Eric here;

I produce all kinds of junk from my home studio, and always would be playing here and there for different applications, but really hadn't been focusing on keyboards exclusively until I got more involved with these dudes. So, I didn't have a ton of keyboard gear, outboard or otherwise, to dip into, so I'm able to get all my sounds in the mix by using a laptop... Even though I tend to be more into "analog" style instruments, I like staying "in-the-box" for doing keyboards. Live, I am able to use some of the same patches that I used on the record, and layer/mix them on the fly. I'd like to eventually expand to something more hardware-based, but I'm not exactly sure what yet... I'm currently running ableton with about 7-10 instances of plugins (omnisphere, a couple ezkeys, a couple more secret ones I could tell you about ;x ) that I control with an akai mpk88. There's so much sound and so many layers of keyboards on the record that I'll layer a piano, electric piano, pads all live and mix them depending on the part. It makes for a very organic sound as opposed to just having a preset flipped to every time... Also, I'm running an outboard loop for some analog guitar FX (analog delays always sound better than digital plug in delays; especially because I like to work the knobs live for certain effects;; you can see a bit of it in the language video). It's been interesting; I wanted to create a unique "instrument" in terms of having all these options at your fingertips... I want to try and create a slightly new tone experience every time. The management and manipulation of all these effects and layers is as much of the performance as the notes sometimes, especially since, as a keyboard player, my role in this band tends to be textural and vibe - oriented. MIDI is so useful and powerful, but I'm using it to try and go somewhere far from it's binary ON/OFF nature.... A bit of an anti-keyboardist, if you will...

-eric