Sometimes the hand of fate feels more like sleight of hand.

Most eager young bands knocking around from gig to gig in a transit van would be horrified at the idea of their lead guitarist pulling a Houdini during the Quest for the Great Record Deal. But if the whirlwind success of Keane is anything to go by, perhaps they should reconsider.

Since Keane’s debut album, “Hopes and Fears”, hit shelves in May 2004, it has sold more than four million copies. The band has played to capacity crowds around the world, headlined major festivals and supported stadium rock giants U2 during their sold-out European tour. No mean feat for a bunch of boys from East Sussex, who, after their lead guitarist left the band in 2001, staged a stealth attack on the charts using only drums, keyboards, vocals and a fair measure of ingenuity.

“Applying the capabilities of a program like Logic to more classic band sounds is a blend that opens up a world of possibilities that I’ve just barely scratched the surface of”, says keyboardist Tim Rice-Oxley.

Born Again

While Keane’s transition from guitar band to piano-driven pop powerhouse was partly a result of circumstance, songwriter-keyboardist Tim Rice-Oxley, drummer Richard Hughes and vocalist Tom Chaplin couldn’t have planned it more brilliantly. For Keane, necessity was the mother of reinvention. And as Rice-Oxley tells it, Apple’s Logic Pro played a major role in that reinvention.

“When we were a guitar band, I was playing the bass”, says Rice-Oxley. “But when there was a big hole left by the absence of a guitar, I decided to go back to playing piano. Obviously, that meant I couldn’t play the bass and piano at the same time on stage, so rather than interfering with the chemistry of the band, we decided to use Logic to play back the bass parts”.

Preserving that chemistry resulted in a pared-down, three-piece lineup that still manages to produce big sounds both inside and outside the studio. Both as a composition tool and an aid to live performance, Logic Pro gives Keane a creative edge it might otherwise have lost the moment it ceased to be a traditional four piece.

Catching Lightning on a Laptop

Rice-Oxley’s electronic experimentation starts long before the band takes the stage at major venues such as Wembley Arena. “The live stage, obviously, is the final incarnation of what we do”, he says. “The initial stage of writing a song is something I always do just on a piano or a guitar. But as soon as I get an idea for a song, I’ll start working on it in Logic”.

For a band whose sound relies so heavily on emotional urgency, reducing the lag time between idea and execution makes for more honest songwriting. Composing electronically helps Rice-Oxley preserve for posterity those magic moments when inspiration first strikes. “When you do a demo for a song, you’re often trying to capture the initial inspiration”, he explains. “And those initial ideas are often the best ones. So for me, it’s brilliant being able to catch those early on”.

Next page: A Logical Solution