Tips for Keyboards
(update 18/01/2000)

If recording electronic keyboards sounds quite simple (all you have to do is plug and play !), it's often in the preparation of sounds, recording sessions, even concerts, that there is a lot of worrying involved. As for other keyboardds (piano, Hammond organ, Fender Rhodes, ...) well that's another story, the sound engineer will handle the worry !

	If you prepared sequences, try to present, whenever it's possible, each sound on a separate output of your sampler/synthesizer/expandeur.
	Also try, in the same general idea, to group the sounds in similar sounding families, so that each separate output is fed a specific type of sound. Avoid, for instance, to have a shaker, then a snare drum, then a violin on separate output N° 3. The sound engineer will prefer to have just the shaker on that output, even if it's only there twice in the entire song.
	If you don't have enough separate outputs to spread your sounds individually, try to get to the studio with a detailed list of which sound appears where and when throughout the song. I've already seen an incredible waste of time in a studio, while I was just baby-sitting : the musicians showed-up with a Cubase sequence on a PC. First of all, they lost about an hour trying to get the sequence to run on another craqued sequencer, their disk drive had a problem (or something like that). That's not my point. The problem is that they lost at least another hour trying to figure out which samples showed-up when and where on the 8 individual outputs of their sampler, in order to spread them out wisely in the mixer channels. It's a pity because the final mix was botched, since at the end of the session, with other clients waiting for the studio, they could have used an additional half hour, maybe an hour, to get a perfect mix. Hmmmm. I wonder where they coul've found that precious additional time ?!?!?
	Make sure thet the studio in which you're going to work has enough DI Boxes for every output you're going to use. NO !!! A synthesizer cannot be correctly recorded by plugging it directly in the line input of a mixer (unless the mixer has been specifically designed for high impedance signals, which is seldom the case). A brutal death to the "engineers" that do so ! You could do so if the output impedance of your instrument is very low (a few hundred Ohms), which is very rare, electronic instrument manufacturers haven't taken the problem seriously yet (I'd like to know more about DIs). Anyway, unless the studio has carefully planned for several unbalanced signals to reach the mixer safely, you'd better use these DI Boxes to balance the signal, carrying it properly over long distances.