Keyboard(s) for Soul Band

[DaveM]

Hi

Playing more and more live with a soul band and need a couple of keyboards - one with good organ and paino sounds and another with excellent brass\horn sounds that can fill out live horn section as well as punch through when required. Also looking for keybaord amp combo to run them through.

Any suggestions welcome - thanks

DaveM

 

[evergreenthompson]

Welcome to the forums, DaveM!

Some of Yamaha keyboards' "Sweet" voices seem to be pretty good for brass and horns. I found their "ordinary" brass voices to be lacking. I don't recall that any keyboard I tried really does muted brass justice.

Yamaha has also been historically good with pianos. A lot of people say Korg hasn't been the greatest for piano, but that their newer keyboards are much better.

I'm not sure who does organ sounds best, though it might depend what kind of organ sound you are looking for.

 

[PianoMan]

Personally I prefer Roland piano sounds over Yamaha, though Yamaha's are quite good. I recently bough a Yamaha Motif Rack and I can tell you what sounds amazing: Organs! Rhodes! Wurlitzer! Clavinet! WOOOO!!! I'm excited, can you tell? Alright so that solves your organ and piano (if you like them) dilemma. Brass and horn sounds you say? I hear tell that Korg is the way to go for brass and pads. Haven't tried them myself, but I can tell you that Yamaha is a little weak in that department.

The only thing I would think better for organ sounds would be some type of clonewheel organ: Nord Electro 3, Nord C1, Hammond XK-1, Hammond XK-3c, possibly others. I was thinking of getting a clonehweel, but now that I bought the motif I honestly don't think I want to for a while, the organ sounds are damn good, and there's a TON (50 or so) of them, so likely they'd have sounds you'd want. I'd still test it out though.

Good luck.

 

[kanthos]

If you're mainly doing keys and only occasionally augmenting the brass, I'd suggest the Nord Stage EX or Nord Electro 3. They've got the same organ engine as the Nord C1, which is generally considered the best on the market (although, there's a catch: the drawbars are digital, so if you're used to playing a real B3, it'll take a bit of adjustment), and they both have the same piano engine and, I believe, same amount of sample RAM (another catch: you're limited to samples Nord provides).

The differences: the Stage also has a synth module. It's not as good as it could be, but it's functional, and you can get some half-decent synthesized brass that way. The Stage also lets you play up to two of each section at once: 2 keyboards/pianos, 2 synth sounds, and two drawbar settings for the same organ tonewheel (you can't play a B3 and a Vox at the same time though, which is probably fine for everyone).

The Electro 3 lets you load samples from Nord's Piano Library (shared with the Stage EX and older Stage models, as long as you update the OS) the Nord Sample Library (which will eventually be shared with the Nord Wave, a combination analog synth/sample playback keyboard), and the Mellotron Library, as well as coming with an editor that will let you convert WAV files into sample files.

 

[DaveM]

Guys

Thanks for the advice and suggestions - gives me some good leads to follow up.

 

[expert84]

hello to all people here!
you asked about realistic brass and horn sections, well I can tell you that none of the yamahas, korgs, rolands or kurzweils don't have that good brass sections like emu-systems "emulator". I have emu E5000ultra rack digital sampler and this module sounds like a bomb, if you can find it I recomend it to you for brass, pads, strings, organs. the point of emu is that it has the best philters and converters even nowadays and sounds so airy and big when you're playing live. and if you don't like racks try to find emu e4k music workstation with keys, everyone I know who tried it was so impressed!