in a live setting I suggest turning it off/lowering it as much as you can. Touch sensitivity can lead to some big problems with the mix, as if its not hard enough to mix keyboards live..

Hmm, I rarely if ever have any problems with live sound. I mean, it’s a straight DI to the soundboard, and assuming you’ve got a decent monitoring it’s easy to adjust your volume up and down as required.

LordOminous made a good point about the adjustability of most keyboards. You might want just a little bit of velocity sensitivity, but not too much. When I do use sensitivity as part of a patch, I’ll often set it so that its affecting something other than volume – for instance linking it to filter cutoff so that the expressiveness comes out as changes in timbre. Another interesting way to use it is say, with a pad or string sound that has a long attack you could link it so that an increase in velocity will decrease the attack, so that as you played harder the volume would build faster, creating an urgency to the sound.

Doing something like that would be depend on what synth you are using though. On my juno-g I can set velocity to affect anything, but most of my other synths are a bit more limited in that area.

Another down to earth question, sorry, I have Reason 4 program I create some patches with it, is this the way that a good keyboard works ? like Roland Juno - G or Korg M3 ? I mean you have mixer > line mixer > then you connect stuff with effects and sensitivity is a part of that patch or it works in different ways ?
and btw, and good online resourse for the sound synth thing on keyboards ? I know the ADSR , and some other stuff , I can do some primitive mixes I mean I know how to EQ , compress somehow and some other basic effects but I wanna improve all of that especially the sound synthesis thing.

Edit: another question:
I am buying a new keyboard (not so soon) but I am searching, my friend suggested that I buy midi controller since it's 88 keys and have that piano feel, but I don't know, I don't like to use my computer whenever I wanna play, so I wanna buy a keyboard, of course my maximum cash is no more than 600$, so which is better the midi controller or is there any good keyboards at this price ?

Hello guys, I just bought a really cheap Casio keyboard and I'm wanting to learn to play, can somebody suggest me a few songs to get started? Thanks.

I'd recommend you get started down the classical route.
Then apply your learning to whatever songs you're interested in, to keep yourself interested.

Greetings fellow keymasters! Long-time keyboard player/composer here tracing back to the mid-80’s, and piano player since at least 4 years old. When I was first getting into piano I took lessons for a couple years, then eventually found a greater comfort in self-teaching and experimenting. My advice is if you want to go that route, I can’t suggest it enough. Only practice your ass off, be 100% dedicated and you’ll be amazed at how far you go. However, if you’d rather take lessons no harm in that either.

The most notable of my musical accomplishments would be I have a shitload of original compositions (600+ now) that comes from over a decade’s worth of work. No question I am more at home recording music instead of live playing, but either way I can dig it. Still waiting for my big break with a metal band although I have jammed with some of the local talent in the Sacramento area (Malevolent, Jack Ketch, The Kennedy Veil, to name a few).

The board I’ve been using for the last 10 or so years is a Korg Triton workstation, and it’s a fucking beast but sadly I’m a tad outdated and a massive upgrade is in order for the not-too-distant future

My friend has a Korg Triton and swears by it. What do you think youre gonna upgrade too? And do you use your workstation exclusively to record, or do you also use a separate DAW?

Just the workstation for recording, though I have tinkered around with some DAWs for fun. As for the upgrade, not sure yet. I've been out of the loop for so long and haven't browsed much...Feel free to offer any suggestions.

My Yamaha Motif XS8 serves me better than I'll ever be able to use it, and is an absolute beast- one of the top three workstations on the market, alongside the Korg OASYS and M3- though I think they've just released (or are releasing) a new Motif.
On the subject of workstations, the Roland Fantom G is also up there and used by plenty of keyboardists.

Love my Triton LE 76. only weakness are the stock piano voices.

Should I get lessons? Dan Swano is fairly good, and he is completely self-taught. What should I do? learn al lthe major/minor scales and then modes?

