| The Portable Home Keyboard Revolution Today's portable home keyboards are packed with professional features and first-class sounds. Making music has never been easier. by Sam Molineaux Some manufacturers call them portable keyboards, others prefer the term home keyboards, and still others refer to them as workstations. All three terms describe the same thing: versatile, self-contained, performance- and composition-oriented keyboards, perfect for the adventurous beginner or amateur musician. Semiprofessional and pro entertainers have adopted many portable keyboards, lured by their convenient instant-accompaniment tracks and easy-to-navigate front panels, not to mention their incredibly realistic sounds and styles. This traditionally housebound instrument has moved out of the home and into the performing arena. Portable home keyboards, which are known best for being easy to use, can open up a lot of doors to creativity. Whether you use them at home for family sing-alongs or on stage for a concert, these keyboards are proving versatile enough to grow with any performing musician's needs. The only limits may be those of your imagination. Is It for Me? Apart from portability, two of the most defining features of the home keyboard are its lightweight key action and its 61-note, 5-octave keyboard. (Traditional pianos and most digital pianos have keyboards with 88 notes, or 71/2 octaves.) Beginners tend to find a lighter keyboard touch easier to play, and fewer notes, of course, means less to worry about. If you're a beginner, you'll take to a portable home keyboard as a duck takes to water. Players brought up on an acoustic piano, however, may find the shorter, lightweight keyboard hard to adapt to. It's a good idea to compare the keyboard to an ensemble-style digital piano before you buy, as some people may not find the difference in action comfortable. But if you're a relative newcomer looking for a compact and portable keyboard to perform songs on -- maybe playing a melody line over a built-in backup band or creating your own backing tracks using the styles or the sequencer -- a home keyboard is absolutely ideal for the job. What a Choice! Most manufacturers of portable home keyboards offer a range of models, with more sophisticated features and more plentiful sounds on the higher-end models. Don't think the entry-level models must have a low-quality sound just because they're inexpensive. These days sampling technology is so good that even a budget-priced keyboard can sound incredibly realistic. Lower-priced keyboards probably have limited features, such as smaller memory capacity, fewer sounds or accompaniments, and a smaller LCD; and these models may not have a floppy drive or the full complement of MIDI connections. But even if you're on a limited budget, you can get a home keyboard with high-quality sounds, versatile accompaniments, and enough fun and educational features to more than satisfy you as you progress with your musical education. When you're buying a new keyboard, you'll have to consider your budget, but you should also match your intended purchase with your own level of musicianship and factor in how you might improve over time. Some of the complicated features may intimidate you initially, but a keyboard that is too basic might quickly bore you. Remember that what seems complicated at first will become less so as you learn your way around the keyboard. One good approach is to find a manufacturer who makes a keyboard with a look, sound, and feel that pleases you; then opt for the best model you can possibly afford in that manufacturer's line. Don't worry if your budget won't stretch to the flashiest model. You can always upgrade later. Sounding Out These days, most portable home keyboards come with at least 128 preset sounds -- the General MIDI sound set -- but many have hundreds more. You'll find a good range of piano and electric-piano sounds, but given the band-in-a-box nature of this type of keyboard, you'll also find plenty of other instruments, such as organs, strings, guitars, basses, woodwinds, brass, choirs, synths, drums, and percussion, as well as some sound effects. Quantity is always good, of course, but it's the quality of the sounds that really counts. Often a keyboard with a limited set of high-quality sounds comes across as more realistic and better suits your personal needs than one bursting with second-rate sound variations. Onboard effects offer a great way of tailoring sounds, and almost every portable home keyboard these days comes with common effects such as reverb and chorus, both of which enlarge or thicken the sound. Many keyboards include a greater selection of effects, such as tremolo (wonderful for organ sounds), equalization, delay, and echo. You may also find that the keyboards you experiment with have other signal-processing effects, such as distortion and harmonization, or even give you the ability to tweak a sound's effects parameters. Custom Fit Portable home keyboards have come a long way in the last ten years. Whereas previously they pretty much limited you to the preset sounds in the box, most keyboards available today have the capability to edit or tweak their built-in sounds. Some higher-end keyboards offer extremely sophisticated editing capabilities on a par with those of some synthesizers and professional workstations, and the large graphic displays and well-explained functions in the home-oriented instruments make editing surprisingly straightforward. Adding effects to a sound is always a good way of customizing it to your liking, as is mixing and matching different layers of sounds. Some keyboards let you apply filters to suppress or boost certain frequencies of a sound, and they may also allow you to adjust resonance and other parameters that can dramatically affect tonal quality. Even altering the start and end times of a sample can have a significant effect -- imagine a cymbal without its initial dynamic attack or a vibraphone that cuts off immediately after you strike it. There are few limits to what you can create by editing sounds, and the more you delve into your keyboard's capabilities, the more you can expand its sound palette. In Style The auto-accompaniments section of a portable home keyboard is where its one-man-band capabilities really come into play. Most keyboards come with a good selection of musical styles, including swing, jazz, country, pop, polka, hip-hop, waltz, Latin, and everything in between. Backing parts consist of a rhythm, a bass line, and up to five other instruments that beef up the chord section. While your right hand jams over the top with the melody instrument of your choice, the backing parts play along using the notes of the chord you choose with your left hand. You can learn this technique quickly, and once you've mastered it, you'll be transformed into a hotshot soloist with your own virtuoso backing band, thanks to the amazing quality and sophistication of the preprogrammed styles. Instant Replay Sequencing takes the auto-accompaniment concept one step further. Here you have the opportunity to create your own multitrack recordings completely from scratch by playing one line at a time until you've built up a complete song. You can store your sequences in your keyboard for instant recall, or you can save them to a disk and load them into your keyboard as needed. A format called SMF (Standard MIDI File) ensures