About two weeks ago, I publicly expressed my intention to get a keyboard. Basically, I’m a cheapsk…, er, I mean, shoestring budgeteer (at least I intend to be). So, whatever I find, it must be as cheap as possible.

Now, to get a better context, I’ve been looking for a keyboard that I could use for recording. So, a multi-track recorder is a must. And what I want is a multi-track recorder that works like, um, a multi-track recorder in a studio. My very old keyboard that my dad gave me after I graduated high school was a Roland E86. Before talking the details, let me introduce you to a technology called MIDI. To oversimplify, it is a set of industry-agreed rules on how electronic musical device should communicate to each other. A MIDI device should be able to read data stored as MIDI files. Now, a MIDI file, doesn’t really store how exactly a song sounds. I mean, if you play a CD on your player, and then play the CD on your friend’s player, you’ll hear the same thing (excluding factors like equalisation, speaker quality, etc.). But if you play a MIDI file in your MIDI player, and then play it on your friend’s player, they can sound differently. It’s because in the data contained within your CD, it has data telling what frequencies are to be played when and how loud they are, whereas in a MIDI file, it has data telling what notes to be played when and how loud they are. How do they differ? To answer that, let me use this analogy: Suppose that you have two friends, Aee and Bee, being equally skilled players, each holding a guitar and the guitars have two different sets of strings, and as such, their voices are different. Now, you tell both of them to play the same note. Assuming that they’re subservient, since Aee’s and Bee’s guitars have different voices, you’ll hear the same note but distinct voices. MIDI players are like that. You feed them the same data, you can get different renditions.

Getting back to my old keyboard, it had a multi-track recording capability, but you’d had to play the whole lot at the same time. No overdubs, but you could do that using another MIDI recording software or hardware, and for playback, just save the MIDI file into a 3.5″ floppy disk, and the keyboard would read the file from the floppy disk (unless some fungi had grown on the disk), and that was it. Although it wasn’t a top notch keyboard (compared to, say, my brother’s Roland JV-1000, a workstation), it did its job quite well and had helped my previous Pat Metheny cover band, the creatively-named Ensemble Band, perform Lyle Mays-ish orchestrations. And it was not only possible, but rather easy as recording could be done in a punch in/out manner. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, punch in/out is a feature where you can start recording at any time point in a song, and stop recording after any duration. It’s like your father’s recording studio with reels.

That was last decade. Now, what I want is more or less the same. I thought that, after 10 years, hardware got cheaper, so I should be able to afford a keyboard with a multi-track recording with punch in/out feature. Last week I somehow had to squint after seeing some keyboards advertised as workstations yet did not have punch in/out. What? Even analogue recording technology wasn’t this restrictive. And to my surprise, they were expensive. Yeah, great voices, the synths work wonders, but the point of having a workstation is to be able to, well, work on music. Punch in/out is just too necessary to be omitted in a workstation. But the good news is that at least a manufacturer was still sane enough to include punch in/out in its cheaper workstations.

So, have I got one already? No, because a few days ago, my good friend, Dexter Pradi, talked me into using soft synths (also known as virtual instruments). Unlike me, he went to a music school and graduated with a music degree, whereas I decided to do a research degree in computer science (but doing research in music information retrieval, and my jazz trio, Mixed Up, comprised of solely computer scientists). The idea is to just get a MIDI controller, a digital audio workstation (DAW) software, and a good collection of soft synths, oh, and upgrade my computer if necessary (I’ve done it anyway since I want a snappier machine regardless). A MIDI controller is responsible to send the MIDI data (recall the explanation above), and its voiceless. In the you-Aee-Bee scenario, you are the MIDI controller. Aee and Bee and their guitars are the soft synths. The DAW software is useful for primarily recording (and other stuffs like mixing). As a comparison, my old Roland E86 had you, Aee, and Bee built in.

Now that both options are acceptable to me, Dexter has convinced me that his idea was more economical. The difference is that, with keyboards with built-in voices, they voices are, um, built in, whereas with MIDI controller plus soft synths, I’ll need to purchase (or create or sample or whatever) the voices separately.

So, I still keep looking. Any help would be appreciated. If I finally find one set of stuffs, I’ll tell my story here.