Gambold wrote:This goes into the whole decision of just how much equipment are you willing to lug and setup at a typical gig.
Unless you have a personal roadie, it can get quite tiring: packing, loading, unloading and setting up two keyboards, keyboard racks, a mixer, your personal powered speaker solution, bench, and countless cables
All true. It's always a balance between the pleasure of keeping your rig small/light, fast/easy to set up on one hand, and having it be great sounding and satisfying to play on the other. At the first extreme, if I had to, I could probably get through pretty much any gig with a Yamaha MX49 (8.4 lbs) and a Behringer B208D (14.7 lbs), a guitar cable, a power cable, and a sustain pedal. OTOH, I did a handful of gigs last year with 6 keyboards (and still didn't bring some of my favorite/heaviest ones, nor my favorite amplification, the 60 lb JBL PRX625, though the venue had a good house system). Finding the right balance is part of what makes it so challenging to assemble the most satisfying rig for the gig.
In this case, though, if you wanted to add a weighted board to an E5DSW to make it more satisfying to play piano, all you need to add is the board itself, it's power cord, and a MIDI cable (and your stand has to support two boards). No other gear (not even a mixer, since you're not using the second board for sounds). So then it's just a matter, will you get enough more pleasure out of doing the gig to make it worth that much more effort.
Gambold wrote:You start to wonder...do they really need me to sound like five different guys? Why can't I just play one instrument like everyone else?
Yup. Somehow we've ended up taking on the role of not just piano and organ player, but brass section, string section, and who knows what else. However, those first two are really on us... we probably did indeed choose to play both piano and organ, and those boards to call out for different actions, if you want to play them expressively and with the appropriate instrument-specific techniques.
Gambold wrote:I've got a Korg SV-1 which I bring to some gigs - it's really heavy. Yeah the action is better and so are the electric pianos on it. But no, I'm not bringing both.
Bingo. I really like my SV-1, but I've never brought it to a gig, it's too heavy. But I'll bring a 20-something pound Casio. But here's the best news: Recently, I hooked up the SV1 and the E5D side-by-side, called up my favorite SV1 EP sounds, and started tweaking the Nord, trying different underlying sample sets, different EQ, different amps/overdrive... I can't say they're identical, but it did not take much effort to get the Nord EPs *much* closer to the SV1's than I'd expected. So yes, the SV1 EPs sound much better than Nord's out of the box, and play beautifully from its action, but with a little effort, you can really improve the sound of the Nord EPs, and they can play quite well from an attached weighted action that isn't nearly as heavy as having to carry around the SV1. The hardest thing about improving the stock sounds is not knowing exactly what you're aiming for. If you can hook up a keyboard you like right next to it, and keep tweaking to get it closer to your reference, you may be surprised at what you can get out of it!
