After the tragedy last Thursday, I spent the entire weekend listening to my Michael Jackson records. I always was a fan, but I'm not sure I ever appreciated all the great keyboard playing on his albums as I did this weekend. Of course the list of players is legendary, but no one is trying to take over the spotlight. No real solos, or fancy parts, just amazing arrangements with great synth programming with the limited technology of the times. And did anybody here ever notice the groovin' synth bass lines in songs like Thriller, Black or White, Man In The Mirror, PYT? Man, those bass lines are killin'!

Any other keyboard work that impresses you, fan or not?

PS. No BS comments about production costs, MJ's personal life, ghost writers, etc. This thread is for real musical discussion of some of the greatest pop music of all time. Any kind of music analysis, whether praise or criticism, is welcome, just please keep the OT comments for another thread. Thanks.

Cool thread!

I love the synth bass and chord stabs (Jupiter 8?) in Billie Jean, the rhodes on She's Out of My Life and the synth bass on The Way You Make Me Feel.

While I didn't pay much attention to his music post-Thriller, I did love the bass line in Man In The Mirror. I can't articulate exactly what it was, but there was something it did on the IV - #IV° - V in the chorus (aka the "no message could have been any clearer" part) that was really tasty.

Slightly off topic, since I'm primarily a guitarist, but I covered the song "Off the Wall" last night at a solo show (not an easy song to do solo). I was somewhat surprised at the degree of complexity for a dance/pop tune that's not really apparent at first listen. There are series of various Maj7 and dominant 11th chords in there. It was actually pretty fun and semi-challenging to play.

That's a quintessential Rod Temperton writing. Rock With You, Lady In My Life and Baby Mine all have those kinds of changes. My cover band and I were jamming out some MJ stuff on the weekend in between sets just to pay a small tribute. I broke into Rock With You on the rhodes, and without getting too far into verse, I stumbled before finding the next pass more than a few times.

Is that really a Jupiter 8? I've covered this song with a few corporate bands, and never was able to emulate those chord stabs properly. I think the last time I played it I used my PC3 and layered a string patch with some choir or something. I guess if you're right I should have used a Jupiter patch from my V-Synth. I'll try this next time.

Did you ever notice how much bite the rhodes tracks on the Thriller album have? never was sure how they got that sound but it's so low in the mix yet it cuts and you really here all the articulations clearly. I always loved that.

I love the KB parts and bassline in Heartbreak Hotel which was a Jacksons tune.

Also, the KB parts in Lady in my Life, Can't Help It, and Butterflies are nice.

Remember the Time and Unbreakable are slick too.

The KB players on MJ sessions are some of the baddest cats in the world.

There is an art to knowing when to play your a** off and showing restraint i.e. *right* parts to play.

Rod Temperton, from Heatwave to working with Quincy Jones is an under-appreciated songwriter/composer/musician. Yet, that guy constantly delivered the goods.

Similarly, not enough can be said about what Greg Phillinganes added to the mix. That cat is the ultimate accompanist.

In fact, Phillinganes' KB playing was the highlight of that otherwise wack BET Awards show I saw last night.

It is no wonder the Toto conglomerate went from session musos to a successful band in their own right. Every last one of the cats played in a number of styles. Ultra-bad musos.

Reading the liner notes of MJ records truly reveals the magic behind them. Even the *simplest* parts are being played by cats who just knew how to make it better.

Louis Johnson plays bass guitar on "Billie Jean".

Unsurprising... I thought Temperton's music writing was fantastic in his earlier band, Heatwave (like "Boogie Nights"). The guy was obviously coming from a sophisticated composition background.

+1 Man does BET suck the big one!. I turned it off after Neo's rendition of Lady In My Life with Greg Philanganes. The worst part about that, is that I'm sure half the audience and most of the viewers didn't even know that was an MJ song. I was watching it with my girlfriend who's black AND an MJ fan AND has excellent taste in music and she didn't know it was an MJ song. How awesome was the sound of that Rhodes from the Oasys? Round, warm, and totally filled up the mix over the TV set.

Yeah with you on TOTO. However, I always prefered them as session cats then as a band. Aside from a few really good songs, most of their stuff was pure cheese IMO. Toto to me was the best example of the whole being LESS THAN the sum of its parts.

