Building a Live Rig, Part 1 – The Basics/Playing with a Single Keyboard

I’ve had a few people ask about my keyboard setup. Rather than describe everything I do, which will be too specific to my own setup, I’ve decided to generalize this to a few articles that will discuss the issues that come up when using keyboards and/or a laptop in a live performance setting. Even if you’re not a keyboard player or if you’re only using a MIDI controller keyboard with a laptop, I encourage you to at least skim all the articles, since they touch on a lot that will still apply even without a keyboard.

Single Keyboard

The big keyword is simplicity. Musically, do whatever you like: make complicated parts and arrangements that you’re good enough to pull off, use pre-recorded material in addition to what you’re playing live, the sky’s the limit. But you have to be able to actually pull that off live. As a musician, you also want to be more focused on the music than on your gear and how it works; musicality and artistry are more important than technology. Here are some suggestions on how to do that.

Rule 1: Do everything you can do to simplify what you have to do technically.

Changing Sounds

If all you’re doing with your keyboard is playing various piano parts the whole way through, all you need to do is plug into an amp and play. But most of the time, keyboard players use a lot of variety in their sounds, sometimes using more than one sound at once or several different sounds in a single song. The key here is that you want to take all the thinking out of your transitions and use as few button presses or pedal presses as possible. If you use a standard workstation keyboard, for example, you might change presets by hitting one button to change banks and then another 3-4 to pick the specific preset that you want. This is bad: you’re not playing, at least with one hand, while you switch, and you have to make sure you remember the right preset.

Rule 2: Switch presets with one button press if at all possible.

There are a few ways you can do this. Maybe you don’t use a lot of sounds and you have a stage piano type of keyboard – I currently have a Roland VR-700 that has 8 banks each of 8 presets, and a button for each preset in the bank. As long as all the sounds I need for a particular song are in the same bank, I can press a single preset button and switch to it. If I use more than 8 presets in a gig, I’d arrange my sounds so that I’m never switching banks during a song – a bank change, on my keyboard, means holding down one button while hitting another, which breaks Rule 2, and holding down a button is harder than just hitting one. You’ll still have to remember which button is the correct one for the next sound you need, though, which leads to:

Rule 3: Put your presets in the order you will use them, even if it means duplicating presets.

Following Rule 3 takes the thinking out of changing. If I know that I’m on Preset 4-3 (bank 4, preset 3), and I know that everything’s in the order I need, then obviously the next preset to use is 4-4. To keep this even simpler, say I have a song that’s structured as Verse, Chorus, Verse, Chorus, Bridge, Chorus. The Verse and Chorus presets are both used multiple times. I could use only three preset slots (one each for Verse, Chorus, and Bridge), but then I’m breaking Rule 3, or I could use six slots and keep things in the order I need. Most decent keyboards will have some easy way of rearranging presets and backing them up to a computer to make this easier. On my Korg TR workstation keyboard, I can save all the presets on the keyboard to a file on an SD card, copy those to my computer, and use a free software tool to arrange them in the order I need. I keep all my presets on disk and whenever we get the setlist for a given performance, I copy individual sounds I need, in order, to a master preset that gets loaded on the keyboard.

Perhaps, instead of a stage piano, you have a workstation keyboard where you pick a preset by number. Again, put your presets in order since there’s probably an Increment/Next button you can press that will switch to the next preset in order.

Your keyboard might also let you switch presets by using a footswitch-style pedal to move to the next preset; you might prefer this to hitting a button so that your hands never have to leave the keyboard.

Splits and Layers

So far, I’ve assumed that switching sounds means switching presets. Sometimes, that’s just what you’ll want, but switching presets can have drawbacks. Most keyboards don’t have patch remain (when you change sounds, patch remain means that any notes sounding with the old sound will continue to sound until you release the keys and/or pedal), so there’s often a noticeable gap where the old sound cuts out and the new one starts. Sometimes the keyboard part might be too exposed to cover that up, so you have to look for other alternatives.

Splitting the keyboard is a possibility (using two or more zones of keys, each playing different sounds), but that only works well if you have enough keys on the keyboard to play both parts to your liking. If one of them is, say, a piano sound where you’re using both hands, splitting might not work because you’ll run out of keys.

