Over the course of six albums, Bring Me The Horizon have become one of the biggest rock bands in the world, with their varied back catalogue taking in everything from deathcore and metalcore to electronic rock and pop.
Prior to a show at London enormodome The O2 Arena, Arturia recently caught up with BMTH’s keyboard player Jordan Fish to check out his current live setup.
The centrepiece of the rig is Apple’s MainStage, the performance-focused software that’s designed for using software instruments in a live environment. This is controlled by a pair of Arturia’s KeyLab II MkIIs and a BeatStep, all decked out in white to give the setup what Fish calls a “Stormtrooper vibe”.
Describing himself as “a good musician in some senses,” but “not particularly a good player,” Fish believes that other skills are more important. “I don’t think you necessarily need to be held back by your piano or keys ability, you know what I mean? I think your creativity is the most important thing,” he says.
Warming to this theme, Fish encourages you to “Mess with software synths, experiment, and just enjoy what you’re making. As long as you can make some music that you think is cool, and people connect with it, then that is way more important to me.”
When playing live, Fish likes to assign chopped-up bits of sounds he created in the studio to pads, and that’s where the BeatStep comes in.
“I do a lot of one-shot button stuff,” he explains. “When I’m singing, rather than messing around on the side, I’ve got stuff in front of me I can faff around with.”
Discussing the KeyStep MK II, meanwhile, Fish says: “The feel is nice, it’s kind of like a middle ground between a synth-y feel, and it’s still got a little bit of weight to it.”
Oh, and those stickers on the keys? Fish admits that they’re there “partly because I’m awful,” but awful so he has a reference point when he needs to quickly jump from his drum pads to playing on the KeyLab.
You can hear more from Jordan Fish on the Arturia website.
