With using a laptop for live music comes the greatest gift of all: Choice

It used to be the case that you were ‘locked in’ by the limitations of your keyboard hardware. Not any longer…

Most hardware keyboards have a pretty fixed architecture. You buy it for the sounds that it comes with, and you then use those sounds until you want to buy another keyboard. Some manufacturers such as Nord and Yamaha offer an ever expanding library of installable sounds, but even with that option, some may feel that they are limited to only the sounds in that manufacturer’s library. 

With a computer-based keyboard setup, you have so many more options available to you. Decide you want a new piano sound? No problem. Want a different reverb effect? No problem. Want more I/O so you can send different sounds to different places in the live environment? Just use a multichannel audio interface. Want a higher-quality D-A converter or the ability to interface with audio-over-IP platform like Dante? Splash out a little more. 

With software, you can personalise your custom setup using MIDI controllers 

Then there’s the immense benefit of being able to tailor your equipment to your personal preference. With a laptop rig, you can design your own setup of MIDI controllers. Maybe you love the feel of an 88-note weighted keyboard, but you also need lots of faders and knobs for live effects. Or maybe you need a smaller version of your setup for tighter venues, with all the same sounds on hand. 

You can use any number of external MIDI controllers from brands like Novation, Akai and Native Instruments, to design some of that control into a computer based system.

I think this flexibility is one of the best things about a computer based solution — it can build and evolve along with whatever you are working on at the time, in a way that it would be very difficult for a hardware solution to do.

A laptop rig for live music performance is more immediate

For the vast majority of live music performers — who do not have a dedicated keyboard tech waiting in the wings — a computer-based live music performance rig will bring a level of immediacy that can make your life easier. By immediacy I mean the level of control that you have over the instrument in front of you, and the amount of time it takes to get from nothing to something in terms of programming.

Now this is a slightly complicated topic because everyone has different needs, and different levels of comfort when dealing with a hardware or a computer interface. So let's look at a couple of scenarios.

If you are in a professional touring band with a keyboard tech, it would not be unusual for all the keyboard programming to be done well in advance — even by someone who is not the keyboard player — so in a gig situation, the player is just playing the notes, and not having to interact with the software or hardware much, if at all. In this case, I don't think there is a good argument for using hardware over software — it will come down to the preferences of the player, the tech and the tour. 

If you’re like most keyboard players, who don't travel with their own tech, your need to get hands-on with your system is completely different. Let’s say you’re in a covers band, playing last-minute requests and tailoring the setlist for each gig. You need to be able to come up with sounds very quickly on the fly. Now, if you have an all-purpose hardware keyboard that you are very familiar with, this could be a good reason to stick with what you have. But then you may encounter the limitations mentioned earlier — you are locked into a limited sound set and your I/O cannot change without swapping out your primary investment — and a laptop becomes a very attractive offering. Here, your only limitations are your creativity and your budget.

How to sound like a record on stage 

For some keyboard players, particularly those working for recording artists, it can be important to sound just like the record — after all, fans want to be able to hear the music they’ve been listening to all summer. It’s extremely common, particularly in pop music, for the sounds on the record to be generated by soft synths in the studio. So the most accurate way to reproduce those sounds on stage is to use those same soft synths in a laptop system played live by the keyboard player. 

This is something that even five years ago may not have been possible with the computer tech of the time — due to reliability issues and cost of high performance equipment — but a modern day laptop should be able to do this with relative ease.

There is a little prep involved: you’ll need to retrieve the presets used on the record from the producer, which is technically very simple but sometimes politically or logistically challenging due to ownership issues. You’ll have to buy the plugins and license them to the laptop you are using (and make sure you have all the license information in case you are asked to reauthorize a plugin, which happens periodically.) Then you as the keyboard player will need to create a way to manage your plugins on stage — this is where StageBox comes into play.