Favorite Keyboard Sounds

By Dave Jones

Keyboards have come a long way since Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and the 200 years of pianos, harpsichords and church organs that followed, Through the last century, songwriters have been blessed with the invention of electric organs, electric pianos and synthesizers. Just try to imagine the electric jazz of the ‘70s or the new wave of the ‘80s without modern keyboard sounds.

Let’s start with early electric keyboards, the instruments that saved the ‘60s from becoming a guitar monopoly. The original Hohner Clavinet debuted in the early ‘60s, and was popularized by Stevie Wonder, who overdubbed something like half a dozen “claw” tracks on his hit “Superstition.” The Clavinet has a sharp, percussive sound that is most often played with a lot of syncopation and spiked accents.

Similar in playability, but far more mainstream, is the electric piano. Wurlitzer’s electric pianos can be heard on Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say,” and on almost any Supertramp or Steely Dan recording. The Fender Rhodes is another renowned electric piano, popularized by the likes of Billy Joel, Michael McDonald and exceedingly so by Pink Floyd. The Rhodes has a warm, earthy attack and a smooth sustain that sounds great with a slow chorus or phaser.

Synthesizers evolved from huge and lumbering behemoths with patch cables and vacuum hoses into tiny, sleek, two-octave keyboards that can sample your voice and send performance data to other synthesizers. Luckily, this change took only a few decades, so the entire lineage is still available for observation. Two of the original synth junkies, Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman, have traded the bulky instruments of their youth for arsenals by General Music. Emerson is also known to have employed the Korg CX-3, an instrument that models organ sounds synthetically. While the CX-3 found its inspiration in Hammond’s B-3 organ, the microKORG is clearly based on the look of the MiniMoog, only this one is digital and it also contains a vocoder!

The MOTIF line from Yamaha is the workstation choice of both Gavin DeGraw and Michael W. Smith. The difference between workstations and plain old synthesizers is a number of sequencing features and the ability to fully integrate your keyboard with a hard disk recorder or a computer. The workstation features are trickling down into more inexpensive keyboards as well, like Yamaha’s PSR series. Paul Williams writes with the aid of a PSR-9000, a workstation that is impressively portable, and can connect to the Internet to download song files, loops, instruments and more.

Using a MIDI controller keyboard, you can play a number of very powerful software synthesizers “modeled” to look, sound and react like vintage gear. Korg’s Legacy Collection provides a modern implementation of all of Korg’s most famous patches and samples. Big Boi of Outkast sings praises to the Legacy Collection, and electronic producer BT is a proponent of Propellerhead’s Reason.

Even with all the different instruments available, the most favored keyboard still remains the piano. For many years, Elton John has toured with Yamaha Disklavier Grand Pianos, and today he commands a fleet of four DCFIII pianos, each armed with a rack of high-end pro audio gear for flawless live performance. Elton records with a Yamaha Grand that lives in London. Norah Jones also plays a Grand, only she takes hers on tour. Jazz and fusion pioneer Chick Corea plays CFIII and CFIIIS pianos almost exclusively on record and on the road.

Whatever your particular needs, you can find a keyboard to fit your sound. Hopefully this look at all the options from the harpsichord to the software synth will help you narrow it down.