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Entry #2070   12:54 PM - September 10th, 2020   Somehow, throughout my adult life, I have avoided NEEDING a keyboard. I mean, I had the keyboards you get as a kid to make funny sounds or what not... but you couldn't actually record with them. When recording my first CD? I used my dad's keyboard in his studio. When I performed my first CD live? I borrowed my dad's. Then I got to WTVN and went all a capella because, well, I didn't have a keyboard. LOL. I just worked with what I had and honestly - it became my uniquity. That leads to 4tvs and of course I always had my piano to continue to write and perform for ME. Live stuff turned into 4tvs and that turned into comedy. My music just became The Journey and sitting at the piano writing songs to tell the story in the moment. Literally NOTHING was ever produced. The most I could do was take that video track and add some tiny background music. Fuck, I didn't even have a mic I used until 2005. I always WANTED a real keyboard to record but again, without a need? I'm too damn efficient to blow $1000 on something for fun. It has to fill a need.   Then comes garageband and the ability to make cool instrumental shit on your fucking phone. Suddenly there's all the myusic for GolfKon and even some of Fastest Delorean. Shitty little incidental music that is totally passable and no one really notices it. Still... avoided buying the keyboard...   ...and then Meeting Michael happens. And I know, without a doubt, that this film has to be scored. It has to be professional. It has to be piano and strings based. It has to feel like magic. That fantastic feeling of the Forrest Gump score? Yeah - we need that. Which means I can't fake it. I can't play around on garageband - I need actual piano keys. I need legitimate piano sounds... I need every piece of an orchestra and so, I knew it was coming - I had to buy a keyboard. I went with the Roland Juno-DS 88 key bohemoth as it seemed to be the best bang for your buck and it has weighted keys because I just... I adore that feeling. I know you can do so much with non-weighted keyboards and my goodness I found out how poor my meter has become... but if I'm EVER to play out live? It's gotta be weighted. The majority of what I do is just straight piano and voice. That's it. The rhythm of weighted keys is just... hard to explain if you're not a piano player.   Now, there was a level up from this (nearly double the price) that apparently has better piano sounds but my goodness it felt like they were splitting hairs in the comparison videos. Now that I have this, I'm more than thrilled. And the care taken to nail the string instruments depending on how you strike the keys... it's just wonderful. As you heard in the last entry - I was able to pull off a nice, subtle theme that works. And when I say subtle... oh my fuck it's so easy to overdo it with keyboards now. You get so excited at what it can do... you just can't stop sometimes. I had to literally turn off the keyboard and go study some soundtracks. The magic of film scoring is usually barely noticing that it's there. And especially in piano-based soundtracks... the violins and harps, etc... they're JUST touching your ears. It's noticeable when they're gone... but when they're there? You think you're just hearing a piano. Again, it's an art, and if done correctly it's magic.   So now I get to attempt that for a movie that will nearly depend on it. There's only one way this movie works: if the audience forgets they're adults and remembers being a kid looking up to a hero. That's the foundation of the movie: you HAVE to be able to feel that or it just doesn't work. Michael has to be larger than life, and once I establish who I was at that time? You have to feel those same tingles with going from the nosebleeds to courtside in a matter of months. It's magic and the music... you just have to buy into it. It's going to be heartwarming to the point of puking basically and probably the only time I'll ever tell a story like this. That's why my kids will be part of it as well. You get to watch them relating to me...   It's a hard balance that I have a ton of concerns about, but we're off to a good start. Oh and this keyboard also let's me autotune and of course the kids had a fucking ball with that...     Still cannot believe I own this. Crazy it took me until the 2020s...    Adam