37,49,61 Whats the minimum number of keys you can play an entire album on?

hi. i've never owned a good keyboard. the alesis micron looks tempting to me. i was wondering if 37 keys is really enough to play with. do most songs stay within this range? or would i find myself wanting 49 or 61 keys? i guess i'll be more worried about just learning to play the damn thing than anything else so i guess i can always buy another keyboard if i ever get good enough to play keys in a band. thoughts? how many people have played for a long period of time on nothing more than 37 key keyboard?

The only thing you can realistically play with 37 keys is a bassline, or triggering samples. 37 keys is good if all you're doing is programming and sequencing, like if you're composing a song with Reason on a laptop while flying in an airplane. but if you're gonna *play* you need more. If I play chords, leads, etc, the smallest for me is 61.

If you have ever heard John Tesh, he only uses the white keys, so you can get rid of all the black ones.

The real choices should be 61, 76 or 88.

For me it's weighted or not. I can't do piano stuff on non weighted keys.

hey elson where'd you find your avatar? is that what you look like? there are some people who do pretty good simpsons caricatures, i want to get one made of me.

The number of keys depends on the setup. Currently, I have only one synth with 61 keys and I can't imagine having less keys than that.

In future, when I add a string machine, a lower number of keys like 49 will suffice, because most of the time I will have both hands on different keyboards. Further into the future, when I add a mono synth, I wouldn't mind having 37 keys, but knowing the pace at which I buy new synths, a period of cryo sleep would be needed to see a monosynth in my rig ;-)

the answer is 2,537,496,188 ...

seriously, though, if I had only one board it would have to be 76 keys ...

Anything less than 61 keys feels cramped to me. I tend to like to play two-handed, though.

... you are a beast !!!