When Maurice touched a keyboard, it was like something from a movie, magical. He would always give you something from a movie, and you'd go, what did you just play... immediately inspirational writings, amazing. That's what we're going to miss.
Actually, because of new technologies, my full studio is on my laptop. And I have a little keyboard in my bag. I can make everything I do come from my laptop. Even when I go to a big studio, all I do is to plug in my laptops. That's they way I do it.
At least half my writing time is spent researching. So for every hour I'm actually clicking on the keyboard, I'm spending another hour trying to figure out some tiny detail I need answered.
I'm starting to play all the melodies with kind of keyboard sound but playing it from the bass guitar.
But with carefully chosen keyboard macros to activate it, Mass Copy is quick, convenient, and powerful. Most users who have mastered it depend heavily on it. That certainly includes me.
I often write in pencil on paper and then type up later. It's much quicker than using a keyboard.
If I'm uncomfortable on stage, everybody can see it. I'm not very good at hiding it. I like long, loose jacket dresses - anything that I can literally have room to move in - not that I'm a very big dancer, but because sometimes I'm sitting down at the keyboard, and then sometimes I'm standing. It just has to feel good.
That it's a lot harder to make a keyboard sound not-cheesy than a guitar.
If there is no music, I will perish. While I have not learnt music, I can play the tune that comes into my head on the keyboard.
I was the Specials' founder, main songwriter and keyboard player.
And I think it's a real challenge to be up there sometimes with only a keyboard if they don't have a grand piano... and to try to win people over that way. It's really hard.
Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.
I've noticed a lot of people are very bold and blustery on Twitter because it's easy to do that with the poison keyboard and a hundred and forty characters.
In the back of my mind was the constant hankering, almost yearning, to write but something always stopped me in my tracks. Or if I did find my way to put a pen to paper or finger on a keyboard I'd give up after a few minutes. I'd find other things to do: Anything but writing.
For years, I was stuck behind a keyboard rig. When I started playing guitar onstage, it was a bit of a release - not to be stuck in one spot the whole night. It's really enjoyable having the freedom to move around. You just have to remember to end up somewhere near a microphone.
On any given day, I'm likely to be working at home, hunched over this keyboard, typing Great Thoughts and Beautiful Sentences - or so they seem at the time, like those beautifully flecked and iridescent stones one finds at the seashore that gradually dry into dull gray pebbles.
I've always been fascinated with the juxtaposition of technology in music, not only in recording, but in the keyboard. It's amazing the way you can apply technology to an art form.
I always have a rough outline, but I'm shocked at how little I actually follow it. Those characters keep doing things that I never expected. I think if I crept up to my keyboard and peeked, they'd be talking about things behind my back. Okay, that's a little paranoid and delusional... but just a little.
I do love using keyboards and I love writing keyboard parts, but I am not a player in the true sense of the word.
I'm kind of a one-note at a time, one finger keyboard player.
I love playing. The keyboard is my journal.
Most of the stuff I learned to play, I learned in high school. I had a band in high school, a jazz-fusion thing, and I was the keyboard player. I was interested in how the instruments worked and the theory behind playing with them.
If I can sit down at my keyboard and have a melody that says something that I can't with words, that's a really beautiful thing.
You treat the air as a canvas and the paint is the chords that come through your fingers, out of the keyboard.
You are talking to a man who can only play a plastic keyboard. Give me anything weighted and I've had it. I haven't got the strength in my fingers to push them down. So I don't get a lot of expression on the keyboard.
What I was proud of was that I used very few parts to build a computer that could actually speak words on a screen and type words on a keyboard and run a programming language that could play games. And I did all this myself.
I'm basically a cocktail jazz kind of pianist. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a very good keyboard player. People think I think I'm good. I think I'm a very poor piano player.
I used to just sit in the living room and make up songs on the keyboard.
We think touch is short-term. The mouse and keyboard were stable for 25 years, but I think touch will be stable for 10 years. Post-touch will be stable for a really long time, longer than 25 years.
After moving to England I did some recording and eventually formed an English band, this was together for quite a few years with only a keyboard replacement. The band had no name, just my name.
It's great if you can afford to carry a string section on the road with you, but most people are used to the idea of just a keyboard player creating those string sounds.
My place in Scotland is in the middle of nowhere, so you've just got a keyboard, guitar, a little drum machine and you know if you can work stuff out like that, if you can hammer out songs that sound good just with those three things and a voice, you're on your way.
The writing gets done away from the keyboard and away from the studio in my head, in solitude. And then I come in and hopefully have something, then I wrestle with sounds and picture all day long. But the ideas usually come from a more obscure place, like a conversation with a director, a still somebody shows you, or whatever.
Not intending to be funny: I sit at the keyboard, put my fingers on the keys and go. To me, it's the real secret of writing. Put yourself in front of the screen or the blank sheet of paper and get to work.
My daughter plays keyboard very well, and my son plays guitar, and they're totally into music.
In general, we like to play as a band - guitar, piano, and voice. We also tour with a bass player, a drummer, and somebody who plays keyboard and guitar. We try to play all of our parts and flesh it out to get a lush sound, while also keeping the energy of a three-piece punk act. We want to be the best of all possible worlds.
