keyboards

First and foremost, I am available to provide lounge style piano music for your upcoming private functions. I have more than a decade of experience playing 5+ hours of jazz standards/showtunes (1920-present day) at cocktail parties, wedding receptions, and various special occasions. In the case a piano is not available at the event, I can travel with a professional full-size keyboard, and enough amplification to accomodate your individual needs.

For session work I play a custom built keyboard rig unlike any I've heard or seen. After learning the "ins and outs" of signal flow and gain structure, I developed a self-contained multi-faceted rig. The first attempt at this process was dubbed NASA due to it's size and complexity. All sounds are produced with the latest plug-ins and amp modeling for a variety of vintage tones in a small package.

I am well aware of the lack of detail in this picture that is on the right, but thought that a simple explanation would suffice. Basically, with a few pieces of 1U rack components and only 2 USB controllers interfacing a laptop, I was able to control 4 different key/synth sounds simultaneously (all with independent gain/EQ/effects), contain an in-ear monitoring system of both my keys and vocals, provide a click track for both by myself and the drummer, and send isolated pre-recorded ambient tracks to the house mix. NASA also housed a mono-mixed dedicated DI box, 3-way iso mic splitter, and a firewire sound card.

As you can imagine, moving NASA (measuring 24x24x22 and weighing about 85lbs) was not the most pleasant of tasks. Early this year I stumbled across the SKB Studioflyer, a 2U rack that holds a laptop securely during transportation without needing to disconnect its cables. After some careful planning, I was able to construct SPUTNIK. Weighing in at only 40lbs, it is small enough to fit in the overhead compartment of any airplane. One of the major advancements in SPUTNIK was the design of a custom patchbay fitted with Neutrik 1/4", XLR, and USB jacks, allowing access to all cabling in the front of the rig, and then hardwiring custom cut terminations for all jacks.

I intend on posting some more detailed images of the design of both NASA and SPUTNIK. Once I obtain some decent pictures I will link up a slideshow for anyone who might be interested.