Larry, Will your SX900 fit on the pull out shelf and can it support the weight?
Mitch

I think Larry’s got the right solution, but it might be a lot better with a couple of mods…

For starters, I’d put the arranger on the top surface. Stable, no bounce, no risk of wobble or the shelf becoming looser over time (those shelves are usually only supported by wood screws into the underside of what is likely to be particle board wood). Put the computer keyboard, mouse and other things like the interface on the slide out tray. A LOT easier to get to while recording than having to reach over the top of your arranger while you play it!

Next, I’d extend the monitor shelf wider. To accurately monitor audio, you should be sitting at the apex of an equidistant triangle. From that photo, looks like those monitors are a bit close together. A lot of computer desks today haven’t kept up with the size increase of monitors, leaving very little room outside for speakers. Either a plank full width or a couple of shorter extensions either end would help…

If you think about it, what are you likely to be doing most..? Playing on the arranger, or editing music? Hopefully, it’s playing! Prioritize that in how you lay out the gear and it will be a comfortable music creation environment.

By the way, a good adjustable height chair that you can lock from rotating will help with posture when either playing (higher) or editing (lower), as it won’t be long term comfortable with just one height. And rolling office chairs that spin and slide are tough to play in!

Mitch, that is my main question, and I'm not so sure. The slide out shelf has been answered (from others on Amazon) as 40" wide and the SX-900 is 39 1/2" wide, so it's tight, but most likely will fit.
And I'm also not sure if the slide out shelf can handle the weight of an SX-900, but Diki might have the right solution. (see quote below)



Good points Diki. One user has his music keyboard on the slide out tray, the monitor, mouse and computer keyboard on the main tier, and speakers on the top tier. So there are options. I'm going to continue to search around. One other note, the top is not a perfectly flat smooth surface, instead it has a slight texture to avoid sliding.

Diki, I am among the few individuals on this forum that have actually seen you play an arranger keyboard - you hit those keys as if you have a ball-peen hammer in your hands. I have never had an arranger keyboard move on my stand while playing over the past 30 years while I was on stage - never!

My custom console is being used by players throughout the globe and it reduced my setup time from 30 minutes to just 7 minutes. (I think you may have seen the video I posted on You Tube). This allowed me to keep things going smoothly while taking up the least amount of space.

Additionally, I loaded all my gear aboard my sailboat, sailed it single handed down to Marathon Key, Florida where I spent the winter living aboard the boat, and played 3 nights a week in that town, where most of the entertainers were "Have Guitar Will Travel" players were pulling down just $35 to $75 for a 4 to 5 hour gig, while I managed to pull down $200 plus tips at the best places in town. I was able to call a cab to haul my gear to the Hyatt Regency Resort and it all fit in the back seat, while I was in the front seat. My cost for the cab was just $5 from the boat to the resort - I could not have done that prior to designing my console.

Now, because I was not a former piano player, I adjusted the sensitivity setting on the arranger keyboard to my lighter touch, which still provided all the velocity I needed to trigger the special effects. The audiences, obviously, enjoyed what I had accomplished - my Beer Pitcher tip jar was filled to the top nearly every night, and probably averaged about $200 or more, which made for an extremely lucrative evening. Additionally, until my lung disease forced my retirement, my vocals were pretty damned good, which made a huge difference in the overall pay check.

Now that I had to retire due to health issues, I still get an occasional call from that part of the world, asking if I would be returning in the not too distant future. While flattering, my days on stage are over, but I still manage to get enough medication in me and supplemental oxygen to belt out a song on my my S-950 and record it with the onboard USB recorder. A few weeks ago, I was able to pull off a recording of Brandy, a song about sailing. Brandy

All the best,

Gary

Gary, I like wisdom and success. Love your story.
Thank you, John C.

