What is your current Keyboard / Synth set up?

[starise]

I have two set up to record and another 3 or so in the closet I need to sell or something. I tend to like more keys as a piano plinker. 

 

The ones I have set up to play are a Casio PS5X and a Roland Juno Stage. The PS5X is hooked up in three ways. Usb midi, typical 5 pin midi out to my interface and stereo audio out.

Since I usually only track  a few tracks at a time I put all of my audio including guitars/bass into a Mackie mixer and send the  audio via line in to my interface. I simply pull up faders on the mixer to track what I want to track, pull down what I don't want.

 

The setup I have allows me to set eq and gain before it goes into the computer. It also allows me to track midi and audio from synths simultaneously. I can then take the midi track and use it for anything in my computer. 

 

I have a lot of synths in my computer. All the Korg stuff. A Kontakt setup with some decent sound libraries and Native Instruments better known synths  and other things like Rapture and zt3a. Too much to mention it all here. Actually too many choices sometimes. A minimalist approach is best I think.

 

If you are new to computer music think of it like this- A keyboard is a set of keys with sounds that come out when you play. Quite awhile back someone figured out how to put everything inside the computer but the keys. When playing a keyboard as a midi controller you only tell the computer what to do with a language called midi. Called soft synths these are usually more capable than the internal sounds in your basic sound generating keyboard. As a result I have literally 1000's of killer sounds and synths in my computer that I can play with my keyboard and record.

 

All the sounds in my keyboards plus all the soft synths plus all the sound libraries in Kontakt equals more than I'll ever need to create music of any kind if I wanted to. The hadest part is sometimes trying to determine which sounds to use .