Roland was a proud participant in Madonna's 2004 Re-Invention Tour (see below). Now the pop queen has returned to the road with an all-new show for 2006. Keyboardist Marcus Brown teamed with Roland and Bruce Forat [www.forat.com] to create a one-of-a-kind Roland synth rig for the tour.

The main synths in Marcus' new rig are customized all-white V-Synths, V-Synth XTs, and Fantom-X7s. He also added a brand new SH-201 to setup. “I’ve already programmed a full bank of patches for it,” he says of the SH-201. “I love it! It’s warmer than other analog-modeling synths I've used, plus the onboard FX just add that extra something. Also it has a nice internal type of compression that I like. It’s almost as if the oscillators squash when you play more than two or three notes. I think it’s wicked … very old school.”

Feast your eyes on this rig!

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Madonna's Re-Invention Tour Six Roland Synths Hit the Road in High Style

In 1989, her mantra was Express Yourself. Five albums, five Grammys, four major motion pictures, and four books later — Madonna has chosen Re-invention as her theme.

Fitting. More than any other pop star in recent history, Madonna has come to symbolize fashion transformation. From bubble-gum punk to bleach-blonde material girl, goth queen to ghetto-fabulous cowgirl, Madonna is never the same woman twice.

Musically speaking, the same could be said. Since the beginning, Madonna has surrounded herself with an ever-evolving cast of innovative collaborators. Nile Rodgers, Jellybean Benitez, Patrick Leonard, Shep Pettibone, Babyface, Dallas Austin, Nelle Hooper, William Orbit, Guy Sigsworth, Mirwais Ahmadzai, Mark “Spike” Stent, Stuart Price, and many other behind-the-scenes magicians have lent their golden touch to her CDs and tours.

The results speak for themselves. Madonna has sold over 250 million albums and is second only in Top Ten singles to Elvis. Her tours have set records as well, and her popularity has never waned. Today, two-plus decades since “Holiday” and “Lucky Star” first crackled airwaves, Madonna continues to sell out everywhere she appears. This year’s Re-invention tour played around the world, from L.A. to Lisbon, and it packed venues to the rafters at every stop.

No surprise — when Madonna tours, it’s the biggest and best in all regards. Her productions are massive. Her team is straight from the A-list. And that leads us to Marcus Brown and Mike McKnight.

Marcus Brown, lead keyboardist, joined Madonna in 1998 for her Drowned World tour, and returned to the chair for this year’s outing. Before joining Madonna, Marcus circled the globe with The Verve, among other trendsetting pop and electronica artists. In 2003 he toured as the keyboardist with Ozzy Osbourne.

Mike McKnight has been Madonna’s “Wizard of Touring Technology” for over a decade. He often resides in a cockpit beneath the stage, where he plays additional synth parts and drives the auxiliary digital audio. He’s the heartbeat of the show, to which all stations sync — instruments, effects, video, lighting. In addition to Madonna, Mike has programmed for and/or toured with Mariah Carey, U2, Whitney Houston, Shakira, J-Lo, Earth Wind & Fire, and many others.

Mike and Marcus demand the very best in gear. When it comes to equipment, they have zero tolerance for failure. Mike, in particular, has built a career on glitch-free performances. A harmless technical hiccup in the studio might be small potatoes for most musicians, but it spells death for Mike McKnight. He demands perfection from his equipment, and has remained in the good graces of pop’s most-demanding superstars for over a decade because of it.

For the Re-invention tour, Mike and Marcus brought in a batch of brand spankin’ new Roland Fantom-X7s and V-Synths. RUG was there from the initial rehearsals at Culver Studios to the final, full-stage run-throughs at the L.A. Forum. Here’s the story of how each musician got the gig, how they prepped for the tour, and how they helped bring this cutting-edge extravaganza to life.

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Getting the Gig

A person doesn’t just fall into a high-profile tour like this. What steps led you to getting the gig with Madonna?

Mike: Back in 1990 I was taking piano lessons from John Novello, and one of his students was working in Freddie DeMann’s office — Madonna’s manager back then. She gave John and I the heads-up about the auditions. John went in to audition as a keyboardist, and I got hired as a programmer/offstage keyboardist/sequencer guy. I got the gig mainly on the word of mouth that I could play keys offstage and sequence extra musical parts. I had just finished Earth, Wind & Fire before her tour geared up.