Also anybody have suggestions for fun and easy metal songs to play on keyboards? I was looking at The Misshappen Steed by Agalloch, I would love to play that but its too hard. What do you guys think?

That would depend on what level you're looking at reaching.
If you want to be able to play any keyboard part (or transcribe complex enough guitar parts for keyboard) from any metal work you'll want lessons.
If all you're looking at doing is improvising around some scales, learning the odd lead here and there and playing some pads then there shouldn't be much harm in being self-taught.

Why lessons?

Technique and discipline would be the pain two points.
If you're passionate enough about your learning and have the discipline to practice every day (or often enough) then you won't need to continue with lessons, but it's definitely worth having a year with a good teacher to make sure your technique is coming along properly.
The last thing you'll want is to have developed poor ways of playing fast shit and then having to take 3 months off using your wrists for anything because you've developed RSI from cranking out arpeggios at 200bpm with poor technique.
Plus, if you wanna get that good I'd suggest taking a classical piano route while playing metal or whatever as a hobby on the side.

guys, what do you think of The Virtuoso Pianist in 60 Exercises by Hanon ?
I really wanna develope my techniques, do you think it's proper ?

It's lasted a good 140 or so years, so it's definitely proper.
I haven't played any Hanon though I'd assume they'd work out for the types of stuff you'd like to play in metal- so long as you don't fuck your wrists up in the process.

We were talking about live mix /w a keyboard earlier. i played a show on saturday and got raped by the sound tech again. nobody heard me til the last two songs

Really? Shitty, that's definitely a disappointment. Was it an inexperienced sound person?

I generally tell the sound person that keys should be as loud as guitars (for my band anyway). Once we get the levels tested, the mix setup, and I've got a sense how my volume compares to guitar in my monitor, I'll bump it up or down a touch during the show if I feel like things are out of whack.

It always good practice, but I'd suggest talking to the sound person before the show to let them know what kind of sound your band is trying to achieve. If that doesn't help, then you've got a shitty sound guy (and there are unfortunately quite a few of them out there).

After playing classics for about two years, I feal I want to start playing some metal. But I have some problems: first, i don't know what to play. second, i can not get some notes/chords. Third, i don't know how to use chordes. I someone can help me solve some or all these proplems, i would be happy.

Can you elaborate a bit? What do you mean by classics? And did you have a teacher?

I am about to finish the sonata K.545 by Mozart and i just began his "Turkish March". And yes, I have a teacher (a really cool one).

Wouldn't you learn how to use and construct chords during two years of classical training? And could'nt you ask your teacher?

i know how to read basic chords, but not much more than that. the only (non-classical) song i can play is collapse the light into earth by porcupine tree.

To all synth nerds: I just finished interviewing Lee from Born of Osiris and apparently they used the Omnisphere vst on their new album. The more you know!

Whoa whoa smoking gnu, I'm a synth nerd and I love BOO...do you have the whole interview available? The use of keyboards in that band is just genius, especially in the first and most recent albums.

Okay, here's one for this relative wasteland of a topic: I'm going to be getting myself a real workhorse of a keyboard, preferably for live gigs. I don't particularly feel like going Rick Wakeman and filling the stage with walls of vintage analog synths (awesome, but impractical). So I want something that can easily work with the DAW on my laptop, has at least four octaves of keys, and actually sounds like something created this millennium.

I'm having a bit of trouble deciding between the Korg M3 and the M50. Keep in mind I'm rather poor, so price is a big deal for me. Now, to my understanding, both 'boards have the same sound module. I know the M3 has that KARMA thing built in, and I've heard it can play samples directly off thumb drives. While I might use the latter, I have no intention of using KARMA. Aside from those details, though, I don't know much of the difference. Should I splurge the extra money for the M3, or will the M50 suit my needs?

Hi guys, does anybody know where can you get piano sheets for Sonata Arctica's songs? I've already searched on internet and found nothing but some useless photos of notes ...

The story ended up not running due to space, but I'll see if I can dig out my notes and translate them into something that makes sense for you.

