My music world is keyboard centric. I do other things, but mainly I am a keyboard guy. As I look at the new boards and drool over how great they sound, before I seriously consider buying one I find the manual online. I scan that manual and see if it takes 2 advanced degrees in electronical engineering to use it or not. I don't want to spend several thousands on a keyboard and have it so far above my level to program it that I am stuck with only the stock sounds. A couple of years ago I bought a used Yamaha Motif. I had it for a day. Fortunately for me it had 2 bad keys so I was able to return it, but as it sat on my table I was never so lost as trying to figure out how to do sound layers, keyboard splits, octave changes to make those splits make sense... I just don't want a keyboard that turns into a full time job trying to figure out how to use it.

Where do YOU draw the line? Is your line a moving target depending on what you do? I am of the opinion that if you never play live you don't have a lot of requirements from a keyboard beyond stock sounds. If you just play in a home studio you can you use MIDI data to do any exotic sound stacking and have no use for keyboard splitting because you can overdub on tracks. I am trying to recreate some of what Roger O'Donnell does to play with The Cure, and between what I can hear and what I see on videos he does a LOT of keyboard splitting. One of the videos I have of them shows that Roger is playing 2 of this very Kurzweil. Keyboards can get intense in live situations under even the simplest of circumstances. You need to be turning the MIDI on and off depending on whether you want to be sending data to another sound source or play the boards individually. In the Southside Johnny band I was in the last couple of years I had to constantly change the MIDI channel on my sampler because I didn't always need it to be slaved to the Korg Krome. There were times when I was not playing horns that I played it independently from the Korg and the only fast way to do that was to change the MIDI to channel 2. Then remember to change it back to channel 1 for the next song. And at times I played rhythm guitar parts on the Korg for just an 8 bar guitar solo so I just pulled the volume down on the sampler and then often forgot to push it back on... It can really get confusing when you make changes within songs and takes a lot of concentration that my 8th decade brain doesn't always have anymore.

Oh, the manual for the Kurzweil is 148 pages. The Motif was 294. The more they do, the more they have to teach us. Way above my pay grade.

Last edited by eddie1261; 06/08/22 02:22 AM.