I am not planning on purchasing a keyboard right now. But I was thinking of it for a while, and thought it might be useful to write up my notes after it came up in conversation...

There are three basic types of keyboards on the market:

The first type are the cheap keyboards that you'd get for your friend's kid or the like. The second type are digital pianos. The third type are the ones most useful for electronic music.

The cheap keyboards are most notable for having a wide variety of sounds, useful "beginner" features, and built-in speakers. I've seen them with such attention-grabbing features as "light up" keyboards. The big problem is that they are never built up with the required features to serve as real keyboards, nor are they necessarily built to handle going on tour with a rock band. Some of them are really crappy. On the other hand, some of them have a MIDI implementation and don't look totally useless.

Slight digression: MIDI is how electronic instruments talk to each other. If you want to hit a note on your keyboard and control something running on your computer, MIDI's the way to do it.

The digital pianos often have fairly authentic piano sounds, far better than the cheap keyboards. They are intended for people who don't have space for a real piano. These can go fairly high end, such that they've got mock-hammers on the inside so that you feel like you are playing a real piano.

Finally, there's the general category of pro-oriented keyboards. These tend to have a fairly complete set of controls -- velocity sensitive keys (meaning: if you bang on the key, it sounds different than if you gently press it down), pitch and mod joystick or wheels (so you can bend notes up and down or add vibrato), and often advanced features like a bank of sliders, aftertouch (such that it track how hard you hold the notes down -- not useful for emulating a piano but required for emulating an organ), etc.

The cheapest (and some fairly fancy higher-end ones, too) pro-oriented keyboards don't make sounds on their own. In the old days, you'd control a pile of standalone synthesizer units with one or two of these keyboards. Lately, I've been keeping an eye on what "real" keyboardists use and I've been seeing a lot of them just plugging a keyboard into a laptop, such that it's the laptop making the sound. There are some awesome synthesis programs available for the computer these days and you'd pretty much ship a laptop in a box if you were to sell them as a piece of hardware.

You can get them with less keys. I think I'm detached enough from the piano playing experience that I don't need 88 keys. But I also think that having less than 61 keys is downright silly.

There are also pro-oriented keyboards that have built-in sounds. They kinda look like the cheap ones, except that they've usually got more dials and less buttons, have the aforementioned pitch/mod controls, and don't have built-in speakers.

There are also old retro keyboards. For a few hundred bucks, you can get an old synth. Maybe even a famous old one, like the Roland D-50 that appeared in a bunch of notable albums. Or the Yamaha DX7, which defined the sound of keyboards for the span of several years in the 80s. The problem is that I'm a bit worried about keyboard life... what's the point of getting something that needs to be fixed constantly?

Now, my friend Mike takes his music very seriously and has one of the "cheap keyboards". It works for him, but he also has a trumpet, two guitars, and a grand piano. There's nothing really hideously wrong with a cheap keyboard.

On the other hand, if you are going to be using a keyboard as your primary instrument, it gets a little harder to decide.

The Digital Piano type really are only good if you are plotting to transfer your skills over to a real piano. You can get better tone out of a pro-oriented keyboard and software running on your computer.

There are reasonably priced pro-oriented keyboard that are a bit more expensive than the "cheap keyboard". Sometimes as little as $10-20 more. But you rapidly find yourself on an escalating price battle. The Casio cheap one is $139. A M-Audio one that's not necessarily built to be toured with is $149. But then you start wanting one that feels a LOT nicer for $249... or one that could be toured with for a few hundred more.... The one I was plotting to get was the M-Audio Axiom 61. It had a better feel and more features than the lowest-end ones.

The Casio keyboards just have a MIDI port, which requires at least a sound-card adapter and probably a USB-MIDI adapter, whereas the M-Audio one for $10 more just hooks up via USB.

There's a few input devices that don't fit well with this model. Both Akai and Korg make these sexy little controllers designed to be used with a laptop. You get 25 keys or a few drum pads or some knobs. A lot of reviewers claim that they are built fairly robustly for the price. There are also "wind controllers" and "guitar synths" and keyboards you can strap on. Which isn't a cheap way to go, but they do sound like fun.

Like I said, I'm not plotting to spend any money on a keyboard right now. As I started to learn REAPER and took advantage of IK Multimedia's deal on their SampleTank software, I realized that I could get away without a keyboard for a while longer, so I've kinda put any plans to get a keyboard on hold until I feel it's the right time to get one.