How to Play Keyboard Music
If you can cope with not being up front on lead guitar, then keyboard music could be the way to go.
I had been playing guitar for years, but I was really getting sick of it. It’s not the guitar that I don’t like, but the whole culture that goes around it. There is a certain attitude that almost all guitar players have, and that they are expected to have. If you are not brash, swaggering, self-centered, and obsessed with showing off, no one wants you to play guitar in a rock band. I was done with it all. I wanted to take up the music keyboard.
I got myself a nice, high end Casio keyboard to start off with. It was not top notch, but it was pretty close. But once I had it set up, had fiddled around for a while, and was ready to actually start studying, I realized some of the problems that keyboard music has.
If you play guitar music, you can just pick up your favorite rock songs and learn to play that way. If, on the other hand, you play keyboard music, it is not that simple. Almost all keyboard players out there study classically at one point or another. A lot of the most popular keyboard music, in fact, is taken directly from the classics. You can not even become a good keyboard musician without formal training.
Of course, the upside of this is that, with a little bit of keyboard music training, you can play almost any rock ‘n roll song ever written. The keyboard music might sound perplexing to an untrained ear, but to a keyboardist with even a little bit of training, it is all quite obvious and easy. Of course, if you want to be truly great, you have to study for years, but this is true with any instrument.
Now that I’ve gotten pretty good with keyboard music, I’ve discovered another good thing about not playing guitar. Absolutely everyone plays guitar, and so it is difficult to distinguish yourself. People have certain expectations of who guitarists are and what the guitar can do, but few people have actually played with keyboardists in popular music bands.
If you are reasonably good at keyboard music, people will be interested in hearing what you have to say musically. You have a lot of freedom in the band, even if you don’t get to act as band leader. All in all, I am happy with the switch to keyboard music, although I do miss being a rock and roll God.