Keyboard for drummer?

[Dunplaying]

Hi,

I’m an amateur drummer, playing for a couple of years and would appreciate advice on buying a keyboard to use as a ‘band’ to jam along with.

The idea is to download MIDI files of songs off the web onto my laptop. Then use software to print out the drum part as sheet music that I can learn. Then I can play the drums along with the keyboard playing the MIDI file of all the other instruments, guitar, bass, piano etc.

Can anyone suggest a suitable keyboard for this. My budget is £300 / $600, new or second hand and the main requirement is that the instrument sounds are as realistic as possible.

Many thanks,

Paul.

 

[kanthos]

You'll be hard-pressed to find something new with good sounds for only $600. The Roland Juno D, the cheapest of their workstation keyboards, is $600 right now. If you have a decent computer and you already have decent software that can make at least minor changes to a MIDI file like muting/removing a part (you'd need something like Finale or Sibelius to handle printing out a score from a MIDI file), you might want to consider buying something like Native Instruments' Kontakt instead of a keyboard.

You could load your MIDI file into Kontakt, make a multi (group of instruments assigned to MIDI channels; this way, you could save your instrument setup for an individual song) and then load the right multi and MIDI file and play along with it. For that matter though, you could also consider using the MIDI file to try and determine a drum part, but playing along with the original audio track; I do this a lot for organ songs. You have to get the level of your instrument balanced right so that you're not overpowering the backing track but can hear yourself over the existing drums on the audio, but it's not too hard and it wouldn't cost you anything.

Honestly though, you're not going to find a keyboard with really good sounds for only $600, so I suggest looking at the other alternatives I suggested instead of settling for something that won't be worthwhile. You're not a keyboard player, are you? Would you get any value out of having a physical keyboard, or are you strictly looking for some way to practice drum parts?

 

[Dunplaying]

Hi Kanthos,

Thanks for the advice.

By using the Kontakt software would I be able to get a better sound out of my laptop than from a keyboard?

Cheers,

Paul.

 

[kanthos]

Better than a cheap keyboard for sure. Kontakt is a sampler: you load any kind of audio data in, can do some processing, stretching, assigning individual audio files to individual keys on the keyboard (if you had a MIDI keyboard hooked up, you could play it back that way). It comes with a huge sample library which easily has more data than any reasonably-priced keyboard. There's a demo (probably without the library though, although there should be online samples of the library sounds) on the Kontakt webpage. I would just double-check that it does have MIDI file playback, but I'm pretty certain it does. I have the previous version of Kontakt and never needed to play back a MIDI file like you'd want to, so I haven't tried it myself, but I'd imagine MIDI playback is a reasonable use case.

Unless you're set on having an actual keyboard or need the hardware of a keyboard for other purposes, Kontakt should suit your needs. For that matter, you can probably spend the same amount on Kontakt and a decent MIDI controller as you would on a low-end keyboard, and as long as having a computer with you doesn't bother you, you'd have better sounds.

 

[Dunplaying]

Thanks for the advice Kanthos,

I'll look into using Kontakt as an alternative to a keyboard.

Cheers,

Paul.