spots among the summers' rock concerts. Live performances The members of Rush shared a strong work ethic, desiring to accurately recreate songs from their albums when playing live performances. To achieve this goal, beginning in the late 1980s, Rush included a capacious rack of digital samplers in their concert equipment to recreate the sounds of non-traditional instruments, accompaniments, vocal harmonies, and other sound "events" in real-time to match the sounds on the studio versions of the songs. In live performances, the band members shared duties throughout most songs. Each member had one or more MIDI controllers, which were loaded with different sounds for each song, and used available limbs to trigger the sounds while simultaneously playing their primary instrument(s). It was with this technology that the group was able to present their arrangements in a live setting with the level of complexity and fidelity fans had come to expect, and without the need to resort to the use of backing tracks or employing an additional band member. The band members' coordinated use of pedal keyboards and other electronic triggers to "play" sampled instruments and audio events was subtly visible in their live performances, especially so on R30: 30th Anniversary World Tour, their 2005 concert DVD. A staple of Rush's concerts was a Neil Peart drum solo. Peart's drum solos included a basic framework of routines connected by sections of improvization, making each performance unique. Each successive tour saw the solo more advanced, with some routines dropped in favour of newer, more complex ones. Since the mid-1980s, Peart had used MIDI trigger pads to trigger sounds sampled from various pieces of acoustic percussion that would otherwise consume far too much stage area, such as a marimba, harp, temple blocks, triangles, glockenspiel, orchestra bells, tubular bells, and vibraslap as well as other, more esoteric percussion. One prominent feature of Rush's concerts were props on stage, at one point called "diversions". These props have included washing machines, vintage popcorn poppers, or animations and inflatable rabbits emerging from giant hats behind the band. Starting in the mid-90s, the props often took up Lee's side of the stage (stage left) as a way to balance out the amp stacks on Lifeson's side (stage right) when Lee opted to use a venue's house system instead of amps. Philanthropy Rush actively participated in philanthropic causes. The band was one of several hometown favourites to play Molson Canadian