that other electronic instruments can read and understand your sequences, so you can even distribute them among your musician friends -- which is great for collaboration or getting your songs out to a wider audience. You can also buy commercial SMFs that, once loaded into your keyboard, map to the correct sounds and reproduce well-known tunes for your enjoyment. You can play or sing along karaoke-style with SMFs, some of which include song lyrics that appear highlighted on your keyboard's display. The sequencers included on some lower-end portable keyboards are fairly basic: they might only let you record a couple of tracks or limit you to storing two relatively short songs at any one time. But the sequencers in the mid- and high-end instruments are more sophisticated, with as many as 16 tracks and myriad editing capabilities. And with the larger graphic displays found on the latest high-end keyboards, you can easily create professional-sounding sequences and backing tracks. Sequencing Tips Here are some beginner's tips on sequencing from Chris Anthony, a product specialist for Generalmusic who has masterminded and developed many of the company's portable and professional keyboards over the last decade. He's also an accomplished musician and programmer. Experienced keyboardists have expertly programmed many of the commercially produced song files (SMFs). One advantage to using these files is that once you load a song into your keyboard's sequencer, you can explore it and see its construction. Isolate the tracks one by one (by turning off all the tracks or reducing their volumes), until only the track you wish to study remains. As you do so, you'll start to notice that, for example, when you hear a great-sounding horn section, it probably consists of a combination of separate tracks for, say, trumpet, trombone, and saxophone sections. A funky drum, bass, and guitar groove might actually turn out to be much simpler than you first expected once you've dissected it. By taking this approach, you'll pick up invaluable keyboard programming and playing techniques that may have taken the programmers years to master. A keyboard's onboard sequencer is a useful tool for developing your own keyboard skills. When you program a sequence, you can take all the time you need to work on the stuff you're not particularly great at. You can play as slowly as you want, regardless of your planned final tempo. You can even go back and remove any dud notes you played or rerecord any sloppy passages until you're completely satisfied. Most sequencers will even correct timing inaccuracies using a neat feature called quantizing. Then, when everything's ready, invite your family and friends over, wind up the speed, press the Play button, and proudly announce, "Here's a little something I recorded earlier." If you're a novice player, you may find the prospect of having to play drums on the keyboard somewhat daunting. On the other hand, you may find keyboard drumming far more satisfying than trying to learn the finer points of keyboard technique. Whatever the case, you can use parts of your keyboard's internal accompaniment styles to augment your own playing in areas where your technique is weak. If you're not good at drum programming, just grab one of the hundreds of drum patterns in the keyboard's style section, and make that the first track of your song. Now you've got a dynamic, professionally programmed drum track on which to build. You can also use the Fills, Intros, and Ending parts as needed to make your sequence sound even more professional. The same applies to all the other parts of the accompaniment styles -- bass, rhythm guitar, horns, synthesizer parts, and so on. Almost every portable keyboard on the market today contains an enormous database of musical ideas programmed by some of the finest musicians in the world. Best of all, every one of these is 100 percent royalty-free! Instant Recall With the innumerable sounds, effects, styles, and functions on your keyboard -- many of which you can assign to buttons, sliders, pads, and performance wheels -- you'd find it frustrating if each time you wanted to play a particular song, you first had to remember all the changes you made the last time you played it. Registration memories (sometimes called one-touch settings) let you store multiple settings so the keyboard can instantly recall a particular song's setup with the press of a button. Some keyboards let you name the memory locations; for example, you might name a registration memory "Livin' la Vida Loca" to remind you that the stored setup corresponds to that song. If you want to switch settings during a song (say you want the third verse to have a completely different texture, melody instrument, and samples), you could have two or three variations of overall settings and switch between them during your performance. Some keyboards let you store these memories onto a floppy disk and create a whole library of setups. Free Sample Sampling is the process by which an electronic musical instrument digitizes, stores, and reproduces external sounds. Although expensive and sophisticated dedicated samplers do this task best, some portable home keyboards offer a basic sampling facility you can use to record your own sounds and expand the available sound palette. There's no end to the type of sounds you can sample, and with a bit of experimentation you'll come up with some interesting and quirky ideas. On some keyboards, the user can only assign a new sample to a dedicated button or pad on the instrument's front panel, so each time you press the pad you hear that sound played once in its entirety. But many of the new higher-end keyboards offer greater sophistication in this area, along with expandable storage capability for increasing the length and number of samples you can load at any one time. (Audio samples take up a lot of memory.) Power Up In years gone by, the main culprit in tinny-sounding portable keyboards was an inferior speaker set. Not anymore! The quality of speakers and the sheer power output on today's home keyboards are quite astounding. Some of the higher-end models even include two sets of stereo speakers for extra bass boost, and their power output is typically between 10 and 30 watts per side. If that doesn't sound like much, plug them in and test them out -- they'll surprise you. You've Got the Look An instrument's look, feel, and response are important aesthetic considerations when you're choosing between keyboards. Many manufacturers are leaning toward a sleek monochrome look. The proliferation of deep-blue, information-packed LCDs and pinpoint LEDs for indicating various keyboard functions has made these keyboards easier to use. Portable home keyboards, with their button-laden, generously labeled front panels, look quite different from portable digital pianos. Solid, responsive keys and neat casings ensure that today's portable home keyboards look and feel better than ever. So get those creative juices flowing and give voice to the music inside you. With such exciting and affordable technology available, it's a great time to invest in a portable home keyboard.
Sam Molineaux is a Los Angeles–based freelance writer and musician whose idea of the perfect portable keyboard is one that weighs just two pounds, plays MP3s, and is instantly upgradable via the Internet.
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