Tips for Buying a Church Keyboard: Part 3

Video Transcript

"TOM SMITH: Hi. This is Tom. This is for ExpertVillage.com. We're talking about how to play keyboards in a worship team at a church. We've talked about eight different things to look for in a keyboard and considerations. One last thing to add to the new versus old; buying a second-hand keyboard is attractive because you save a lot of money but with technology changing as fast as it does, it's always good to look at new instruments because the sounds constantly improve. If you listen to even a 10-year old synthesizer compared to what they come up with now, the sounds generally sound better and it's cheaper technology too and there's less chance of the thing breaking down so keep that in mind. Another thing too, one approach, is to have a very basic keyboard, a controller where maybe you have just four basic sounds: piano, organ, electric piano, and strings or something like that or maybe it doesn't have any sounds at all but it uses MIDI, a MIDI cable to plug into some sound modules. And that is one approach that I've used as well where I may have a controller and then I'll go out and buy some sound modules or like a particular piano and a sound module so I'll wire that into my set or strings on another module that I really like. In buying sound modules, they just look like a little black box. Buying those separately isn't as much of a risk because basically, it's all chips, sounds, there are no moving parts, there's less to break down. So, that's another approach to buying a keyboard."