Snow Patrol: Pushing the Possibilities
Their fourth album, Eyes Open, has sold 1.5 million copies in the UK and over 800,000 in the US, making it the biggest selling British album of the past 12 months. They’ve been nominated for the Grammys and the Brits. They’ve sold out arena shows around the world. And their epic single, Chasing Cars, was recently voted number one in a Virgin Radio poll to find the top 500 songs of all time.
Snow Patrol have arrived.
We caught up with the band’s keyboard player, Tom Simpson, and his keyboard technician, Paul Eastman, to discuss Snow Patrol’s tool of choice for studio mixing and live performance — Apple’s Logic Pro.
“Logic has always been this great tool I dive into now and again”, says Simpson. And it doesn’t stop at Logic. All the band own Macs, which they use to share tour schedules (“our manager sends us dates using iCal, which we sync with our iPods”). They also use GarageBand and iChat AV to collaborate on new songs.
“A lot of the guys use GarageBand to record guitar parts. That’s what I love about the Mac. It’s a new way of working because you can have a little distance from each other”, Simpson explains. “Macs are really powerful machines”.
He also respects Logic Pro’s power and “sense of space”, as well as its ability to work with ambient sounds. “Logic’s got some great virtual instruments in it. I really love the EVP88 pianos”.
Snow Patrol are currently engaged in an extensive US tour, and Logic’s along for the ride. At the beginning of 2006 — when Eastman joined as Simpson’s keyboard technician — the band dumped its old hard drive-based playback system and started using Logic for live performances.
There were many reasons to make the change, not least the relative complexity of editing tracks on the fly when engaged for fixed-duration television appearances. When we met the band, they had just edited down the chorus for Chasing Cars in order to fit the song to the schedule required for their live appearance at the Brit Awards. Rather than exporting the track from a hard drive to a computer, editing it, and saving the result back to the drive, Logic enabled them to prune the track to fit the TV schedule in just a few minutes.
Despite Logic’s advantages, moving to a software-based setup also posed some challenges for the band, and for Simpson in particular. “It was a big jump for me because I was playing Roland samplers in live shows, and at first it felt awkward playing an instrument I couldn’t physically touch”, he remembers. “We now use a Roland Controller keyboard routed to virtual instruments with effects within Logic. You can just sculpt the sound you want”.
Snow Patrol are an enduring live act, spending their early years following rock’s classic tradition of touring around the UK in the back of a van. Their focus on live performance means they demand software and hardware that won’t fail during a show. “Logic’s a tool I can rely on. It helps me ensure I won’t let the audience down”, says Simpson. “You need to be able to concentrate on playing your parts in a song and not worrying about whether your keyboard’s going to fail”.
