Yeah, chas… 90% of my audience don’t care. Fortunately, I’m playing for an audience of one, and he attends EVERY gig I do, so there’s no slacking off! The minute I stop loving my own show, I’m done with playing… 💔

But there ARE players in my area that sing well, but can’t play to save their lives, so they put a bunch of keyboards and other gear in front of them and mime. I don’t want to be mistaken for them, so I make sure there’s nothing that obscures the audience’s view of my fingers. Those that even bother to look at least have no illusions that it’s fake..!

As a solo, I consider my competition isn’t other keyboard players, it’s mostly acoustic guitarists in my area. There’s only a handful of keyboard players left, and even there they mostly are either duo’s or in bands. And the one thing a guitarist has over us is that the audience can easily see them playing, both hands! No wiggle room with a guitar… And I’m sorry, but I feel that a LOT more care than you might at first feel, otherwise there would be a plethora of guitarists miming. There are NONE. Show the audience your hands, blow them away with great playing, not just one note solos and restrict your LH to rote chord input, they DO appreciate the skill. Which is a good job considering I don’t consider myself a great singer! 😂.

Gary, couple of years ago I also played an Italian restaurant with one of those fake piano shells and had my BK-9 in it, but they did what quite a few piano bars do, had a mirror suspended overhead showing your hands as they play to the customers. I think you do the audience a disservice assuming none of them care. I doubt any venue would bother with the mirrors if they felt that way. But yes, the less you actually play, the more benefit there is to obscuring what you are doing!

One thing I can say with certainty. No one has EVER come up to me to check on whether it actually was me..! And let’s face it, if anybody does, it shows they care a bit more than you think they do 🎹😎

I don’t think the sliding shelves are sturdy enough. Especially when they are pulled out, there must be an up-and-down movement.
This is my desk, I also had a problem with the size of the my room. The depth of the room is not enough so I adjusted the dimensions of the table.
Homemade Custom PC-Synthesizer desk

Then I bought Genos and a problem arose but I solved it easily too.
Upgrade table

regards, casper

That’s nice, Leon…

Here’s my rig, sorry for the mess! I’ll tidy up and take a better one some day! (Yeah, right!)

https://pin.it/2NZGtgL

Unfortunately, Bush Furniture don’t make this one any more. I modified it by turning the end piece shelves out sideways to extend the monitor supports further out to get that equidistant triangle thing right. But I think it was under $200 or so. Mind you, 20 years ago or so, I think… Time flies!

Nice, it’s called a creative mess. ;-)

It’s Florida, so a hot mess!

After all the input, I have come to the conclusion that the slide out shelf is probably too risky to hold an arranger keyboard. So putting the keyboard on the main desk area, with the slide out shelf used for the computer keyboard, mouse, etc. would work, and the slide out shelf seems wide enough for a pencil and paper too. Remember paper and pencils?

However I do use a 12" laptop, (a Samsung chromebook with a 3:2 display for reading sheet music, lyrics, etc.), along with a PC monitor. Not much room for all that on this studio desk, especially if you include the actual PC, along with any external speakers.

So for me, it might be more practical just to downside my current computer desk, and leave the arranger keyboard as is, right along side the PC desk. It's just a matter of sliding left.

Thanks for all the input. I find all your setups fascinating and informative.

Have you considered using he laptop’s HDMI to feed the monitor? A cheap HDMI switcher would allow you to share the monitor with the computer…

Diki, that piano in the photo was a real Steinway - not a phony shell, and my keyboard is positioned on the X stand directly over the piano's key bed cover, where only people to the side of me can actually see it. The output was plugged into the house sound system, which was lousy to say the very least. If I recall, consisted of a pair of 10-inch Peaveys and a 600-watt stereo mixer/amp.

As for being a musician, as have posted on this and other forums, I am not a musician by any stretch of the imagination, but I was a damned good, musical entertainer - and that's why people hired me. However, you are absolutely correct in that your competition is a bunch of "Have Guitar Will Travel" guys and gals, especially in Florida. Some of them are pretty talented muscians, but by and large, most are not. And that's why they work for chump change, and a good arranger keyboard player, especially one that can also provide good to excellent vocals, and produces a wide variety of songs, can get all the work they can handle, and often booked a year or more in advance.

One of my long since deceased friends and his wife worked for 5 decades as a duo - Jerry and Elsa Burns Duo. They began their career rolling in a baby grand piano into the jobs, but when the PSR-5700 came out, he gratefully switched gears and went with the arranger keyboard, which back then only tipped the scales at 52 pounds. By today's standards, a 52 pound arranger keyboard is a real back breaker, but back then, A lot of entertainers had them in our area.