Gary, the force I play with is mostly a product of firstly a continued interest in playing the piano, which doesn’t have velocity curves (although a good tuner can lighten or stiffen the action a little bit to taste) and needs good finger strength to be able to cover everything from ppp to fff, but also a need to be able to play rhythmically totally accurately, and a lot of funk and other styles need complex syncopation with a ton of dynamics. This, I find extremely hard to pull off consistently with a very light touch, you can get rhythmical, and you can get dynamic with a light touch, but both at the same time is not easy!

Looking at your playing in a DAW or sequencer is a really good way of seeing if you are really using the full dynamics a keyboard can produce. How close to 127 do you get, how close to 01 do you get, and how tight to the grid do you get at each extreme?

Plus, for me, it’s about the ‘sound’… yes there are good drummers who play extremely quietly, but they are as rare as hen’s teeth! To be in the pocket and with a good groove, most players need at least a certain degree of force. If you thought I played hard, man you should see some REAL pros! Liszt used to break piano strings all the time..! To be honest, compared to some of the greats I’ve had the pleasure of playing and recording with, I’d put my ‘touch’ on the medium low side… 😂

One of the issues with turning down the dynamics on an arranger is, yes, you can make it more sensitive to medium strength playing and give the impression you are playing harder, but you don’t get any increased sensitivity to lighter playing. There’s a basic lowest velocity the sound will play at no matter what the curve is set to. So what you are doing is reducing the resolution the machine recognizes velocity at. You are trying to squeeze 127 degrees of velocity out of 90 steps, but you haven’t made the low end any more sensitive. It’s not a ‘shift’ in touch sensitivity, it’s a ‘compression’. Bottom line, you’re losing range.

But everybody gets used to what they feel most comfortable with. Me, I’m comfortable playing with close to a pianist touch. That way, I can easily do a stint on a piano and not fatigue my fingers.

Anyway, as I pointed out, my comments had nothing to do with your rig, they were addressed at the OP. I actually DO have a music production desk very similar, a bit bigger and more heavy duty because it supports full sized studio monitors as well as the keyboard and computer, and I can assure you, hanging your keyboard from the underside is going to stress the wood screws that support it into the underside, especially if you play with anything but the most featherweight of touches. Mine have stripped out a couple of times, and that’s with no weight on it al all other than me resting my forearms on it from time to time! The problem is, the screws which support the tray do so from the middle of the underside, which puts quite a lot of moment angle on them once the drawer is fully extended with the keyboard on it. Too much for me to trust a $2000+ keyboard on, at least!

Anyway, each to his own, but when you have lightweight computer keyboards and other lightweight peripherals, why waste the sturdiest surface you have on them and trust your much heavier, much more expensive keyboard to the shelf designed for computer keyboards? 🎹😎

Diki, here's my basic setup: As you can see, everything is perfectly stable, safe and secure, setup time is less than 7 minutes, no wires showing other than the main AC power cord and the main line to the Bose L1 Compact. Additionally, all the essential components are housed within the console. I even had some strips of velcro on the bottom of the foot pedals so they would adhere tightly to the carpet.



All the best,

Gary

My setup is a little easier, LOL… BK-9 direct into a pair of QSC K10’s. That’s it! A TC VK-Perform just to do basic mic compression and echo into the BK’s mic in,

Lyrics, if I need them are already embedded into the file and display on one of the BK’s little LCD screens. Never been a fan of the audience being able to see you reading off of a laptop screen… I’m old school, no pop band I was ever in used sheets, only big bands. Plus, I think more and more nowadays, people tend to think ‘karaoke’ the minute they see a big screen with lyrics, and it’s hard enough as a keyboard player to get them to realize you are actually PLAYING, as good sounding as the backing is! Add in a big screen with lyrics big enough for them to see you reading, next thing they’re asking if they can sing!

I know things have changed quite a bit since my early days, and nowadays you can even find top concert groups like Dream Theater using iPads etc to display charts and lyrics, but I just can’t bring myself to use them. When my audience sees me, they see a keyboard, a mic and me. And that’s all I want them to see!