Well, that sort of thing is straight-up copyright infringement by many standards, so that would explain the difficulty in finding such things.

There are a couple options you can use to get around that:
1) Many people make guitar tabs for synth parts in songs for which the synths are prominent. I imagine Sonata Arctica would qualify. Sure, you won't have note-for-note accuracy on the big chord smashes, but if you know your music theory, just extrapolate the chords from a guitar setting to piano. The downside is that this process is tedious as hell.

2) MIDI files + Musescore. Just go to http://www.musescore.org and download the program: it's basically an open-source version of programs like Finale or Sibelius. Sure, not nearly as flashy, but it's free. It also imports .mid files, which you can find around the internet. As above, you'll probably have to tweak things to get it to sound exactly right, but if you're worth anything as a pianist, you should be able to make it all work. You know, provided the .mid file doesn't completely suck. Which I can't guarantee.

3) Failing those, you can always just try to play them by ear. Obviously if it were that simple, you wouldn't be requesting help, but there are a couple tools to make that easier. Audacity is a great free program which can do many things, but here I recommend using it for slowing down the original song mp3s to make it easier to figure out what exactly is going on. You can generally slow things down to half-speed before the distortion gets too annoying. There's also the option of downloading the demo of FruityLoops. Moreso than Audacity, it's a huge program with tons of functionality, but if you're having trouble with a particular passage, you can chop out that clip and run it through the Fruity Sclicer, which isn't perfect but does a decent job of cutting the audio into note-by-note segments. You can then play those segments individually until you get it right. It's better for less cluttered song sections, but as a last-ditch effort it may be helpful.

EDIT: Also, for anyone who gives half a crap, I ended up getting the M50. Should be arriving next week. The inclusion of a free semi-hard case and at like 60% retail for a new one was too hard of a deal to pass up.

Thank you very much!

I'm working on a new album for my band FUNERAL MOONLIGHT which is a kind of Ambient Black Metal band like Leviathan , Striborg ..etc
I was going to add some keyboards and effects but my keyboard got fucked so I wonder if any of you guys is interested in teaming up with me for this release .

Are there any other classically trained keyboardists here? I study piano at university.

So far I haven't quite gotten used to electric organ or lead synth. I feel like electric organ requires a rather inactive left hand, and lead synth seems to mirror guitar playing rather than keyboard playing. Any thoughts?

I'll do it via email if you want. I don't have a lot to do this summer, and I have some recording software and a couple of keyboards (Yamaha p200 piano/ Roland SH-201 synth).

I've got a Roland SH201 also which I rather quite like.

Not really sure what you mean by lead synth mimicing gutiar playing. I guess that really depends on what style of music you are playing and how the songs are composed.

Hey guys, my name is The Poison. I'm a beginning to learn keyboard. I started a couple of months ago and progress feels rather slow, but I know this is music, so I shall push on. This is my first instrument, so I'm pretty much a music 'tard. I'm learning chords and melodies for a couple of simple non-metal songs, and am working on the intro for "In Deaths Embrace" by Dimmu Borgir. I'm a complete noob. Any tips?

Anyone know where I can find the synth effect like the one used on Opeth's song Windowpane from the album Damnation? Thanks in advance.

Someone may get a kick out of this video, it's a 1960s piece from the BBC about the Moog:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usl_TvIFtG0

What do you guys think about going down the jazz route? I'm gonna buy this jazz book for beginners when I can.

Hey guys

New boy here just signing in. Play Hammond, synth, piano, currently working with 13 Candles and The Von Nitros. Been playing in bands since I was 18, semi-pro for the last few years.

Current gear is Hammond XK1, Viscount combo organ, Korg N364 and a Roland Juno D. Just got some recording software so dipping toe into home recording

Noticed a post here about sound levels - always a problem, some sound guys seem to have no understanding of the keyboard as a lead instrument or that it can be as loud as the guitar....

cheers

Welcome aboard sir!

I've never tried any of the digital tone wheel Hammonds... how do you find it holds up against the console organs?