Live Performance, Part 1 – My Keyboard Rig

I’ve written some articles on setting up a live keyboard setup, but they may have seemed a bit abstract, and they don’t give you a good idea on what to do if you’re starting from scratch.

In these next three articles, I’ll walk you through my keyboard setup and how I use it to perform, starting with why I have the gear I have and what makes it work well for my purposes. In the next article, I’ll discuss how to choose and arrange your sounds, and then I’ll close with what I do on stage.

Keyboards

Whenever I upgrade or buy new gear, I start off by figuring out what types of sounds are most important for my performance styles. Sound is the most important thing here; the keyboard with a few more features that doesn’t have the sounds you want isn’t the right keyboard. For me, piano is my most-used sound. I also use a lot of Wurlitzer and Rhodes electric pianos, so both the sounds and having enough effect units to customize the sounds are important. I also need a good B3 organ sound with drawbars and leslie; I try to play like an organ player rather than a pianist using an organ sound. Besides that, most of what I use are strings and pads, with some occasional solo orchestral instruments for subtle melody or synth leads for solos and more prominent melodies.

With sounds out of the way, size and weight are the next considerations. I used to use two keyboards, but I’ve downsized to make my rig more easily portable. Fully-weighted keyboards are heavy, and synth-action keyboards have too light a touch to make pianos sound as realistic as I’d like, so I go with a semi-weighted feel, which is also great for organ playing. I need a keyboard with 73-76 keys; 88 is too long to fit in the back of our Honda Civic, and 61 isn’t long enough as a primary keyboard when I have to split the keyboard to play two different parts.

The last consideration for me is versatility and ease of use in the context of where I play. Right now, I do all my playing at church. Usually, we have mid-week and Sunday morning rehearsals for a Sunday morning service, but occasionally, we skip the mid-week rehearsal and may not even have a setlist before Sunday morning. If this happens, I need something that can cover all the sounds I want to use but that will also let me choose them quickly. Sometimes, I may not want to bring a large keyboard. My church has a digital piano with MIDI output, so having something small and light is also nice. I also play in a monthly event that’s bigger, better, and louder than our usual Sunday morning services. The focus is on the music and we do 15 songs compared to a typical 7, and we have a full band unlike most Sunday mornings. This is where I put more of my focus, and this is where having the best sounds and the right variety matters – on a Sunday morning, if we have no guitars and I only use a piano sound for the entire service, that works fine.

With all this in mind, I ended up with the following.

Roland V-Combo VR-700

This keyboard is classified as a stage piano. It has an organ section with drawbars that can be layered with one or two “ensemble instruments” – pianos, electric pianos, strings, brass, synth leads, pads, basically everything that’s not an organ. Being a stage piano, it doesn’t have too much variety in these other sounds, though it does have a little of everything, and a lot of the sounds aren’t particularly good. Compared to the competition, though, the layering, sound variety, and physical drawbars make it my ideal choice. Stage pianos also make it quick and easy to create a preset; everything on this keyboard, besides the fine details of customizing the organ, is on a dedicated knob or button. It’s also semi-weighted and 76 keys, and the action is the best of any semi-weighted keyboard I’ve played. This is what I’d bring on the Sunday morning when I don’t have the setlist in advance.

Yamaha Motif-Rack XS

The big limitation for me with my Roland is the sound quality and effect limitations on the ensemble parts: there’s only one effect per ensemble instrument, and you have no control over what that effect is or what settings are used; you can only control the wet/dry mix of the effect. The keyboard’s also fairly heavy, so I wanted an alternative that would give me better sounds and a smaller, lighter amount of gear to bring.

The Yamaha Motif-Rack XS is a rackmount version of their Motif XS keyboard. It doesn’t have a few of the less-necessary features (sampling and a sequencer), but besides that, it’s the same sound engine as the Motif XS packaged in a small, easy-to-carry rackmount module. It’s not easy to use from the limited front panel, and is much easier to program using a laptop, but if I’ve done the work ahead of time at home, I can connect it to my church’s digital piano and have great sounds with great portability.

The Instruments

With the Roland and Yamaha, I’ve got all my bases covered. The Roland is my on-the-fly keyboard, the Yamaha is good when I have time to prepare and there’s a keyboard at the venue that I can use, and when I want to go all out, I use the Roland for the organs and as the controller and the Yamaha for everything else. When I use both together, I can control the volume of my organs by using the Roland’s master volume knob – the Roland has no overall organ volume, but since I’m not using the Roland for any other sounds, the master volume knob works as a substitute organ volume knob. Having a dedicated organ knob is enough reason not to mix and match and use other sounds from the Roland.