Originally it was supposed to be only a few background vocals, and repetitive keyboard and percussion parts in the computer — an Atari 1040 ST running Dr T’s sequencer. I was hired basically during the first week of band rehearsals, and I took the gig, since it looked like I wouldn’t have to go nuts with sequencing all of the parts from the multitracks. Wrong! During my first meeting with her she made it very clear she wanted everything in the computer. Back then all I had was an Atari 1040 and six 8MB samplers for playback, so while three were playing, three were loading up for the next song. It was nuts, but I pulled it off, and have been there for every tour since.

Marcus: I’d been working in England with Richard Ashcroft from The Verve. He’d done the support slot for Madonna when we she’d come to town a few years prior. Also, Steve, the drummer in Madonna’s band, had worked with Richard, so there was a bit of a connection there. When she was putting the band together for the Drowned World tour, my name came up, and that’s pretty much how it happened. No audition; I didn’t have to stand there and play Chopin or anything like that [grins]. I think it was more or less taken for granted that I could play.

With this kind of job, you have to get on with the people you work with, so a lot of it is about style and personality as well. We all came from a similar place. I was familiar with Steve’s work, and [musical director] Stuart Price’s as well, so it all came together nicely. I basically walked in and we got on with it. We started right away.

Describe steps you went through leading up to launch of the Re-invention tour.

Mike: I began programming for this tour while I was out on the road with Mariah Carey — just putting the files in order, making sure I had all the parts I needed. Stuart Price and I got to L.A. a week before rehearsal to begin putting together the arrangements. Stuart is a very good remixer and musician, and M expected him to “re-invent” many of her big hits from the ’80s and ’90s for this tour. I jumped in where I was needed, but Stuart did most of the arrangements. My main job was to put all of the possible versions into the computer for fine-tuning and rehearsal with M. She would come in and sometimes love the direction and sometimes would suggest other directions, and she usually wanted to hear her “vision” right away, which made my job “interesting” at times, but we got through it. She’s tough but fair, so it wasn’t too bad really.

Were strong sight-reading skills required for this gig?

Marcus: We haven’t typically had the music written out, unless something got thrown at us quickly, in which case we had a pile of those guitar chord-books for grabbing a basic chord structure.

The main way we’ve approached the tracks is … Stuart creates a sort of remixed version of a song in his studio, and plays it for Madonna. If she likes the version, he separates the parts into a multitrack session, and then we stand around and say, “Okay, I’ll do that bit, you do that line there, Steve can handle this part. etc.” We’d basically strip away as much as possible from the mix, and perhaps only leave a couple of little things here and there that we couldn’t physically do. Then we start getting sounds together and rehearsing the song.

How have your rigs evolved over the years?

Mike: I started with an Atari computer, but before that I had a Commodore 64 that I used in my bar-band days. I used a Roland MC-500 as well with Earth, Wind & Fire in 1987–88. I made the switch to Mac in 1991 with an SE30, then a Mac IIci, and so on to my current rig with two G5s and a G4. At first I had tons of synth modules and keyboards on the road, but I’ve cut it down to a Fantom-X7 and V-Synth.

Marcus: My rig has gotten smaller, which is inevitable. But to be honest, I sort of like that. The rig I have currently is the best I’ve ever owned. I don’t really need anything more than that. It’s condensed, but it does the job. And there’s something a bit more hands-on about it, which I enjoy. I actually took one step backward compared to my rig last year, and that’s the removal of the automated mixer, which I replaced with a little analog desk. With the old desk, I found that I couldn’t grab things on the fly as easily, or do random effects. Now I’ve got three or four returns which are always running to all of the keyboards, so any sound that I want can be sent to any one of three delay lines, which I have control of manually.

What Roland gear has come in and out of your stable during that time?

Mike: I’ve taken just about everything Roland has made on the road and it has always performed flawlessly. Roland has always made gear that’s very roadworthy. The Fantom-X and V-Synth are very solid.

