Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame Ceremonies Superstar musicians. A legendary hotel. A music director with impeccable credentials, and a Yamaha Pro DS4 Disklavier®. Only the very best would do for the most recent Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies, held this past March at New York’s Waldorf Astoria. As this year’s honorees - including the Talking Heads, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and the Ramones - rehearsed, musician Paul Shaffer sensed that an essential piece was missing. As leader of the house band at nearly every Hall of Fame induction since 1986, he immediately decided that the piano already on stage wasn’t right. “It was especially important that we have an excellent piano, because I would be playing behind Gene Pitney on ‘Town Without Pity’ and Brenda Lee on ‘I’m Sorry’ — two of the most famous piano-triplet records in the history of rock and roll,” he explains, referring to the plink-plink-plink patterns that are central to countless classic rock ballads. “But we were having trouble with this particular instrument, the triplets were coming through, but not the bottom end. I was getting a little upset, so the people at the show said, ‘Don’t worry. We’re getting another piano tomorrow.” That, of course, turned out to be the Disklavier that Shaffer played at the show. “It was like night and day,” he says. “It sounded great immediately. The whole range was right there — not just upper range for the triplets, but the bottom as well. Isaac Hayes did ‘Shaft’ that night, and there’s quite an important low-end part at the beginning, doubling the bass. And the piano really came through there.” The DS4 made it easy for Shaffer to rock the Waldorf late into the evening. “When you mike an acoustic piano and expect it to compete with rock and roll instruments, you never know how it’s going to turn out,” he says. “But this was a great piano because I knew that I could dig in and get results.” |
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