Jordan Rudess is a rarity. A rockstar virtuoso who happens to be a keyboardist. Not just an ordinary one but one for a band called Dream Theater.
Dream Theater are the kings of progressive rock. They have a stellar line up which includes James LaBrie on Vocals, John Myung on Bass, John Petrucci on Guitars and Mike Portnoy on Drums. Any other keyboardist would just be a dot compared to these guys. But Jordan Rudess is a special case. He is quite simply a magician with his fingers on the keys.
Jordan Rudess has been giving lessons for quite a while now. Even thou he offers keyboard lessons and I am a guitarist, I can clearly see now why he is so highly rated.
Jamplay and Jordan Rudess teamed up to offer lessons on Jamplay. I was lucky enough to attend one of these online sessions. The sessions involved us students posting question to Jordan, which he would answer back by video conferencing. Seeing Jordan Rudess play is seeing a master at work. This guy has the gear and the talent. For someone as good as he is, he is very humble and nice as well. He is a great teacher, explain everything in a very simple and precise way.
Jordan was playing on his Korg OASYS, which let me tell you, is a magnificent beast. That thing has a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 CPU and up till 2GB of RAM.
I was lucky enough to have my question answered by Jordan, which was incidentally the first question he answered. I asked him about practice routines. He replied that was a very good question. He went on to say that practice was very important and gave some tips on practicing.
After that we had a little jam session where Jordan would play notes on his keyboard and we at home jammed along. Quite not your average jam session, but with video conferencing, the sky is the limit.
Even thou we only heard what we and Jordan played, it was simply unbelievable.
Its not often that you get to meet your heroes who inspire you to do what you do. Far less, that your hero is even bigger than you dreamed.
Jordan Rudess is far far bigger than you can ever imagine.