Marcus: One of my favorites, and I still have it, is the JUNO-106. I use it a lot for bass lines. If I’m doing pads with the JUNO, one thing I like to do is to record one side of the pad in one pass, then do another pass with the other side detuned. Then record another pass an octave higher, and mix them all together.

Other gear … TR-909s, -808s, more recently the MC-505, which I enjoyed working with. It was great for getting records started, just getting a vibe going. Also the JD-800, can’t forget that. I just loved programming that thing. All of those faders and sliders — just great!

You both added Fantom-Xs and V-Synths to your rigs for this tour. Describe how you are using them.

Mike: The Fantom-X is being used mostly for strings, piano, and pads. I love the orchestral cards Roland has put out; they’re so expressive. The Fantom-X’s “Ultimate Piano” patch gets a lot of use as well. The V-Synth is used more for synth bass and some analog-style synth lines. I’ve barely scratched the surface with these two instruments.

Marcus: They’ve been great, and the way we’re using them has been evolving throughout the tour as we learn more. Things are constantly changing on those two machines, and I’m adding things every day — especially on the Fantom-X, which is amazing. I really like it a lot. It has a great bank of core sounds, so you have a huge palette to choose from. I’m amazed at the strings — they just sound incredible, and they play so well. That was the thing … it’s not just the case that they sound good, but they actually feel good to play. So it got that job straight away. But because of the aesthetics of the stage, and how we wanted to do a section of the show out front with just one keyboard, we chose the Fantom-X because it can handle it all. It has all the sampling capabilities inside, the sequencer in case we needed any of that, controllers, everything we needed. So I dropped some sounds into it for those songs, did some editing and resampling, and it’s been great. It’s so easy to use. Everything is really obvious on it. Chopping up and manipulating the samples is really easy.

As for the V-Synth, it’s being used primarily for some lead sounds and for a bunch of effects, whooshes, sweeps, things like that. I’ve also loaded in some samples from the records, which I encoded so I can manipulate them. One of the great things about the V-Synth is that once you’ve encoded the samples, you can use the controllers to make them go wherever you want — forward, backward, up, or down — and they sound great because you’re manipulating the time as well, which are things that you can’t do with a straightforward synth. And the COSM [TB-303] filter is amazing. There’s some incredible stuff in there.

There’s a V-Synth lead sound I’m using in “Crazy For You” which is a type of pad that’s doubling the part that Monte’s playing on guitar, and I’ve got the D Beam set to rise up and down in octaves. It’s got loads of delays and reverbs on it, and I use the Beam to sweep up and down in octaves, which sounds great when it sweeps, and it looks quite cool as well [laughs]. Also, there’s a sitar part that I do in “Hollywood,” where one of the dancers comes up on a lift doing a traditional Indian dance, and using the D Beam makes the sitar go very erratic in a few places which I really like. There’s another great patch in the V-Synth that I’m using in a few places called “MemoryMoke,” which is a good analog starting point that I’ve modified for a few songs like “Material Girl,” “Burning Up,” and some of the other ’80s songs we do. Massive sound!

Mike, You’ve been Madonna’s “right-hand man” on every tour for 10-plus years. What things have you learned that are invaluable to your survival on this gig?

Mike: Just to be prepared for everything. I have to have several versions of each song ready, as well as to be constantly thinking ahead to what she might ask for to spice up the arrangement. It’s important to have backups in several places, and to keep every variation ready just in case she decides to go back a version or two. In short — just think ahead and pay attention.

Final thoughts about life on the road with perhaps the most famous woman in the world?

Mike: Madonna is the ultimate touring experience; nobody else even comes close. She hires the best people, and the tour is run like a well-oiled machine with none of the stupidity I’ve become accustomed to on other tours. She works everyone very hard, but she expects as much of herself as anyone else on tour, so it’s cool. It just doesn’t get better than this.

Marcus: It’s one of the best jobs in the world, without a doubt.

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Concert Photography by Neil Zlowzower; Marcus/V-Synth photos by Al Dugas; Marcus/Fantom-X7 photo by Peter Wiltz; Madonna posed-photo courtesy of Madonna Management.