Another trick is to use layering (using two or more sounds at once) along with an expression pedal. Many keyboards will let you mix several single sounds together, usually called a combi or multi, which is a good way to make more complex “single” sounds, but some keyboards also give you the potential to adjust the volumes of some of the sounds but not others. For example, I sometimes layer a piano sound with strings or a pad and use an expression pedal that only affects the strings (by setting the piano sound to ignore the expression pedal). I can then add strings to my piano sound just by using the pedal, and can even control the volume of the strings with the exact position of the pedal. You’ll want the pedal set up to act as expression, not volume, on most keyboards – volume usually adjusts the overall volume of the keyboard, not the volume of an individual sound. Depending on your keyboard, you might also be able to set up a crossfade with the expression pedal: to take the piano out while replacing it with strings, for example. This would involve more work, since most keyboards don’t let you treat a pedal in reverse for some sounds without editing the sound to customize the behaviour of the pedal.

Pedal Use

All that needs to be said about pedals, if you’re only using one keyboard, is to make sure you’re comfortable with what you have. You’ll want a sustain pedal, obviously, and possibly an expression pedal to do the above trick with layering. You might want a footswitch if your keyboard will let you use one to move to the next preset. Some keyboards might have uses for other pedals as well: a keyboard like the Roland VR-700 that has a built-in B3 organ simulation gives you the option of using pedals to control the organ swell (not quite the same as volume/expression) and the speed at which the leslie speaker is rotating. Remembering Rule 1 about keeping things simple, I wouldn’t recommend using a pedal for any purpose unless you need it, and I definitely wouldn’t recommend that you use one pedal for multiple uses (e.g. don’t use a pedal as expression for your strings on one song and as a way to control an effect on another). The more you have, the more likely it is that you’ll forget what one is for or hit the wrong pedal at the wrong time.

I suggest using the sustain pedal with your right foot and using everything else with your left foot. Sustain is something you’ll probably use a lot, but you’ll probably only use volume pedals to adjust volume quickly rather than needing your foot on them constantly. Until you’re comfortable with the pedals you need, you might want to label them or arrange them in a way that makes it easier to remember. For example, don’t put two expression pedals beside each other until you’re sure you know which one does what.

Rule 4: Don’t use a knob, button, or pedal to do different things at different times.

I just mentioned this with pedals, but it’s important enough to be generalized. Keep things simple; let your brain learn to associate a particular control with a particular action always, rather than having to remember which of four things a control does on the current preset.

Adjusting Volumes

Sometimes one of your volume levels won’t be quite right. No matter how well-rehearsed your band is, sometimes things just sound a bit different. Maybe the balance between your piano and strings sounds off in one venue, or maybe the guitarist turns up just a bit louder than usual and you have to adjust. With one keyboard, an overall adjustment is easy, obviously. There’s not much you can do to balance between different sounds from the same keyboard, though, unless the keyboard has several outputs and lets you send specific sounds to a specific output. A word of caution: some keyboards that use multiple outputs will send out dry sounds to the extra outputs and only use effects on sounds coming from the main output; unless you actually want to send out strings without reverb, for example, make sure this isn’t the case. Some stage piano-type keyboards have different volume knobs for different parts; that’s the ideal situation, where you can easily mix every part to your liking in a hands-on manner.

If you split things up by using different outputs, make sure you have a mixer within your reach (or an amp that mixes) even if you’re sending more than one signal to the main mixing desk. There are tiny mixers like the Behringer MX-400 that are dirt cheap. Unless you have a dedicated sound engineer who knows your songs as well as you do, you should be the one in control of the fine balance between your parts when possible (if you send several signals to the mixing desk and the engineer still messes with the balance, there’s nothing you can do) – you’re the artist and performer, after all, and you probably created your presets and know exactly what sound you’re going for.

Rule 4 applies here too. If you’re using multiple outputs, use them in groups by type of sound. I used to own a Nord Stage, where I’d use output 1 & 2 for the pianos and electric pianos, 3 for organs, and 4 for synth sounds. Switching which sound comes from which output as you switch presets is especially bad. Say your pianos tend to be a bit quieter than your organs, and you’ve got a keyboard set up so that whatever you play with your right hand comes from output 1 and if you use a different sound for your left hand, it comes from output 3. Now say that in a particular venue, you’re finding it hard to hear your piano but your organ is coming through more clearly. If you sometimes play organ in your left hand and sometimes in your right, how do you adjust the volumes on your mixer? You can’t, without making frequent changes. But if you’ve arranged your sounds so that a piano is always coming from output 1 and 2, you adjust your mixer and leave it alone unless there’s more fine-tuning to do mid-song, and if something is unexpectedly loud for any reason, you can think, “This is a piano sound, so it must be in mixer channel 1″, rather than trying to remember which output is used for piano on a particular part of the song.

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