Gary, the force I play with is mostly a product of firstly a continued interest in playing the piano, which doesn’t have velocity curves (although a good tuner can lighten or stiffen the action a little bit to taste) and needs good finger strength to be able to cover everything from ppp to fff, but also a need to be able to play rhythmically totally accurately, and a lot of funk and other styles need complex syncopation with a ton of dynamics. This, I find extremely hard to pull off consistently with a very light touch, you can get rhythmical, and you can get dynamic with a light touch, but both at the same time is not easy!

Looking at your playing in a DAW or sequencer is a really good way of seeing if you are really using the full dynamics a keyboard can produce. How close to 127 do you get, how close to 01 do you get, and how tight to the grid do you get at each extreme?

Plus, for me, it’s about the ‘sound’… yes there are good drummers who play extremely quietly, but they are as rare as hen’s teeth! To be in the pocket and with a good groove, most players need at least a certain degree of force. If you thought I played hard, man you should see some REAL pros! Liszt used to break piano strings all the time..! To be honest, compared to some of the greats I’ve had the pleasure of playing and recording with, I’d put my ‘touch’ on the medium low side… 😂

One of the issues with turning down the dynamics on an arranger is, yes, you can make it more sensitive to medium strength playing and give the impression you are playing harder, but you don’t get any increased sensitivity to lighter playing. There’s a basic lowest velocity the sound will play at no matter what the curve is set to. So what you are doing is reducing the resolution the machine recognizes velocity at. You are trying to squeeze 127 degrees of velocity out of 90 steps, but you haven’t made the low end any more sensitive. It’s not a ‘shift’ in touch sensitivity, it’s a ‘compression’. Bottom line, you’re losing range.

But everybody gets used to what they feel most comfortable with. Me, I’m comfortable playing with close to a pianist touch. That way, I can easily do a stint on a piano and not fatigue my fingers.

Anyway, as I pointed out, my comments had nothing to do with your rig, they were addressed at the OP. I actually DO have a music production desk very similar, a bit bigger and more heavy duty because it supports full sized studio monitors as well as the keyboard and computer, and I can assure you, hanging your keyboard from the underside is going to stress the wood screws that support it into the underside, especially if you play with anything but the most featherweight of touches. Mine have stripped out a couple of times, and that’s with no weight on it al all other than me resting my forearms on it from time to time! The problem is, the screws which support the tray do so from the middle of the underside, which puts quite a lot of moment angle on them once the drawer is fully extended with the keyboard on it. Too much for me to trust a $2000+ keyboard on, at least!

Anyway, each to his own, but when you have lightweight computer keyboards and other lightweight peripherals, why waste the sturdiest surface you have on them and trust your much heavier, much more expensive keyboard to the shelf designed for computer keyboards? 🎹😎