Musician Forum - Band Discussion Board - BandMix

Hi there. Hoping someone can help me out.
I'm a proficient musician but not great when it comes to the tech side of things. I am performing as a vocalist in an events band and now want to add some keys to the sound (5-piece, pop/rock. Think Killers, Kings Of Leon, Foos etc.) and am not sure the best way to do this. I am a Grade-8 pianist, but no real experience of using keyboards. Two things I want to achieve:

1. Adding additional sounds to songs. Piano / strings / synthy bits / brass. Nothing outrageous, just some nice sounds to give additional texture, and obviously piano in some of the bigger tracks where needed.

2. I have my eye on a Voicelive Touch 2 which it looks like I can control the harmonies using a keyboard too.

So. Is it best to get a keyboard with built-in sounds (if so, which?), or, do I get a Midi keyboard and run this through a laptop with Logic or similar (again, if so, what's the setup look like for this?).

Hope that makes sense and really appreciate any advice, with detail if possible. The gigs we do are small (weddings for up to 300 people) so need an easy solution to this so can readily replicate for weekly practices and gigs on the go.

Thanks!

Purchase a Kawai keyboard. An MP7 has horns or almost any sound you want to recreate.

If you a gigging musican playing piano only and you want a keyboard which is real easy to transport purchase and Kawai es110. Only weighs 26 lbs. the sound is amazing and feels like an acoustic under your fingers.

Anything Kawai is amazing. Blows the competition away.

I have a Kawai keboard that will not sell for $75.00..why?..I do not know..the touch on the keys is amazing..Kawai are simply the best..Yamaha good too..

If you're into The Killers then you can go a couple of routes. If you go the hardware synth route, you could look at something like the MicroKorg, which was heavily used on The Killers albums and is cheap. Also, the Roland JDXI is similar, but a little more expensive.

I would recommend going to the MIDI controller route. If you get Ableton Live, you watch a few videos on youtube and program your entire set. You can download a bunch of different VST's for free as well. MIDI keyboards are also fairly cheap and give you far more options than any Workstation can in my opinion.

I personally would recommend that you get one hardware synthesizer and then a MIDI keyboard controller. I would say that out of 14 tours I have done, 95 percent of keyboardists in bands run a MIDI controller setup. They're cheap, reliable and extremely versatile.

I would adamant on not wanting to have keyboard tracks going and this is why I went the controller route.