When played live, the distortion effects are achieved by running the CP70 outputs through Line 6 Pod XT Pro multi-effects units - the Crystal Ball riff sound is particularly easy to achieve (just use one of the distortion pedal models with lots of drive and gain), and with a bit more tweaking you can get very passable versions of the Is It Any Wonder? sounds and A Bad Dream solo sounds. In the studio, I am aware that Tim has used a vintage Chandler Tube Driver rack effect on the CP70 - I suspect he's also used other distortions, but I'm currently not sure of what. I'll try to see if I can find out any more!

If you've got a Pod XT, Derek Jevens (who runs the Keaneshine fan-site) has also made up some patches to give pretty convincing approximations of the piano distortion sounds. You can download them from the Line 6 Custom Tone web-site - do a search for "Keane" under the POD XT patches.

The primary use of the laptop was the same as it had always been - it provided tempo for Tim and Richard via a click-track, as well as playback of extra parts such as the bass-line, synth parts, strings and so on. During the gigs for Under The Iron Sea, there was initially only a single PowerBook G4 laptop sitting on top of the effects rack (to Tim's right when he was sitting at the piano) - this was pretty much the way things had been even back in 2003. However, in those days, Tim would manually control the loading of songs in Logic by using a mouse in the normal manner. As the band became bigger, they gave Tim a bit more freedom by not making him be solely reliant on operating the laptop, and instead allowing him to concentrate on playing - this was achieved by having the laptop be wirelessly controlled from off-stage by his keyboard tech. He would then be responsible for loading the songs onto the laptop, triggering them playing and so on. In addition, they also then employed a second "mirror" laptop off-stage that ran independently of the one on-stage, but perfectly in-sync - this meant that if there was a technical glitch with the one on-stage (say it crashed), it wouldn't need to derail the whole performance, as they could switch to the mirror one.

After October 2006, they used another laptop on-stage as well (to the right of the original one). This second on-stage laptop was used to run a sampled Rhodes piano sound and a sampled CP70 piano sound and was used whenever Tim played on either the main-stage Yamaha S90 or the b-stage Yamaha S90. The CP70 sampled sound was mainly for Hamburg Song from the b-stage, but could also be used if there was ever a problem with the actual CP70.

One other aspect that the laptop became responsible for was to switch the patches on the effects units for certain songs - this is still used for some in the Perfect Symmetry tours, as Tim simply wouldn't have enough limbs to keep playing and do all the necessary changes. However, there's now very little in the way of playback.