That's because you're a musician, Diki. There are two kinds of OMB's; those that can play and those that use technology to disguise the fact that they CAN'T play. Sadly, the average customer with 'three shots and a beer' under his belt couldn't care less about which one you are (the exception being jazz club audiences that come for the music, not to make idiots of themselves on the dancefloor). This whole thing of being worried that the audience may not think that you're playing, is mostly a 'musician thing'. Truth is, only an idiot would think it's you playing 5-6 instruments at once (all at an 'expert' level), while simultaneously singing your heart out. Audiences are pretty dumb, but not THAT dumb (watching you pick out one-finger notes with a full blown big band arrangement going on in the background). Now, nobody's going to think Marco Parisi isn't playing, even if he's got a Genos stacked on top of a Bk9 stacked on top of a PA4x. That's because his keyboard skills are SO in evidence. I'm guessing, so are yours, given your piano background and broad musical knowledge.

My guess is, but for the economy of it, most Pro's out there wouldn't be playing Arrangers in the first place (on a gig). Sadly, most of the available gigs out there these days can't or won't accommodate 3-4 piece groups and an increasingly dumbed-down audience seems more than willing to accept the technological substitute (There's a reason we've got multi-millionaire DJ's out there and trained, degreed, talented musicians out there starving to death). Oh well, a guy's gotta' eat.

chas

Gotta agree with that, Diki. All I wanted them to see is me and the keyboard, but with more than 3,800 songs roaming around in the cobwebs of my aging mind, there were times when that 9-inch netbook PC came in handy. Most of the time, however, I just left it closed and it went into a standby mode. The only bad thing about the standby mode is it took about 30 seconds to recover, thus 30 seconds of dead air, which as you are well aware, seems like a lifetime when you have a packed dancefloor and people headed for their seats.

I always loved it, particularly when I was performing the nite club circuit in Baltimore's Little Italy, and some drunken fool would climb on the stage and ask you if you had "House Of The Rising Sun" or some other song, in that machine while they were holding a glass of beer in their hand over the top of my keyboard. I usually responded by saying, are you bringing me a beer, at which point they would back away a bit, clutching that beer as if were a life ring thrown to them from a sinking ship. I then usually responded saying "There are no songs in this machine - they're all up here" pointing to the side of my head. Then I would sneak into the music finder directory, where the songs are listed alphabetically, use the scrolling wheel and quickly select the song. I probably played "House Of The Rising Sun" a couple thousand times in my 30 years on stage, so no need to look up the lyrics.

I clearly remember one job where I was filling in for a friend who was recovering from a heart attack and spent six weeks in rehab after a pacemaker implant. He was really having a tough time and it was a Saturday Night job, a time when I rarely worked doing the senior circuit. There were three couples sitting at a table 20 feet in front of me, they were constantly talking, often very loud, when a lady got up from the table and came over to the piano bar where I had my keyboard setup. She was totally blasted, and began talking to me while I was playing and singing a song. She was obnoxious, to say the least, and finally I just stopped playing, left the mic on, and said "Maam, do you realize how difficult it is to play a song, sing that song, and talk to you at the same time? She gave me a weird stare, turned around and walked quickly to the table and in a loud voice said "Frank, I told you it was him singing, and it's him playing the songs, too." I almost wet my pants I was laughing so hard. Her husband/boy friend gave me a nasty look, got up from his seat and I didn't see him again the rest of the night.

This again, was in Baltimore's Little Italy, at a restaurant that has long since gone out of business, called Dela Notte, where the keyboard was pretty much totally hidden from view, and you were surrounded by a piano bar and you sat behind a huge Steinway. When my friend came back to work, I greeted him with open arms and said "I'm damned glad you didn't die - I'm outta here!"

I was glad to back entertaining the wonderful people I met doing the senior circuit, daytime jobs, no getting home at 2 a.m., no drunks to contend with, better pay, middle of the day, every day of the week.

All the best,

Gary