Using Atmosphere live on the ‘Rockstar’ reality show and more…
Paul Mirkovich has a lot to say when it comes to using synths. He’s a pro both live and in the studio, as a musical director, keyboardist, singer, programmer, arranger, composer, and songwriter. He’s worked with musical icons and rock stars including Peter Gabriel , Shawn Colvin, Billy Preston, Cher, INXS, Anastasia, Whitesnake, Janet Jackson and many others. Paul is currently the musical director for the house band on the musical reality show “Rockstar: Supernova” - which is on Tuesday Nights on CBS.
“I use Atmosphere live in the Rockstar band with the Muse Receptor. Atmosphere is one of my main softsynths,” Paul told us. “Last week I had to play a live arrangement of the Who’s ‘Baba O’Riley’, so I split the keyboard and had two instances of Atmosphere with delay and effects and played both the organ-like parts, left and right hand. It worked and sounded great.”
He added, “The three virtual instruments from Spectrasonics are always among my go-to instruments. They’re well thought out and powerful. I edit Atmosphere patches all the time. It’s very immediate. I get a lot more out of it that way and can bring up patches that I created right on the Receptor for live performance.”
When not on stage with the TV cameras rolling, Paul is called for other musical creations. “I do a lot of other projects too. I just finished creating a dance break for Pink’s European tour that’s coming up. I did 90-percent of it with Stylus RMX. I used the Trilogy instrument for bass sounds on the break too. I just sat there with the choreographer and went through RMX loops and found ones that worked, edited them to fit and gave them the track. Now they’re choreographing to it.”
Having worked with hardware synths in the years when the industry was young, Paul has a long view of the industry and synths. “I’ve always loved Eric Persing’s work with Roland. You can hear that legacy of quality in Spectrasonics instruments. The sounds are so good. Every hardware synth company seems to have a voice, or at least used to. Spectrasonics has a unique and different voice than other softsynth companies. I would even compare Eric with Bob Moog and Tom Oberheim with the contributions he’s made in sound design and now with the design of Spectrasonics softsynths, especially Stylus RMX. Someone has to be the creative center in designing instruments, and RMX is really amazing.”
