Cover band keyboardists

[Mantarkus]

How has JR influenced your work in a cover band? To me in many ways.

First of all I just carry ONE keyboard, an Alesis QS7. If i latter add something it will be a rack module, and a battery back up power supply. If there's a particular sound I need I'll sample it instead of carrying a second board.

I play unison lines with the guitar player, not just sit back and lay pads for him ( in Lenny Kravitz "Are you going my way" for example i play the same riff ).

I set my keyboard in multi zones with the exact number of keys needed for that particular song, and not jump from one program to the other in a hurry (Pink Floyd's "Hey You", I have electric piano on the far right, pad center, helicopter and kids playing samples at the far most keys, I hit program mode to go to a hammond patch where i do smears and all and then back to MIX mode).

I try to experiment with different sounds and FX to avoid using a hammond sounds to often, but then again it might be the other way around.

And a few other ways that I cant point out right now.

Ok, this all sounds like very basic stuff but it was JR's infuence that got me into taking out as much as I can from technologie in one single board and get my settings ready before the gig and not worry about where a particular sound is in the middle of a song.

How about you?

[ImaX]

The same thing, I don't have much to add :-) except it's also a rotating stand and a K2500 with me... which might look like a "I need the same stuff that Jordan uses" but it isn't.

Seeing Jordan using only one board brought me to the real use of midi-technology. Beeing able to use one keyboard controlling the other one I soon got some rack synths, which again brought me to much more sounds without carrying 5 keyboards with me.

Having everything programmed in nice setups for each song (or colections of setups in QA-banks) I was able to play different songs without having to search for sounds in the breaks between the songs. It's also much easier in case there's a change of the setlist. And of course the FOH-man is happy with a keyboarder who has good volume-levels instead of having sounds with different volumes for each sound :-)

Thanks to Jordan, who initialized that process of discovering!! ;-)