I've been using Biab on a PC feeding into the Auxillary input of a small portable amplifier for solo (trumpet or flugelhorn) gigs. I generally mute the BiaB melody for the 1st & 3rd of 3 choruses to give the chops a break in the middle of each song. I'm considering buying a 2-octave keyboard to doodle during the 2nd chorus. The Keyboards advertised use a USB MIDI CONTROLLER which is a bit Greek to me. I'd appreciate any information regarding how, with minimal equipment, I could have an amplifier to control volume on both the PC Biab output, and the Mini Keyboard.
If one small amplifer would handle both and have separate volume controls, which inputs would I use?
I'd greatly appreciate any help or ideas. Thanks

It really depends on how you are going to use your keyboard. If you plan to use the sounds that come with the keyboard, then you wouldn't need to use MIDI at all since that would be an audio output directly from the keyboard. In that case, you would have to find a way to plug your keyboard into your amplifier (for example, my keyboard amp has multiple inputs, so I can plug in the keyboard, a guitar, a microphone, and an audio player (such as an iPod or my portable computer).

However, if you are planning to use sounds that your computer generates (perhaps with a VSTi softsynth), then you would need to have a MIDI interface to your computer. There are many on the market to choose from (I use the Emu X-MIDI 2x2, but it's out of production now); also, there are external sound cards that include both audio and MIDI interfaces (I use an M-Audio FastTrack Pro - again not in production anymore). This then allows your keyboard to send MIDI data (but not the sounds built in to the keyboard) to your computer. In that case, you can just use the thru channel in BIAB to control the sounds from the keyboard and it will let you play along with whatever BIAB is playing. The thru channel has it's own volume control to balance out the mix.

I suspect that what you are looking to do is the latter, since it's just a 2-octave keyboard that probably doesn't have its own sounds, but just wanted to give the whole picture.

Give us a little more info and we can help you out further.