Lost and slightly dazzled newbie...

[TheMagician]

After a dramatic change in my life, I'm now looking to something new to fill my life. I've always been a big fan of music and after pulling out some of my favourite CDs, I noticed one consistent theme - great keyboard parts. I love Dream Theater and Deep Purple in particular, and the work that Kevin Moore did in Images and Words, along with the magic of Jordan Rudess on the Six Degrees, and having heard the Liquid Tension Experiment albums (which I just ordered both of because I want to hear them again!), plus Jon Lord's work on the DP stuff, have all convinced me that I really want to learn to play keyboards - its an inspirational sound that I'd love to emulate. Both my parents are musical but I never really got into it at a young age. I'm currently 24.

Anyway, it's a fairly daunting task at the moment - needing to start looking at how to read sheet music, needing to not get bad habits with fingers, and needing to get a keyboard to actually play. I've started going through some basic exercise books with reading sheet music but I need to make the big step of buying a keyboard and getting into it. Unfortunately there seems to be a huge amount of technical information/jargon about keyboards which people are happy to go into remarkable levels of detail, when all I really know at this stage is that I'd like play songs like I hear on the albums (after mucho practice of course!). I don't really have a grasp of the basics of keyboard anatomy or terminology.

Any advice or starting points or resources that anyone could point me to that aren't overly technical would be very much appreciated! I am determined to do this properly and to put serious amounts of effort into becoming as good as I can, so your guys advice might just help me avoid some of the serious pitfalls that the inexperienced often stumble over when starting something!

Cheers guys, look forward to your repsonses

Ian

[Spacehog]

One piece of advice I'd suggest is to concentrate on the notes and the technique first... worry about the sounds later on... there's enough to get your head around with learning the notes, techniques etc without trying to understand synthesis and programming first.

I don't know what kind of money you're looking to spend, or what kind of keyboard action you're looking for, but if you're into Deep Purple, then you'll want decent organ sounds. I'd recommend something straightforward but versatile like the Roland V-Combo (VR760), which is an ideal performance board... there are a myriad of big fancy workstation synths around the place, but the learning curve for something like that is much steeper. Personally I use an (well, 4 currently, but gradually being rationalised, probably down to 2) E-MU PK6 which was very cheap, fairly intuitive and good sounding.

As for techniques books, I have the National Guitar Workshop(!) books Intermediate Rock Keyboard and Mastering Rock Keyboard (there's a Beginning Rock Keyboard as well) that are very well laid out. Published by Alfred Publishing, I'm sure they can be found at Amazon or in most good music stores. Not too pricey either, and they come with a CD of examples and exercises.

Martin