Learning How to Use a Musical Keyboard

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Athena Reich, I'm an actress and musician and performance coach here in New York City and we're just blocks away right now from Times Square, the home of Broadway. In this clip, I'm going to talk about learning how to use a musical keyboard. If you're aspiring to be a keyboardist on Broadway, it's important to get very comfortable with different types of keyboards. This keyboard is actually very simple. It has a grand piano sound, it has other sounds like electronic piano sound, woo that's kind of funky right? It has vibraphone sounds, so you should learn how to find your different sounds for sure, but there's more than that. There's metronomes, metronome buttons, there's sequencing where you can record little bit and play it back. There's volume control. Now some keyboards are very complicated and they have beats and they have many different sounds and many different sampling capabilities so you can really record songs in layers and different tracks on it. And if you're in a Broadway show and you have to provide, say it's a really low budget show, you need to provide the whole orchestra, you can actually use string sounds and piano sounds and beat sounds and create something similar to a whole orchestra sound that you might find in a Broadway show. And some keyboards are very complex. This is a very simple keyboard which I love because it was only 300 dollars and it's very light. So definitely read your manual and explore and don't be afraid to push all those little buttons and do what you can to learn about your keyboard. This has been Athena Reich in New York City."