Wednesday, June 6, 2012

How To select The Best Keyboard For You

In this material we shall discuss how to pick the best keyboard for you. I get lots of emails from visitors to my web site asking what keyboard they should choose. They often want to know either they should pick one single keyboard over another. Well choosing the best keyboard for you does not have to be difficult at all. As long as you know and understand the features that you really need, it's a easy matter of buying a keyboard that comes with these features. And there's no need to pay extra for features that you will never have use for.

Here's a checklist for choosing the best keyboard for you. Understand what these features are all about and you can pick your keyboard agreeing to them. These features are as follows:

Bass And Electric Guitar

Professional piano players, serious pianists and piano students should buy 88 key keyboards. But if portability is an issue, the best keyboard for you would probably be a 61 or 76 key keyboard. If you're seeing to save money, a keyboard with less keys may be your best bet.

How To select The Best Keyboard For You

Personally I think touch response is very important. In fact, I wouldn't buy a keyboard that didn't come with this feature. With touch response, your keyboard will feel and sound like an acoustic piano. The more pressure you apply the louder your keyboard will sound, and the less pressure, the softer. Some keyboards take touch sensitivity one step additional with a highlight called Graded Hammer result where the keys are heavier in the bass and lighter in the higher registers of the keyboard just like an acoustic piano.

Knowing what kind of display you really want makes it easy to pick the right keyboard for you. It's really about personal preferences. You have varied choices when it comes to a display. These include color display, backlit display, one that displays lyrics and score, or even a 640x480 dot matrix display. Or how about a keyboard that comes with a touch screen?

Do you need a keyboard that comes with recording potential or not? There are many options available from easy 2 track sequencers to 16 track sequencers. The more tracks the better. These are great for custom as well as expert arrangements and compositions.

Yamaha keyboards come with a highlight called Yamaha education Suite that is very good for students. If you're buying a keyboard for a child or student, you may want to buy one with this feature. It really teaches one how to play the keyboard with its varied keyboard lessons.

Polyphony is another foremost feature. Polyphony has to do with the number of notes that can play together simultaneously. If your playing is such that you're only using one or two voices at a time you can get away with low polyphony. But if you're doing complex sequences it becomes an issue, and the more polyphony the better. Polyphony choices include 16 or less, 32 to 64, 98-128, and 128 and over.

If you're a trainee you will find Yamaha's guide lamp very useful. With this highlight the keys light up as you play, indicating where you should place your fingers.

Understanding what terms like Gm, Xf, Xg, and Xg Lite stand for will make it easier to pick the best keyboard for you. Other proper features include metronome, tuning and transpose.

If want to harness the power of the Internet your best keyboard should be one that connects directly to the Internet. Some Yamaha keyboards come with a highlight called Internet Direct associate (Idc) that allows you to do just that.

Whether you're a beginner, professional, teacher, gift giver, religious, or naturally want a piano replacement, choosing the right keyboard for you shouldn't be difficult at all. As long as you know what to look for the rest comes easy.

How To select The Best Keyboard For You

The Best Guitar Effects Processor - The private to Great Guitar Tone

Pure heart stopping distortion.

Those were the words used in a guitar player magazine advert for the Art sgx 2000 that first caught my attention. The most prominent thing I learned from owning one was how to eq my sound to get great guitar tone.

Bass And Electric Guitar

I know that sounds like I'm blowing my own trumpet, and everybody has their own idea of what a good guitar sound is, so let's just say I've learned a few things that hopefully you may find useful.

The Best Guitar Effects Processor - The private to Great Guitar Tone

When it comes to direct recording, I've all the time tried to emulate the sound one hears when standing a fair distance away from the speakers, as opposed to the gritty sound one gets when the amplifier speaker is facing you directly.

Simple Eq guidelines.

I approximately all the time end up adding more bass to my guitar sound. Not too much, but just sufficient to round out the sound. A guitar sound can genuinely deal with quite a fair whole of extra bass before it gets overbearing.

The trick here is to offset it with the right whole of upper midrange. The frequency I commonly like to use is 4 khz.

For bass, 100 Hz is regularly fine, but it depends on the amplifier and speaker being modelled as well.

Guitar effects processors and amplifier modellers I've used successfully in the studio.

  1. The Art Sgx 2000 (No longer made). This had a valve preamp section which was configured in dissimilar ways to yield discrete sounds, as well as a solid state distortion. This had excellent effects and eq options. The closest thing ready nowadays is the Rocktron Prophecy 2 and the Rocktron voodoo valve.
  2. The Sansamp classic. This in blend with the Art Sgx 2000 gave me one of the most awesome rock guitar sounds. This is naturally an amplifier simulator and has no extra effects like reverb, delay etc.
  3. The Roland Gp 100. The first guitar effects processor from Roland to feature their "Composite Object Sound Modelling", or Cosm for short. This was a totally digital unit, and even though the effects where good, the amp models left a lot to be desired. The newest Cosm guitar preamps are mostly made by Boss, a subsidiary of Roland.
  4. The Behringer V-Amp. This dinky unit surprised me with the capability of some of its tones, especially for direct recording and live straight into the mixing desk. The trick was to use the right speaker cabinet model, as only a few where good. Behringer is now up to the V-Amp 3.
  5. The Boss Gt-6. This multi-effects processor initially disappointed me, but after genuinely diving in and exploring every selection available, I was eventually able to emulate a wide range of guitar amps quite convincingly as well as find a guitar sound to call my own. If you've got one, the trick is to use the booster pedal result to alter the tone of some amps as well as not be afraid to eq the hell out of it if you have to.
  6. The Boss Gt-Pro. This, along with the Gt 10 floor unit is the newest Cosm processor, and is a rackmountable guitar rig for the recording studio.

While I've used other guitar processors than the ones mentioned above, I've excluded those that genuinely didn't have what it takes.

There are also a lot of guitar processors I've never used before which may be excellent, but I can't genuinely say anyone about them until I do.

Some more tips when working with guitar amp modellers.

  • Never be afraid to get too radical with the Eq. Sometimes that's what it takes to turn a good sound into a great one.
  • Always take a break when you think you've found the sound you want, and come back later to see if it's still sounding good.
  • Check the sound with and without headphones. What sounds good on headphones can sometimes be a bit over the top when the studio monitors are used.
  • Use a guitar that's got medium to low output. Some processors can't deal with the very high production of high gain pickups. I've found that pickups with an impedance of 15K or less work fine. 20K may be too much for inevitable digital processors.
  • Check all gain stages if you can, too see that no part of the effects chain is overloading the next one, or the output. This helps a lot with the final tone.

So what is the best guitar effects processor?

As always, this is very subjective. everybody has a dissimilar taste in guitar sound. What I look for is a farranging Eq section with an selection to put something in the effects loop, so I can add to the motor later.

As I mentioned earlier, the best rock guitar sound I ever got was using one of Tech 21's superior Sansamp pedals in the effects loop of my Art Sgx 2000. Looking as they don't make the Art anymore, I've found other options.

Your guitar and pickups can make a major divergence as well. At the occasion I use the Boss Gt-Pro, and I've got some genuinely great sounds from it, but not without tweaking and experimentation.

The Best Guitar Effects Processor - The private to Great Guitar Tone