A making of a concert - Episode 2: choose your weapon

Hello everyone !

Today is another post about preparing a show, and it's about how I choose my gear.

Sometimes, when I say that I have 9 keyboards, people are surprised and don't understand very well.
It's very simple though.
We could compare with cars: some people have several cars, like a small city car and a break to go in holidays.

That's the same thing with musical gear, each of my keyboards has a specific use.

Some of them are for "generalist" sounds, like pianos, organs, strings...; others are for synthetic sounds, and others don't have any sound at all, the just control the others.

I choose my gear according to several parameters:

- the type of sounds I'm using
- the number of different sounds I have in one song
- the available space on stage (that's not the most important parameter, but some times, it matters)

So let's take a example: the upcoming concert of Clara Neville.

In the songs, I'll use pianos, organs, electric pianos, strings, synth sounds...well...I'll use of types of sounds.

With the previous workshop (cf the previous post) we did with David and André, I know that I will be using two or three sounds in each song.
From there, I could choose to use only one keyboard and split it in the amount of zones I need, or I could use two keyboards to be more comfortable. I'm not going to say more about that for now, first because I will talk about it next week in a post about keyboards programing, but also because I'm not yet decided.

The only thing I know is that I will be using my Kurzweil PC3. I'm faithful to that brand for more that 10 years, I love the timbre of their instruments. I actually have two kurzweil keyboards. The PC3 is not too big, it got 76 keys, and it's really with acoustic sounds, as well as with the synthetic ones. If I choose to use only one keyboard, that will be the one. I will tell you next week about my final choice.

From left to right:
Studiologic Sl161 (master keyboard) , Korg microKONTROL (master keyboard) , Access Music Virus Indigo 2 (synthesizer, specialized in synth sounds, so unrealistic ) Wernick Xylosynth (electronic xylophone, master keyboard), Mutable Instruments Shrutti (the small white box on the keyboard, synthesizer of synth sounds), Kurzweil Pc3 (synthesizer with acoustic sounds, but not only...)