How to Find the Right Keyboard Sound

Video Transcript

"BEN ANDERSON: Hi. I'm Ben Anderson with Expert Village, and I'm here today to talk to you about finding what sound you need to use on your keyboard. Determining what sound to use is a very important thing, and that's determined by what genre of music you're currently playing. Since a keyboard has such a large variety of sounds, there's an infinite number of possibilities that you could certainly have but it's important to think about what genre of music am I playing right now. If you're playing Gospel music, I really don't think you'd want to use a harp while playing along to Gospel music. Something would be more appropriate like an organ or a piano or strings even could be appropriate, but it's really important to sit and think about what genre of music I am playing. What am I trying to emphasize here? If you are playing something really sweet and melodic and more beautiful sounding, you probably wouldn't want to use an electric guitar sound or you wouldn't want to use a really powerful synth sound. You might want to use a pad or a piano or strings or flute. There are many different instruments that you can have, and that's the wonderful thing about a keyboard is that there are so many different sounds that you can use, and each keyboard comes with all their own different styles of sounds in their own different number of sounds which is really nice. Some keyboards might only have a few sounds to choose from, others keyboards might have a lot of sounds to choose from, and that's the difference between getting a cheaper keyboard versus getting a much more expensive and more reliable keyboard. It all determines on what you're really using it for. But the important thing to remember is what genre of music I am playing. That will help determine what sound you find is best for the situation that you're playing it for. And even though you have so many different options of sounds in a keyboard, it doesn't mean that you have to necessarily use all of those different sounds. I have over 70 different sounds on my keyboard and I'll probably only touch maybe an eighth of those sounds that exist because a lot of them tend to actually be pretty cheesy. And that, again, is determined by how expensive, how nice of a keyboard are you buying. I tend to use the same ten sounds over and over again because they're reliable sounds and they work and they fit well with the genre of music that I am playing. "