Hello there! I’m a worship keyboardist having played in the same church band for nearly 17 years. The rig I’ve been using is finally starting to get a little dated – not that the keyboards are really old and have antiquated sound, just that they’ve been in use for several years.
The rig is a Roland Fantom G7 on top with a Roland VK-8 tone wheel organ on bottom. We are in the process of updating our sound a bit, and I’ve been collecting VSTs for “home recording” for a few years, so having a larger selection of sounds made me want to see what Gig Performer could provide. While the Fantom has well over 1200 sounds, I’ve found myself using the same 10 or 12 sounds over the last several years.
Tonight was rehearsal. The FOH engineer was glad to be able to reduce the number of channels in use because I can now run both keyboards through my audio interface, routing all my individual racks through the global rackspace and out through a single pair of balanced stereo mains – so no DI boxes anymore!
He set the levels, and since I had done my homework by sending all my local racks through the global rackspace, all of the sounds were nicely balanced whether they came from the internal VSTs or from the audio out of the two keyboards.
Rehearsal began, and the worship leader for this week was blown away by the new pads and leads I was able to pull together.
When we went into an orchestral based song, where I would typically pull up a string patch on the Fantom, I pulled up an ensemble string section from EastWest sounds and played a rich, full orchestra sound. The team was truly impressed.
I’m looking forward to Sunday and seeing the response from the congregation. The best thing, because of so many helpful people here, I’ve barely had to change my workflow from what I was doing before – but I have all new updated sounds!
I’ll try to get some pics of the rig this weekend.
