Dave Cohen
Open Labs Exclusive Artist Interview
- by Carson Barker, Open Labs Staff Writer
The B3 organ is Dave Cohen's first love, his weapon of choice, his Holy Grail, if you will. Cohen has had his hands professionally on guitars, pianos, and other chunks of musical wood, but the B3 is his one and only. Why? Because according to Cohen, the B3 has a soul of its own, and a sound that no other instrument can touch.
"It's just powerful, more so than a piano," says Cohen. "A piano in a big room might sound as huge as you want it to sound, but there is that unmistakable sound of the B3 that can just cut through anything, and scream when you want it to."
Cohen's fondness for the B3 started with the classics. Jazz masters Billy Preston and Jimmy Smith, to name a few, introduced Cohen to unique possibilities of the B3. The passion drove Cohen to take up the B3 as a musician, and after high school, he attended Humbar College in Toronto, Canada, in the jazz program. As his musicianship progressed, Cohen was approached by country rock singer Johnny Reid, and Cohen put college on hold to start a U.S. tour playing B3, keyboards, and piano with one of his favorite artists.
He hadn't even finished college, and Cohen was on the road, living his dream. But there was one problem: the B3.
Hammond B3's are about half the size of a baby grand piano, throw in a huge pair of vintage Leslie speakers and it will almost weigh as much as one. For this reason, B3's are expensive to ship, so traveling musicians must make do.
"Living in Nashville and playing with a Canadian artist, a lot of the time we're flying to gigs. When you do that, you're basically renting gear, you can't fly with all of this organ stuff. I was sick and tired of, 'I need this piano and I need a B3.' So the B3 would show up, would be run down and would shock you. You never know what you are going to get."
Add the frustration of rental gear to having a smörgåsbord of keyboards and synthesizers on stage, and you have the makings of a musician melt down.
"From song to song, I changed patches on every single board," Cohen says. "It was a mad scramble to get sounds happening on every song, so I'd be ready for a piano intro with synth pad underneath and with my left hand I'm playing the Nord lead. It was just a big pain in the ass."
Enter Cohen's Gen 3 MiKo TIM. At the very basic level, it houses all the sounds of the B3, Rhodes Piano, and every synthesizer that Cohen could ever need. That eliminated the faulty rentals, and lack of transportation problem. Now, Cohen knows that his gear will always be at the show, will function 100% correctly, and he can take it on the plane thanks to his custom MiKo case.
"I have a custom-built, lightweight flight case for it, so it comes just under 73 pounds, which is fantastic," says Cohen. "The case has no plywood and it's good and strong. I was really nervous the first time flying it, but now I don't think twice."
On the road or in the studio, Cohen can cram and stack every sound, note, or sample into his MiKo, however odd they might be.
"I've put down a number of keyboards, so instead of having five or six keyboards on stage, I'll have two or three, and everything in Karsyn is programmed where I want it to be. So, if I want my Rhodes sound to be going through my Fender Twin, and I want my B3 sound to be going through my Leslie, I can do that. When I do a session, I just have the MiKo. I walk in with every sound on the face of the earth. The good thing for producers is say they want the sound of a car going 75 miles per hour and turning left for three seconds, I'm like, 'Yeah, I got that sound.' If they want a bell hitting something in a room that's this size and this kind of reverb, I'm like 'Yeah, I can do that.'"
The last, and probably most ironic perk of Cohen's MiKo, is that now that he doesn't have to stack keyboards, he can do his other favorite hobby, which is stacking blocks.
"I have Tetris installed on my machine, actually," Cohen says. "My guilty pleasure is playing Tetris during those long sound checks. There's a lot of waiting involved, and I'm a real Tetris man. People get a kick out of that, seeing Tetris on my MiKo."
Artist Q&A
Q: You have been touring with your MiKo, how is that working out?
A: I just got off the road doing a bunch of dates with Amanda Marshall, my Miko's premier run. It was just amazing. I was worried about flying with it, but in a little under a month, it's been on more than six flights, flying across Canada and the US (which must be the equivalent of 10 world tours, based on the condition of the flight case!) and it performed FLAWLESSLY.
Q: How has your MiKo done on stage?
A: After about a week of programming/tweaking and a few remote sessions with my new best friend Dave Williams (Open Labs Tech Support), I had the whole show ready to rock in Karsyn. Which is really amazing, considering I had no experience with computer music whatsoever before this. I'm now running four busses, separate outs for piano, etc. going to a D.I; Rhodes, etc. going to a sweet sounding Fender twin; strings/synthpads, etc. through expression pedals; and B4 going to my Leslie ... I've managed to do everything I needed to ... and cut down my number of keyboards on stage!
Q: How about on the road?
A: It's now such a breeze to travel, considering most backline gear is often unpredictable. Now I dont care ... they're all just midi controllers to me! Everything is in house ... not to mention I am now a road musician and session player at the same time ... I've actually laid down keyboard tracks ON the bus between gigs!
Equipment Used
Purchased MiKo Timbaland Special Edition (Gen3)
Artist Links