What’s your next keyboard?

I had a question today from a friend in Ephrata about keyboards, and it’s a great one so I thought I would post it along with my response. Keyboardists: what are your recommendations? Post in blog comments. Thx!

Q: We need new/better sounds for our keys player on the church band. What would you advise? New keyboard? MIDI effects processor? MIDI effects software (Ableton Live, MainStage, etc.)? We would be typically using the keys for pads.

A: I’m a fan of Apple MainStage, been using it almost exclusively (with my Roland RD700 stage piano as a controller) for the last year for both my bands. The software was bundled with Logic, and fairly expensive, but now you can buy MainStage by itself for $30. It does require a Mac. And you’ll need to interface it to the keyboard via USB or MIDI-USB adapter. If you already have those two things, you should definitely try out MainStage.

For the PC, I have a couple friends that use and love Ableton Live. I’m not that familiar with it, but it looks like they have an Intro version for $99 and Standard version for $399. For what you want (more patches/sounds) it looks like those packs come in Standard/Suite but not Intro. But like I said, I’m not that familiar with Ableton so you might want to research that.

After software, my next suggestion would be to look at a MIDI module that can connect to the keyboard. All the major keyboard manufacturers make a MIDI module version of their popular keyboards, and it’s going to be cheaper than buying the whole keyboard (that part which you already have). You could pay $1000 or more for a good one of these, for example the Yamaha Motif-Rack XS goes for ~$1300. Good luck!!