What is the least I can expect to pay for a keyboard that can produce a realistic acoustic or electric bass sound in the left hand?

I would like to play things like "Fever". "Green Onions" would sound great (to me) with an electric bass in the left hand and an organ sound in the right hand.

A walking jazz bass line for tunes like "Autumn Leaves" with piano in RH.... Blues LH "patterns" with piano licks in RH.

Thank you for your recommendations.

Ray

Hello RayzKane

You can split the keyboard on all the DPs I know.
On my Yamaha CP33 - there are 4 basses for ex: 2 electric + 1 acoustic + 1 acoustic w/ (ride) cymbal. The latter is especially made for walking bass lines.

Cheers

Splitting the keyboard works fine for playing at home. For live use in a band situation, not so much. I use my CP33 with master setups that route the left side of the keyboard to a Yamaha Motif rack via MIDI. I run the Motif through an Eden bass amp. I have one setup that uses the stand up bass sample, another that uses electric, etc. The bass sounds on the CP33 aren't bad, but the is no way to isolate the left side of the keyboard so a separate output. (Panning doesn't work)Doing it this way is inconvenient, but it sounds great. Thanks!

Keyguy is right that it it's very helpful to be able to isolate the bass sound from the right hand sound. This lets you do all kinds of useful things... more easily control the relative volumes of the two sounds, send the bass sound to a bass amp as he mentions, easily process the bass separately (its own EQ, compression, whatever), process the right hand sound separately (i.e. if you want to improve your organ sound some day with a Ventilator pedal for a better leslie effect, you want to be able to send your organ sound to that device without sending your bass guitar there as well), or if you're playing a gig with a house PA, you can send the sound guy a separate feed for your "bass", etc.

Another factor is you'd probably want at least a 73-key keyboard. A 61- starts feeling very constrained if you're going to use the bottom couple of octaves for left hand bass, leaving only 3 octaves for your main sound.

The least expensive keyboard I'm aware of that has 73+ keys and panning that lets you separate the split sounds from each other would be the Yamaha Piaggero (NP-V60 and NP-V80). Their biggest limitation is that they have no MIDI ports (only USB), so for live performance, you're completely stuck with its own sounds. And I'm not a big fan of many of their sounds, making it even more unfortunate that you're stuck with them. But sounds are a personal taste thing. Also, the keys are not weighted. They are still surprisingly playable for piano (far better than most unweighted keys), and the lack of weighting would actually be an advantage for organ.

I think the next step up is probably the Casio PX-3... much more capable, and 88 weighted keys, but quite a bit more expensive.

I haven't tried too many "cheap" keyboards (as in <$750) but in the mid professional range (~$1000) there is the MP5 which had pretty good bass sounds IMO.

Also, it's good to have one that allows sound editing. I find almost all bass presets are too tight, that is, they decay too fast which makes them sound a little synthetic to me and not good for live. They sound more realistic with the damper pedal on, so either do that or edit the decay to be just a little longer so you don't have to use the damper.

In the ole days of the Hammond B-3 players who usually had to play left hand bass lines on the lower manual, chords and solos on the upper manual, plus kicking out bass punches on the pedals and running mono through one Leslie tone cabinet, the separation of bass was quite effective.

However today, many of the newest stereo keyboards that have split and layer functions, there isn't always a way to isolate or separate the LH bass into a bass amp and the "upper end" into another separate speaker, even with panning the signal. So using a keyboard in live situations with a bass split may not be possible nor effective enough to punch through the mix.

I'll have to research this a bit and see what keyboards can separate and isolate split functions for live gigs.

katt

Does it have to be a self-contained keyboard or can you use a software virtual bass. Just like with piano sounds the best bass is done in software. There are quite a few of software basses to pick from

Thanks for all the tips, guys. I have a Yamaha PS340 which
can split the sides of the keyboard, but it just doesn't sound
the way I want it to.

I think my solution may be to play the keyboard in the right
hand and play a Mobius Megatar (think Chapman Stick) in the
left hand. I will play the Megatar laying flat on the table.

Ray

I play both bass and keyboard. One thing which makes it hard to play bass lines on a keyboard is that the keyboard gives you less control of how a note sounds. On a bass there are a lot of ways of varying the tone of a note such as plucking closer to the neck or to the bridge, adding slight bends to the note, releasing the note abruptly or more slowly, slapping the note against the body etc so no two notes sound exactly the same. On a keyboard the only variables are how hard you depress the key and how long it stays depressed, if you want to get a different tone you have to change the patch.

This is not to say that you can't play a plausible sounding bass line on a keyboard, you just have to be aware that every time you play the same note it is going to have the exact same tone - for this reason repeated notes are to be avoided but a walking bass line can work OK. If you split a keyboard you will need to have separate volume control for the bass- the CP-33 has this. Using a separate channel for the bass as other posters have suggested would work even better but it sounds like that is out of your budget.

Yamaha S70XS and S90XS have two assignable outputs in addition to the L/R line outs. The older S90ES, S90 and S80 have these as well.