Carrying a rackmount sound module loose is a bad idea, especially if it rains, so I house it in the Gator GR-2L two-unit rack. The bottom unit is a Behringer Eurorack Pro 1602 mixer that lets me combine the signals from the Roland and Yamaha if I can only use one channel on the house sound system. It also lets me connect both keyboards in stereo and listen with studio headphones at home, which sounds so much better than playing in mono through an amp. If I’m performing when I do have two inputs, I can just send the organ direct to a DI and into my keyboard amp. My amp is a Roland KC-150; it’s a not-too-special 60 W amp that’s relatively light and small and sounds good enough.

Pedals

From left to right, I use a Tech21 MIDI Mouse, Yamaha FC-5 Footswitch, Roland EV-5 Expression Pedal, and Yamaha FC-4 Sustain Pedal. There’s nothing special about the Yamaha and Roland brands for pedals; my only suggestion is to avoid M-Audio since they offer comparable expression pedals and footswitches that are cheap but also cheaply made. Their expression pedal didn’t send values through its full range, making it impossible to completely silence a sound, and the rubber face on the footswitch came apart after fairly light use. Pay the extra money to get something more rugged.

The sustain pedal is obviously used for sustaining notes. The footswitch is used on my Roland to control the speed of the virtual leslie speaker that the organ runs through; the pedal switches it between the slow and fast speeds, an essential performance control for the B3. The expression pedal has two purposes. It acts as the swell pedal for the B3 – a pedal is the only way to control the volume on an organ; the keys aren’t velocity-sensitive, so no matter how lightly I play, the sound will always be at the same volume. The pedal also acts as an expression pedal for voices on the Yamaha, which lets me change the volume of those voices. I sometimes set some voices to ignore the expression messages, so I can do something like play a piano sound and then use the expression pedal to bring in some strings at a key moment in the song.

The MIDI Mouse is my way of changing the sounds I’m playing. The number on the display is its current preset number; if I press the Down or Up buttons, the number is decreased or increased by one, and a MIDI program change for the new number is sent out. This means that I can put the presets for a service in the order I’ll use them, reset the MIDI Mouse to preset 1, and keep hitting Up all the way through the service to change my sounds without thinking about the order.

Connections

The audio connections in my setup are easy. The Roland and Yamaha are connected to the first two channels in the mixer, and the mixer’s master output goes through a DI to the house sound board and to my keyboard amp. There’s also only one way to connect all the pedals; the Yamaha has no pedal inputs and the Roland has one for sustain, one for an expression-style pedal and one for a footswitch-style pedal.

Of course, the MIDI Mouse and Roland need to talk to each other, so there’s also some MIDI connections. In the picture above, the Roland and MIDI Mouse connect to the MIDI Solutions MIDI Merger, which combines the two signals into one. Both are fed through the MIDI Solutions Event Processor Plus, a unit that lets me selectively change or filter the MIDI data that goes through it. Finally, the Event Processor connects to the Yamaha. Nothing sends MIDI data to the Roland at all, not even the MIDI Mouse, which might seem odd, but I’ll explain that later. The Yamaha doesn’t need anything connected to its MIDI OUT; the only MIDI data it can generate (MIDI controller messages from the front-panel knobs and a MIDI clock for timing) are things that I don’t use, so I don’t bother connecting this at all.

The Event Processor has a couple purposes. The simpler one is to filter out any MIDI data from the Roland that shouldn’t be sent to the Yamaha. For example, moving one of the organ drawbars will send a MIDI controller event that might mess up the sound on the Yamaha. I filter out everything that shouldn’t get through, only allowing sustain, expression, pitch bend and modulation (the joystick on the Roland moves up and down for modulation), and notes and program changes. I use program changes in a special way, which is the more important reason for me to be using the Event Processor, that I’ll explain later.

To keep things really easy to connect, I use coloured electrical tape on all my cables, using the same colour for the device they connect to. I use multiple rings of tape on a cable to indicate position: for example, the pedal cables connecting to the Roland have one, two, and three rings of red tape so I can tell, without following the wire back to the pedal itself, which of the three plugs in my hand connect to which pedal input. For MIDI cables, I use one ring of tape to indicate IN and two for OUT, so I can easily be sure I’m connecting things the way I mean to.

Using The Keyboards

Now that I’ve described how I connect all my gear, I’ll talk about how the parts work together and what it lets me do.

MIDI Channels

The Roland lets me assign a different MIDI channel to each part (upper and lower organ parts and two ensemble parts). I want the Yamaha to always respond to notes on the Roland, so I set the Yamaha to channel 1, set the ensemble parts on the Roland to channels 1 and 2, and mute the ensemble parts on most presets so that the MIDI data is sent to the Yamaha but the Roland doesn’t sound. Program changes and some of the control changes on the Roland are sent on channel 16, but I use the event processor to change them all to channel 1. The MIDI Mouse sends on channel 1 by default, so everything sending to the Yamaha does so on channel 1.