Yes he does. But many of those songs have synth bass overdubs on top of the real bass. Billie Jean is one example. If you listen closely to the intro, you could hear a lower octave F# which is unmistakeably a synth.

What a great song! Although, because of a Elvis-related law suit, the song is now called This Place Hotel.

Yeah, Greg Philly made that OASYS Rhodes sing last night.

In fact, I've always felt the OASYS was the best Korg KB. Unfortunately, the price tag and fact that I couldn't use it as a mode of transportation was a deal-breaker.

Keep in mind that in order to get paid, bands had to make radio-friendly records. There was no Jam band scene.

Toto was no exception in coming up with a winning *formula*. During live performances, they would display their real musicianship.

No mention of Jimmy Smith's MIDIed B3 solo on "Bad" yet?

The synthbass doesn't double the bassline, but juxtaposes it by playing 1/8th notes on the first and fourth 1/8 note of each measure.
The signature bassline is LJ's bass guitar, but they've killed off all the top end with EQ. Or that's what it sounds like to me, anyway.

What's more, just about the whole world seems to think it's Jeff Porcaro on drums, but it is actually Leon "Ndugu" Chancler.

edit:
My bad, further on the song you can hear a synth playing along with the signature bassline. It starts when the synth strings come in. I stand corrected.


As for keyboard parts: the entire "Thriller" album excelled at innovative and soulful synthesizer work, but I think that David Paich and Jeff Porcaro really did something groundbreaking with "Human Nature".

And of course, the synthlead on the "Rock with you" intro. Very soulful, very Q. I believe that was Greg Phillinganes, but I don't have the album here.

Greg "Mouse" Phillinganes, what a masterful player.

You need to go back and listen again. There was a lot of stuff there I didn’t care for, but man, when they hit the mark, they took the bullseye and the whole target down with it. If you doubt it, here’s a few suggestions, with a few hits thrown it (because you’ll find them to be a lot deeper musically than you think):
Goodbye Girl…Rosanna…Africa…Afraid of Love…99…Tale of a Man
Pretty much the entire Minefields album is killer. Whether you’re looking at it from a performance aspect, songwriter aspect, synth programming or vocal angles, those songs are stunning, and rival anything on the MJ table, and arguably surpass it (in those terms). Again, I’m not a huge fan, but I came around a bit when I really listened to the stuff. Like I said, a lot of Toto I find unlistenable, but then there are those songs that just slay.

Speaking of MJ bass lines and session players...

I once knew a bass player who had an awesome Bad Decision story. He said at one point he had the choice between doing an international tour with a pretty successful, well-known R&B act, or recording an album with another pretty successful, well-known R&B act. He chose the tour.

The album he turned down? Thriller.

Then again, I later found out he was generally believed to be a pathological liar, so who knows...

Oh dude, don't get me wrong. I have the first four albums on vinyl plus livefields and a few compilations. The stuff you mention is among the stuff that I really like, along with Hold The Line, Georgy Porgy, etc. However, the bad stuff is REALLY bad.

I've always and always will be a HUGE fan of them as musicians. Jeff Porcaro's drumming with Steely Dan, Boz Scaggs, Michael McDonald, Michael Jackson, etc. is among the best session drumming you'll ever hear. And of course his half-time shuffle on Roseanna is legendary. David Paitch is a great songwriter and excellent piano player, whereas Steve Porcaro was much more the synth programmer guy in the band. Lukather rocks on guitar of course, but I always liked him when he held back and just grooved. His clean split coil guitar on Human Nature is magic, as is the rest of the Toto guys on that track. Coincidentally, I much prefer the songs where Lukather sings than the Bobby Kimball stuff. Beat It is another great example of how amazing they were at laying down rhythm tracks.

Haha, the guitarist playing in my band in Kenya claimed that his cousin used to play with Mozart!

I was waiting to see who would mention that first. I just listened to it this morning, and man it's killing. Somehow I can't imagine Jimmy Smith with his notorious attitude to accept playing a synth organ solo and not a real B3. It rocks nonetheless.

Dude, no doubt he's lying. Louis Johnson played bass on ALL of Off The Wall. So naturally they recruited him again for Thriller. In fact, most of the team from Off The Wall is also on Thriller.

