As they now appear to be the biggest live band of 2024/5, I’ve been working on a Coldplay song for the past week - Viva La Vida:
I’ll be posting my gig file and rationale over the weekend in case anyone is interested.
A few samples of how it sounds just now below. As always, I play everything live with no quantisation or editing, so it’s not perfect!
Cheers!
Part 1 - String quartet and solo cello
Part 2 - Dreamy pad and bass
Part 3 - Audience choir and strings
Part 4 - Drum samples
Are you kidding, everybody is interested 
Viva La Vida - Coldplay.gig (7.2 MB)
The first rackspace, Strings + Solo Cello, introduces the fundamental 9 beat motif that opens the song. Although I can play this spread across two hands, I run out of fingers to play the Cello theme on top, so I opted to use the MIDI Chord Maker to map chords to single notes. This frees up the right hand to play the theme on a blended string line with Tina Guo high in the mix. The Session Strings 2 patch is actually out of the box and is almost identical to the record if you hold the key down. But if you’d rather play the rhythm yourself, it works in that context too. I’ve also used the Sitala sample playback plugin (which I love due to its simplicity and straightforward UI) to map bass drum, school bell, and timpani triplet samples which I created. These will be moved at some point to the separate instance of GP that I run for my drummer (who uses MIDI triggers on his skins).
The second rackspace, Strings + Spectral Pad was the most difficult to create. Took about a day of trial and error. Coldplay often add a lot of Eno-esque ambient layers to their music which adds something different to the standard rock band format. The pad (which comes in after the first chorus) needs movement, swirl, ambience and above all, playability. My .gig file coincided with the release of Pigments 6 (free upgrade) so I feature that here for the bass (which my bass player will probably replace when we play live). I decided to sequence the rhythm to make things easier using BlueARP (free!). Augmented Mallets (also free!) provides texture and movement, and I’ve used Keyscape for the played dulcimer part. Shimmer reverb is a big part of the ambient toolkit, so I’ve added that too (interestingly didn’t realise that Valhalla Delay has this and some other reverbs too).
Finally, I’ve used the excellent and fun Audience Choir Kontakt library by Jacob Collier (free!) which worked out far better than I’d anticipated. Both the attack and release needed extending to make it more realistic, but we are going to have fun with this at our next gig when the singer sings on top of that. As usual the .gig file isn’t perfect and it does require a lot of plugins, but I hope some folk can get something from it. My main takeaway from this is that MIDI Chord Maker is not just for players who are beginners at the keyboard, it’s a valuable tool that seasoned players can also use to solve real world problems when trying to reproduce multi-tracked recordings live.
Let me know what you think. Always interested to hear feedback. Thanks, Stephen.
