Yeah, chas… 90% of my audience don’t care. Fortunately, I’m playing for an audience of one, and he attends EVERY gig I do, so there’s no slacking off! The minute I stop loving my own show, I’m done with playing… 💔

But there ARE players in my area that sing well, but can’t play to save their lives, so they put a bunch of keyboards and other gear in front of them and mime. I don’t want to be mistaken for them, so I make sure there’s nothing that obscures the audience’s view of my fingers. Those that even bother to look at least have no illusions that it’s fake..!

As a solo, I consider my competition isn’t other keyboard players, it’s mostly acoustic guitarists in my area. There’s only a handful of keyboard players left, and even there they mostly are either duo’s or in bands. And the one thing a guitarist has over us is that the audience can easily see them playing, both hands! No wiggle room with a guitar… And I’m sorry, but I feel that a LOT more care than you might at first feel, otherwise there would be a plethora of guitarists miming. There are NONE. Show the audience your hands, blow them away with great playing, not just one note solos and restrict your LH to rote chord input, they DO appreciate the skill. Which is a good job considering I don’t consider myself a great singer! 😂.

Gary, couple of years ago I also played an Italian restaurant with one of those fake piano shells and had my BK-9 in it, but they did what quite a few piano bars do, had a mirror suspended overhead showing your hands as they play to the customers. I think you do the audience a disservice assuming none of them care. I doubt any venue would bother with the mirrors if they felt that way. But yes, the less you actually play, the more benefit there is to obscuring what you are doing!

One thing I can say with certainty. No one has EVER come up to me to check on whether it actually was me..! And let’s face it, if anybody does, it shows they care a bit more than you think they do 🎹😎