Welcome to another Weekend Warrior profile, where we chat to a fellow keyboard player on the front lines of music making. If you’d like to be profiled yourself, here’s how.
This profile is on David Jameson, who aside from being a veteran weekend warrior, is also the man behind Gig Performer, one of the most respected pieces of software used by players using soft synths in their rigs. With a Ph.D. in Computer Science, David brings a unique blend of technical expertise and musical talent to their work.
Band Names
Reelin’ In The Years
Beyond The Wall
The Security Project
What genres / eras does your band cover?
Reelin’ covers Steely Dan, Beyond The Wall is a Pink Floyd cover band, and The Security Project covers the early prog music of Peter Gabriel.
How many years have you been playing gigs?
Started 54 years ago, stopped 43 years ago, and started again 15 years ago.
What inspired you to become a keyboard player in the first place?
Started classical piano as a 4-year-old child, gave it up around 7, and got interested again in my teens due to my interest in technology. Toured in Ireland for a couple of years, then gave it up and went back to college.
What is the keyboard rig you currently use when gigging?
These days I’m totally software based using Gig Performer which was developed by me and a colleague after bad experiences with other hosts. Performing is stressful enough without having to worry whether your gear will fail.
My rig:
Weighted controller – Studio Logic SL88
1-3 Roland A800 Pro light-weight controllers, depending on band
GT Mastermind MIDI Pedal Controller with generic sustain pedal and Mission Engineering expression pedal
Eigenharp Alpha
iPad Pro running Mobile Sheets
iPad running Lemur (OSC controller)
RME UFX Audio Interface – configured as follows:
Reelin: 4 stereo output pairs (so FOH has more control over individual sounds when layering)
Beyond and Security Project: 3 stereo pairs, one channel for subs and effects, one for click track
Wifi Router
Intel MacBook Pro from 2019 running 10.15. (yes – my live performance machines are old and solid, I have never found a need to update them)
MiPro IEM Transmitter/receiver
JH Audio molded inear monitors
Most used plugins:
Acoustic Piano and Clav: Pianoteq
Rhodes and Wurly: Lounge Lizard
Hammond: Blue3
Pipe organ: Organteq
Moog: The Legend
Prophet: Repro
Mellotron: M-Tron Pro
DX7: f’EM
Sax: Sax Brothers
EQ: EQuilibrium
Effects: TH-U, Outer Space
For other general sounds (strings, choirs, effects and interesting sounds)
Kontakt 6
Absynth
Reaktor
Is there a piece of gear you’re lusting after?
I used to lust after many synths, but I have everything I need in my studio, and none of it gets used for performance.
Aside from keys duties, do you have other roles in the band?
No, thank goodness.
Most memorable gig you’ve played and why was it memorable?
1) Last summer we performed The Wall in its entirety at a theatre complete with Broadway actors and 30 kids who sang the second verse of Another Brick — an amazing experience – to be repeated in Summer 2025. I completely orchestrated the songs that needed them (Nobody Home, Vera, The Trial) and performed them using Kontakt with typically about 9 “instruments” loaded for the orchestral parts and then I played the piano parts live.
2) On tour in Europe with The Security Project in 2017 — lived on a tour bus for a month — discovered that all the stories you hear about rock bands on tour are true – (and to protect the guilty, I really can’t repeat any of them here).
Has anything ever gone spectacularly wrong for you at a gig that you’re happy to share?
When I first started touring with the Security Project (which was initially extremely intimidating as the other members were rather famous – Jerry Marotta and Trey Gunn while I was – and still am just a serious amateur) I was using an L-shaped rig. We were performing at The Tralf in Buffalo and we got to a song that I had to start by triggering a loop.
I pressed the key and nothing happened. I pressed it again, still nothing happened and I started to panic. To fill in the time, Jerry started talking to the audience and Trey came over to me to calm me down and think methodically. I rebooted my computer but that didn’t fix it.
I suddenly realized what was wrong. Obviously with lots of practice I was using muscle memory to automatically press the right key. But I had forgotten that at the Tralf, the entrance to the stage was right where I had to put my keyboards and so to leave room for the others to walk on to the stage, I had rotated my rig by 90 degrees. So I was pressing the key on the wrong controller. I quickly pressed the key on the correct controller and the show continued.
But I felt just like a deer caught in the headlights with the entire audience watching me fail. I was quite mortified and it took me about a week to get over it.
Are there songs you love or hate to play?
In Security Project, as well as Gabriel’s early material, we also played a few of the songs from the last Genesis album before he left. So I loved playing “Lamb Lies Down on Broadway”, “Fly On A Windshield” and Back in New York City. I had also created a medley of older Genesis songs which we often used to open the second half of our show.
My favorite was when we played Biko and I used my Eigenharp to play the bagpipes solos. I had two sets of bagpipes configured as separate instruments in Kontakt and had one set slightly out of tune relative to the other. The result was a massive and overpowering solo
With Beyond The Wall, again using the Eigenharp, we do Welcome To The Machine and except for the guitars, I’m performing all the other parts. Great fun to play.
I do not like playing “blues” songs or other straight “rock ‘n roll” – I’m always interested in their being some “color” to the songs.
Who are your keyboard player inspirations and why?
Keith Emerson was my hero, both as a player and as a composer….so sad when he died. The solos that Tony Banks wrote for Genesis were often spine tingling and I learned many of them. Other players that moved me tremendously where Chick Corea (in Return to Forever) and Joe Zawinul (in Weather Report)
In earlier days I was a great fan of Wakeman (because I loved Yes) but I eventually got bored as after his first three solo albums, everything he did was essentially the same.
Fantasy time: you get a call from your favourite band of all time, asking you to play keys next week at their gig. Who is that band and how would you pull it off?
Genesis (of course) – ready to play Supper’s Ready, Cinema Show, Firth of Fifth, One For the Vine, Blood on the Rooftops and of course those three Lamb songs I mentioned above.
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
I don’t know how to answer that one. The best advice I ever got was from a manager at IBM Research where I used to work who said to me, “don’t focus on a goal – focus on a direction”. So although I have some accomplishments for which I’m proud, I never want to be at a point where I just “stop”
Assuming I’m still in good health, I hope to both be playing, continuing to develop products and learning new things. I believe strongly that without change there is only stagnation and I hope that I will never get stuck with nothing new to do. I always strive to improve.
Your 5 Desert Island Discs
Genesis: Selling England by the Pound
Holst: The Planets
Yes: Close to the Edge
Weather Report: Heavy Weather
ELP: Brain Salad Surgery.
Anything else you’d like to add?
Although I’m a serious amateur musician, my career background is in research – I have a Ph.D. in Computer Science. Combining those two activities is what allowed me to participate in the Gig Performer project. That project got started to “scratch an itch”. I had started using a well known host from a fruit company but had too many issues. I then developed a prototype host using MaxMSP and toured with that for a couple of years. But newer releases of Max itself were much buggier and I couldn’t get Cycling74 to address the problems. So we decided it was time to build our own plugin host, with a key focus on stability on stage. If I had a dollar for every time I saw a post that said, “Great gig last night, computer only crashed once”, I could retire.
On a whim, we decided we would see if we could sell it and although it started out slow, we’re at a point where we easily compete (and often surpass) the competition on both reliability and functionality so very happy with how that project is going — and it keeps me out of trouble!