Yamaha Presets

Presets on the Yamaha are quite straightforward. All the sounds I need to play at once are loaded into a multi (a preset containing up to 16 different sounds), and I adjust key ranges (the set of keys that a voice will respond to; it need not be the whole keyboard) and transpositions (I’ll bump voices up or down by an octave or two) to make a keyboard split. If I’m splitting between two sounds, I do the split here instead of on the Roland so that the Roland presets stay simple. Everything on the Yamaha is on MIDI channel 1.

Roland Presets

The Roland has 64 preset slots on board. The picture above shows 8 favourite buttons; there are 8 banks of them that I can switch to by holding the Bank button and pressing one of the numbers. Doing this is awkward, so I never switch banks during a song.

Most of the time, I’m using the Roland to play sounds on the Yamaha, and the Roland is silent. There’s no need to change presets on the Roland at all for this. The only time I typically need different presets on the Roland is for different organ sounds. Ignoring banks 1 and 8 for the moment, I set up the presets on the Roland as follows:

In banks 2-7, the first preset always sends MIDI to the Yamaha (by turning ensemble part 1 on but muting it on the Roland). The second preset is always entirely silent (by only turning the organ on, which doesn’t send MIDI to the Yamaha on a channel the Yamaha listens on, and then pushing all the drawbars in so the organ is muted) – I use this if I’m sitting on stage and not playing for a while, maybe while someone is talking or reading; if everything is silent, there are no surprises if I absent-mindedly hit a key. Then, for a specific performance, presets 3-8 in each bank will be set up for organ sounds on the Roland. For example, preset 2-1 triggers the Yamaha, 2-2 is silent, 2-3 through 2-8 have organ sounds, 3-1 triggers the Yamaha, 3-2 is silent, 3-3 through 3-8 have organ sounds, and so on.

Remember that nothing is sending MIDI to the Roland (in particular, the MIDI Mouse is not), so I have to switch presets here manually. Most of the time, I can sit on 2-1, and when I need an organ sound, I switch to that preset manually and then switch back to 2-1 again. As I progress through a performance, I’ll switch banks to bank 3, and then use 3-1 as the preset to trigger sounds on the Yamaha.

So far, none of the preset changes on the Roland will cause the Yamaha to also change presets, so I can switch between organ and other presets as I wish without changing anything on the Yamaha until I’m ready to do so with the MIDI Mouse.

Setup Presets

Bank 8 on the Roland is a special bank. For convenience, 8-1 and 8-2 trigger the Yamaha and are silent respectively, though I should never be playing in this bank during a performance.

Any of the controls on a normal B3 can be found as hardware buttons on the Roland, but some more detailed settings are only accessible through a more complex and unlabelled menu system (I actually printed out and laminated the pages in the manual that describe it). Things like the choice of tonewheels used for the organ (a B3 has 61 wheels that spin; as the organ aged and they deteriorated, the sound would get more grungy) or the amount of key click (a mechanical click you’d hear when pressing a key on a B3; different instruments in different conditions had varying levels of key click) are an important part of the sound, but not easy to change manually on my Roland. Presets 8-3 through 8-7 have specific organ sounds with some of the fine details different from my standard setup: a grungy sound for louder rock parts, a sound with no key click at all for using the organ as part of a pad, and so on. These are here so I can easily get a more specific sound without being forced to go through the menus; I pick the sound that has the characteristics I want (no key click, for example), save it to a different slot, and then adjust the drawbars and other hands-on settings to get the tone I want.

Special Presets

One of the important things to do on stage during a sound check is make sure that your volume knobs on your gear are adjusted exactly right. The easiest way for me to do this is to play sounds from both keyboards at the same time, and fine-tune the knobs until the balance between the two is where I need it. Preset 8-8 does just this: it sends sounds to the Yamaha AND lets the Roland play an organ sound.

Lastly, I haven’t mentioned bank 1 yet. Like all the other banks, 1-1 and 1-2 trigger the Yamaha and are silent. 1-3 through 1-8 all trigger the Yamaha as well, but with a different purpose. All other presets on the Roland don’t change the Yamaha’s preset; these six do (using the Event Processor to do so). On the Yamaha, I have one bank of 128 multis to work with; the last 6 always have some standard sounds: a grand piano and five different string and pad sounds. In a church setting, it’s not uncommon to have the singer do something spontaneous at the end of a song or to have them ask for a pad to be played during a prayer or reading. 1-3 through 1-8 let me switch quickly to a piano or pad sound without changing anything on the MIDI mouse, and when I’m done with the spontaneous part and we get back to the setlist, I can use the MIDI mouse to get back to where I was in the planned order of the service.

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