Hi folks - I'm Alan Nelson, 53 years old, Scottish, and a professional rock keyboardist. I left university (studying medicine) towards the end of the 70's to become a rock and roll star. My parents still haven't forgiven me. I started the Eighties as one of the "founding fathers" of the NWOBHM. The what? Failing miserably to become a rock star, I became a gun for hire doing touring work for various hard and commercial rock bands, and also did some songwriting. I'm particularly proud of having written two singles for the rock guitarist Michael Schenker, and (bizarrely) playing keyboards for W.A.S.P. during their 1989 "Headless Children" tour, walking in the shoes of the mighty Ken Hensley. During the Nineties, as the touring work dried up due to the rise of (keyboard-less) grunge rock and the death of the MTV rock in which I'd specialised , I concentrated more on studio engineering, running a small demo recording studio and later doing some tape-oping and junior engineering for producers and artistes far better than I. Eventually I wised up and returned to my first love, live work. For the last ten years or so, I have worked in various rock-orientated cover and tribute bands.
Gear-wise, I have been lucky enough during the years to have played many of the synths and keyboards now considered to be classics, you all know the stuff I mean - Mellotron, Hammond, Clavinet, Prophet, CS80, OB8, Minimoog, Memorymoog, Odyssey, Jupiter 8 and countless others, even the rare single keyboard version of the Prophet 10. Some deserve their hallowed status. Others, not so much.
My current gear, well last year I finally traded in my rack modules, including an MKS70 and a TX802, for my Dream Team - a Nord Stage 88 and Triton Extreme 76 with MOSS board. Now all my sound problems are fixed forever! Yeah, right....
These are run through a Behringer RX1602 line mixer, and in a couple of weeks I'm upgrading from my Mackie SRM450s to EV ZXA1s. Yeah two of them. Ya wanna make sumpin' of it...?
I still have a D50 which I can't really justify taking to gigs, but I just can't quite bring myself to get rid of it, it's just too much fun. Also a dark brown Minimoog, which sadly languishes in a cupboard, badly in need of some TLC.
Well, that's me...
Lang may yer lums reek.
