What Is A Keyboard Player
Most people who begin to play keyboards do so after taking piano lessons. You might have put in years of practice, have a ton of technical ability and be a great sightreader. “A keyboard’s just a piano that feels cheaply made and has many different sounds; how hard can it be?”, you might think. While you can attempt to play any sound with a piano-like technique, if you listen to what you’re playing with a critical ear, you’ll realize it just won’t sound right; it’s not how a good keyboard player would play.
If that’s where you are right now, you’re more of a pianist who happens to be playing a keyboard than a keyboard player. However, if you want to actually become a good keyboard player, you need to break out of the pianist mentality, and the goal of this site is to help you do so. If we had to pick only two words to describe what being a keyboard player is, they’d be “variety” and “utility”. Keyboards have variety in both sound choices and playing styles. Each type of sound has one (or more!) ways in which you can play it and sound natural and real. You can’t play sustained chords, using a sustain pedal, using an orchestral string section sound. On a piano, the sound eventually dies out, even with sustain; on a violin, as long as the player keeps the bow moving over the string, the note can sound forever. A B3 organ has no way of sustaining notes whatsoever, besides keeping your fingers on the keys, and there are various playing techniques that you’d never use on a piano that will make a B3 patch shine. Even an electric piano like a Rhodes should be approached differently on a keyboard; the instrument has a style of its own, closely related to a piano but different. Being a good keyboard player means taking the time to understand and master this variety in sounds and playing techniques.
keyboards are more versatile than other band instruments, If a lead line just doesn’t sound quite right on an electric guitar, we can take it over. If there’s a quiet moment in the song, we can play a pad to keep things together while the other instruments rest. If there’s no one really driving the rhythm harmonically, we can play punchy piano or EP parts. We can find the thing that no one else is doing and do it.
“Being a good keyboard player means choosing the right sound at the right time to complement the band, and play that sound in the right way”