Lifeson: We’ve always used rear screen projection and on our last tour we used video projectors, which is cool. This time around it’s basically the same set up but we’ve been dealing with a new company that are building up different types of animation software. All the visual stuff is secondary to what we do, but because we’re so trapped by our technology it helps. We’re running keyboards and samplers and playing guitars and singing all at the same time, so we tend to get a little stuck in certain areas of the stage. So the visual stuff enhances the whole presentation and gives the audience something to look at.

Is it difficult to reach back into the vaults and bring out old material when you were in a certain emotional place when you wrote it, and you're no longer there now?
Lee: It's always a little tough at first if you're playing something that's quite old because you do have to get back into that headspace. When we first started playing "2112" in its entirety, there were parts where we'd just start to giggle because there's sort of a naiveté about that piece. But a funny thing starts to happen. You start playing it and you start remembering that it was really fun to play and it really worked. So you just kind of go with it. And I found that one of the most enjoyable parts of the last tour was playing the "2112" suite.

Have you had any onstage disasters that haven't been your fault?
Lee: Sure. We're so technologically wired because of all the keyboard stuff we have, that things can go really wrong. We produce a lot of keyboard vocal effects on sampling and sequencing devices, and all these things are rooted to foot pedals that we all play. It's like the bass pedals of an organ, for example, that are MIDI'd and sent to a series of sequencers so you can basically program a keyboard chord to one note or a keyboard effect to another note or a guitar effect to another note. So you can add some of these things you would find on an album while you're playing. I play some of those, Neil plays some of those and Alex plays some, and they're rooted to one general area, and it's the most finicky technology of all because sometimes it goes horribly wrong or the guy who's loading the sequences loads the wrong sound. So, you go to hit a big horn shot or something and something totally different comes out. Sometimes you've got these strange sounds coming out in the middle of a song, which is really weird. And some of these sequences are eight or nine note keyboard parts that repeat over and over again, so if you hit that pedal at the wrong time, everything's fucked.

Lee: That's where you have the front of house sound engineer and the monitor engineer on alert. If one of those accidents happens, they've gotta pull it out of the main sound system and out of our in-ear monitors otherwise it drives you crazy and you can't even hear what you're supposed to be playing. One time we were playing in Phoenix and before the show there was a big voltage surge that blew out all of the keyboards and all of the sequences, so we delayed the show for an hour trying to get them fixed, and we couldn't so we just said, "Fuck it, let's just go on." And we altered the set a little bit and changed some of the arrangements. I had a keyboard and I ended up playing it with the same sound for every song, and nobody seemed to care. It came off fine and that was a good confidence booster because in your own mind you make it seem like these things are so important, and maybe to the audience they're just details.

Since you've started there have been so many developments with technology. Do you like to stay on top of the latest developments?

Lee: Yes because the whole keyboard/sequence aspect of it changes so fast and we've been doing it since before it was invented. We had this idea in the late '70s to use a remote keyboard system that we could trigger with foot pedals, and that was before MIDI was invented. We were working in Wales at the time at a studio in Rockfield. And the tech guy there was an electronic wiz. I had this big Oberheim keyboard at the time, and I had originally hired this company to build me this remote system, but when they delivered it to Europe it didn't work. So I had this guy in Wales working on it trying to reinvent the wheel for weeks. He kind of got it working, but it wasn't very successful. And then, of course, when MIDI came out it solved all our problems. So we kind of do have to reluctantly stay on top of all this stuff even though your hair can go prematurely gray from using it there's always something that's not going to work right.

Lifeson: We’ve always tried to keep up to speed with technology and the changes in the technical end of the show presentation. But the formula for putting it all together and the process still seems to be pretty much the same. And we’re fortunate that we’ve always had great people working for us. Many of them have been there for decades, and we’ve come to trust them. They make a lot of those preliminary decisions on what we want to do and get the information together. Then it’s just a question of making final decisions.