Yeah, except John Robinson. Strange, as he is all over Q's other work.

I thought the OJays tribute with Tyrese, Johnney Gill & Trey Songz was fantastic! Wasn't that into the Tevin Campbell intro, but the trio was great. They sounded very old school R&B, very masculine.

skip to 1 min 40 seconds

But yeah Philliganes is a beast.. He records(gospel I think) at the same studio I do mixes in here in Atlanta, actually Conyers GA. When I found that out while visiting a friends session, I decided to make that place home.

Yeah, a lot of overlooked Toto material -- especially Fahrenheit, which features Miles Davis! I hadn't thought about the commonality between Toto and MJ before, but there's obviously a lot of cross-pollination due to the session players.

I had noticed the doubling on "Billie Jean" a while back but decided to keep it simple by doing the entire thing on synth bass -- although when we had a full-time keyboardist, I did it on bass guitar. It's an interesting choice to just double certain accent notes, and part of the genius of those sessions.

But I've played that song one too many times by now (live, not on the record player). It's worn a bit on me. Even so, it's clever how the reptition is broken up in different ways throughout the song. What a way to milk one riff!

Tale of A Man is one of my favorites---never released until Toto XX because 'Dirty Lowdown' evolved from the breakdown and they were too similar. ONLY David Paich could make a Db/D work as an ostinato. That's graduate school composition ability.

Veering back on topic, when I listen to Thriller and Off the Wall, I experience it as Michael Jackson playing with TOTO and in that sense I love it all the more. In that sense, perhaps, the OP's comment about Toto being less than the sum of it's parts is cast in a different light: as a band unto itself, TOTO was slick, inspiring and awesome, but as a studio BACKING BAND behind an artist like MJ, they could sell tens of millions of records and change the direction of pop music.

I had the pleasure of recording at Westlake studios a year or two ago and all I could think about was that these were the rooms where the Porcaros, Paich, Phillingaines Quincy and MJ himself made that incredible music. Awesome!

Getting back on topic further, I love all the keyboard parts of these tunes.

I've played a good amount of them live, and as a lone keyboard player in a band it becomes a gymnastic exercise performing these tunes. ESPECIALLY if you cop the vocoder parts on PYT! It's fun as hell though.

Delving into that tune especially, there are a couple parts that I really dig. One is the constant upbeat of what sounds like an M1 piano (it's obviously not as that didn't exist) that percolates through the whole verse. What is that anyway? I'd like to know. Another cool part is the synth lead that comes in at the beginning of the 2nd verse. It does that figure and then it's repeated up an octave. It doesn't get in the way, but it's a bold part and not something you'd hear in modern production as most producers would simply say that it distracts from the verse.

And you know those dreaded "solo projects" from prog-rock bands?

Funny thing is, Steve Lukather's "Luke" from 1997 is actually my favourite work by him! Strong songwriting, solid playing, incredible breadth of material.

BTW I think David Paich is the son of Marty Paich isn't he -- the guy who produced most of Mel Torme's greatest early records (I think Shorty Rogers was involved in those as well). So he probably got good schooling even before conservatory. :-)

I was always surprised that the QJ team didn't contribute to the pop genre much past their MJ collaborations. I guess that really wasn't his bag and he made an exception due to Michael's talent.

Sort of like a lot of cats sat in with The Beatles (e.g. Billy Preston) who might not normally hang with that crowd.

Yes David is Marty Paich's son.

And TOTO surely did contribute to Pop beyond MJ although not necessarily with Q involved.

Speaking of Luke's solo projects, check out the now out of print I believe but I may be wrong 'Santamental' album from the early 2000s I believe. It has Greg Bissonette on Drums and Jeff Babko on keys and some of the grooves are just beautiful and classic! My favorite is 'Angels We Have Heard on High' which is classic L.A. groove.

PYT has always been one of my favourite MJ tracks. That synth line you're talking about is just awesome. The synth programming for this album was so immaculate that it never even gets close to being in the way of the vocal, yet sits in the mix so perfectly that you could hear the whole melody. I also love that Princy synth line in the choruses which acts as an answer, sooo cool. And of course that groovin' synth bass.