How to Use Keyboard Simulators

Video Transcript

"In this clip we're going to be talking about what you do when you don't have a room full of these big old instruments to take with you to a show. I'm obviously a sucker for old vintage, big, heavy instruments, you know, with the Hammond and the pianos and electric pianos. Even the electric piano which is supposed to be a portable instrument, this thing weighs over a hundred pounds so it's a pain in the butt to get in and out of the studio to the show and back. So anyway, what do you do? You play a keyboard that has those sounds on it. There's a bunch of different kinds out there, right, there are some that you just have a patch that's your electric piano patch and that's your piano patch and that's your Hammond patch. But then there are other ones that try to simulate those sounds, those actual vintage sounds. So we're going to be looking at what I use when I go out on stage because I don't feel like lugging all this stuff with me, and be showing you kind of how to get those same sounds out of a keyboard emulator. This is what they call a Nord Electro 2 and this is the keyboard that I've been looking for since I was in high school. It basically has all the sounds that we just talked about all rolled into one thing. It's more than just organ sound, electric piano sound, you really have control over it and you even have some of the effects built in. So let's start with, this is, this section right here is your organ section so those draw bars that I had, you can simulate those by pushing them down here. You know, it simulates you pulling them down and up so you know, that same thing that we talked about before about having the draw bars and using those for expression, you can definitely do that. So up here you also have the Leslie simulator. You can turn that off too so you don't have.....you know, or you turn it on and it's as easy as that and you have two different sounds then with that. So to simulate that what we were doing before, you know, you have.....you know, all of a sudden, you can get pretty close to what I was doing on the actual Hammond and you don't have to carry a four hundred fifty pound instrument with you. This not only has the organ simulator on it but it also has a bunch of different piano sounds on it, specifically rock and roll vintage piano sounds. So you do have an acoustic piano simulator. You know, it's pretty decent. But I typically don't use that very much. There's a Rhoades simulator on here. It's not exactly the same thing but it's pretty close, especially for something that's this small and this compact and also has the Hammond sound on it. You can even throw some effects on here right, so.....you know, so you can get some of the same ideas that you get out of the pedals that we were looking at before, even like an overdrive. So it's not the real deal, it doesn't look quite as cool as having a big Hammond on stage and your electric piano but it's about the next best thing and you can get, you know, once you understand how the sounds come from the real instrument, then it makes it a lot easier to simulate those sounds on a good simulator."