I am an organist in an oldies band. I play a Hammond XK3c proline system using either a Motion Sound Pro-145 or a Leslie 3300 system. I have owned Hammond B3 with 122,145 speakers, Roland VK-7 and Vk-77 organs as well as an Alesis QSR 6.1 (my first keyboard which I never did figure out how to run)No one gives keyboard programming instructions. What I want to do is buy another keyboard,arranger or workstation,sampler...... to sit on top of my Hammond rig so I can hit a button and get some brass horns and a few other sounds going along with my organs sounds. We do oldies rock 60's,70's so I need some horns. Don't want to add band members just the sounds. What do I need to do this? How much programming? As a side note my wife and I like to go camping in our trailer. I was thinking of buying a keyboard to do all the above plus portable enough to toss into the camper plug in some good headphones and rock away. Whatever I buy it has to be "pro quality" not a kids casio or yamaha toy keyboard. I was thinking about 61 or 76 keys should be enough. I don't play piano so I don't need an 88 note board.
Get a workstation keyboard. My personal choice would be the Korg M3, but a Yamaha Motif or Roland Fantom would be good choices too. At a lower price, there's also the Yamaha MO, Korg M50 or TR, or Roland Juno, though you lose a number of features with each of these compared to their big brothers. How much programming will you have to do? Well, a bit of organization to best make use of the basic sounds would help. As for actually modifying patches, you'd only do that if you don't like the sounds you have. Try before you buy. There are plenty of good ways to get keyboard programming instruction. First off, you'd want to understand the basics of synthesis - there's a great set of tutorials on Sounds On Sound magazine's website that covers that. Once you know that, the majority of what your keyboard does will make more sense. There are also specific tutorials available on youtube for specific keyboards; Korg in particular does a good job of using video to educate their customers.
I have used an Emulator rack module (w/128 gigs of ram) and the "Physic Horns" samples to cover brass. The Physic Horns samples are pretty up front sounding (not laid back). My E-mu racks are mounted in a small rack case with a scsi drive that stays connected to load the samples.These days can pick up the Emu rack modules and scsi drive fairly inexpensively on Ebay. If I need to do brass, I used that set-up and trigger it from my old DX7. B3