Elsa was probably one of the best Jazz singers I ever heard and Jerry was a Peabody trained pianist who was an incredible player. They strictly worked the nite club circuit, but there were times when they performed with the Zim Zemarel Orchestra, and performed at the White House on at least 3 occasions. Jerry often said, he would never go back to lugging that baby grand around, and after playing an arranger keyboard, he absolutely loved the lighter touch and his hands no longer hurt him after doing a 4 or 5 hour performance. When I once asked him about the special effects of a real piano and his 5700, he said "I don't think the audiences give a tinker's damned, and in reality, they came to where I was performing to be entertained by both Elsa and myself. Without Elsa up front with that old mic in her hands, I would just be another musician, of which there are thousands of them out there looking for work. I have to turn down jobs every week!"

Jerry and Elsa are both deceased, but worked until Elsa passed at age 78.

Good luck,

Gary

Good idea Diki. Going to investigate that further.

On another note, and as a side comment about the arranger player musician debate, my father, a self taught and a lifelong organ, and accordion player, who had his own 3 and 4 piece bands. (As a kid, I remember helping him lug his Hammond and Leslie up steps, and around corners) He was a remarkable player, someone who I tried to immulate, but never quiet got there.

His age, and the advent of arranger keyboards came at the perfect time, as it was a true game changer for him. He no longer had to struggle, and really couldn't, deal with heavy equipment, and was now able to play out, on his own, at small venues, like Nursing homes, the VFW in Florida, and special small occasions. He had a partner, a retired drummer, who would accompany him. (Drums were really terrible on early arrangers). He was in heaven, he could still play "out" and entertain.

Still later in his life, and his health not good, his voice failing, and reduced playing ability, he relied almost entirely on saved midi song files on a floppy disk, to play at occasional outings. Many knew he wasn't really playing, but they really didn't seem to care. They were just happy to be entertained. I remember him saying "Who gives a damn, as long as it's fun for me, and the audience, besides it's all I got left"

He spent his last few years playing around with his beloved Technics KN7000, at home, for hours every day, that kept him going, kept his mind sharp. And yes he entertained my mother and on our visits every Sunday night, till the end.

I've learned to enjoy both the musician, like Diki, Chas, and my younger dad, and the entertainer, like Gary and my older Pop

I think I often detect a bit of defensiveness from those that consider themselves as pure 'entertainers' and not musicians. I don't have any problem with it, however you do your show is up to you, and if your audience is fine with it so much the better! If you are enjoying doing it, life is sweet...

But I often feel there's some pretty dodgy advice offered from time to time, from people with little experience with how a 'musician' plays. I generally find it better to offer hardware advice on the assumption that a keyboard is being played at a pro level, which will work fine for the less skilled, but advice from someone who plays very little, or very lightly, or with one finger, etc. can often lead better players down the wrong path.

As far as I'm concerned though, if you are enjoying performing in public, it doesn't matter a hair HOW you achieve it. But as a 'player', I must confess that the art of playing needs to come into the performance. It is primarily why I play, the audience's satisfaction is secondary, and the paycheck probably last! Truth is, there are LOTS of easier ways to make more money than gigging, with far less effort. If my skills deteriorate to the point where I can't enjoy the playing, I'm not going to go one finger, or karaoke. And the truth is, if money was the object, I'd already be running karaoke shows. I have a friend who has a great duo with his wife, they sound great, they use audio tracks, sound like the record, yada yada yada, but he gets paid significantly more to sit on his ass and run a karaoke show at the same venues he used to play at!

He can do that, but I can't...

I love PLAYING!

By the way, as a side note, I also hear a lot of defensiveness about using an arranger. So often I hear the old 'You don't see real 'pros' using arrangers' claim and I have to groan... That's a problem with the 'pros', not the keyboard! This is one 'pro' player that has been using arrangers almost exclusively for band gigs and studio work for 30+ years, and never have I once received a sideways look or a funny comment about it. The truth is, 'real' pros don't give a damn what you are using, as long as YOU make it sound killer.

And that's the rub. In a non-sequenced, non auto-accompaniment environment, can you actually PLAY? Because, if you can, the arranger offers a FAR friendlier live playing tool than almost any workstation keyboard. Faster access to the sounds, faster set up of splits and layers, consistent across the board volume evenness (a real weakness of most WS's) and fast and easy access to most meat and potato sounds (which are often buried in a pile of fancy synth sounds you'd rarely use on a WS). That few 'pro' band players haven't yet found this out is THEIR problem, not yours!

But what you WILL get is sideways looks and groans if you EVER use any of the automatic stuff while they are around! Stay off of that, play like a demon, no pro will EVER criticize what you play...!

Be proud of your choice...