with the likes of Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode, the Spin Doctors and fabled producer Matt Wallace (Faith No More, Maroon 5, The Replacements).

“Between our last trip to Australia and this tour, I’ve probably written more music, had more little song ideas, than I ever have before. That’s because I find this technology so inspiring.”

“For playing live, I’ve replaced all my old hardware samplers with just a PowerBook running the EXS sampler in Logic,” he says as he savors a pre-show Niçoise salad prepared by McLachlan’s traveling chef. “It sounds a lot better. It’s a lot easier to use, to manipulate sounds, add reverb, all those effects. It’s a heck of a lot lighter. And,” he adds, “I can check my email between shows.”

Performance Proven

The roadworthiness of Vince’s PowerBook-and-Logic rig has proven itself again and again on McLachlan’s recent tours of Australia and North America, allowing him to leave behind two heavy pieces of rack-mounted hardware, plus one keyboard. “That’s a considerable weight off the shoulders of my keyboard tech,” says Jones.

“It still surprises me that this little laptop replaces all that gear and gives me even more flexibility in performance. We never play to a sequencer. Sarah didn’t want to sacrifice that spontaneous vibe. Yet we also need to be faithful to some of the sounds on her CDs. Logic lets me do that. I can trigger samples that I’ve lifted directly from her records, as well as play everything from solo cello to distorted piano. Logic does it all — and the fidelity is just amazing.”

The PowerBook-Logic setup also allows Jones to tailor the sound to the venue, a godsend considering no two places are exactly alike. “For example, we were playing some horribly boomy arena the other night, and our front-of-house tech was getting killed by frequencies at around 300 hertz,” he says. “He told me about it, we inserted an EQ plug-in, dialed down those particular frequencies, and zap, in ten seconds, we’re done. At the sound check, before every performance, we have the capability to sculpt the sound from my PowerBook just as easily.”

When he goes into the studio, “sometimes I just show up with my PowerBook in a backpack,” says Jones. At a recent session with producer Matt Wallace and singer-songwriter Kyle Riabko, “a whole lot of the stuff I played — the Clav, the Wurli, the Mellotron — came right off the computer. I whipped out the laptop and Matt was just laughing — he was blown away.”

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