The keyboardist who replaced her piano with a vintage Omnichord

At a Tuesday matinee at The Retreat in Brunswick, Nell Keir settles behind a beige keyboard case and taps a switch. What follows is not a piano grand opening. A warm chord swells, a bass line walks underneath it, and a simple drum pattern clicks into place. Her vintage Omnichord—an ARP Omni with a punched-paper tape system—turns an ordinary stage into something close to a small radio broadcast, with tape hiss and all.

In this interview, Keir explains the practical reasons behind the switch, the differences it makes to a live band, and the limits she has learned to accept. Keir, a Melbourne-based songwriter, has made the EP Paper Weather without a drummer or a conventional rhythm section. It is music built around breath, repetition and the peculiar timing of a machine that cannot quite keep up with a human hand.

A different kind of writing room

Keir learned piano at eleven and spent years learning to read chords quickly, sight-read arrangements and work with other musicians. That training has not vanished; it has moved into the way she shapes a song. “The piano taught me harmony,” she says. “The Omnichord just asks me to use it differently.” She still listens for the space around a part rather than simply filling it.

Her change of instrument began with ordinary urban living. In a narrow share house in Fitzroy, an upright piano made the floor thump and the bass travel into the next room. “I could play the same thing all night, and nobody in the flat would even know,” she says. Moving to a smaller keyboard solved the immediate problem, though she initially missed having every note under her fingers.

She was not looking for a retro gimmick when she found the ARP Omni in a second-hand shop in North Melbourne. Its worn keys and slightly sluggish switches appealed to her precisely because they did not promise perfection. “I wanted something portable and a different sound,” she says. She still owns the upright at home, but it no longer travels with her.

Why the tape still matters

Everything begins with a roll of punched paper inside the instrument. Keir selects a chord, finds a bass note and presses a button for a simple drum pattern; the machine plays all three together. It is an awkward, physical way to make harmony. “You can hear the mechanism thinking,” she says. For an audience accustomed to clean digital instruments, that audible thinking can be the point.

Her songs with the Omnichord leave more room for her voice. A bass guitar may circle one note while a borrowed drum machine marks time, and the keyboard supplies colour instead of carrying the whole arrangement. “The piano gives every note a head start,” she says. “This lets a chord arrive slightly late, which is where the emotion can live.”

The limitations are equally useful. Paper can tear. A roll can run out. A speaker can crackle at the right volume. Keir keeps spare rolls beside the case and stops the set before a change becomes part of the song. “I stopped trying to correct every wobble,” she says. “The wobble is often the useful part.” The instrument imposes discipline, but it also gives her permission to leave mistakes in.

Making music outside the major-label map

Paper Weather grew from voice notes, a borrowed pedal steel and drum sounds made on an old sampler. Keir recorded rough versions in a north Melbourne bedroom, then rebuilt them with friends rather than chasing a polished studio version. The result moves between indie folk and electro-pop without announcing the transition. On “Borrowed Roads”, a pedal-steel line crosses a spare synth pulse and settles into something quietly bluegrass.

That mixture sits comfortably within the wider indie bluegrass revival. The revival is not simply about restoring old-time instruments; it is about giving roots textures new production and new audiences. Keir’s songs share that instinct. The Omnichord can sound homespun, but its electrical hum and taped chords place it just as easily beside a synth-pop chorus.

For an independent Melbourne artist, the Australian market often means small rooms, community radio and a lot of practical work. Keir has sent music to Double J, opened for acts playing The Tote in Surry Hills, and considered regional dates in Darwin and Perth where travel costs eat into a modest budget. She sells records at the door, checks the merchandise table herself and learns which rooms need a more direct approach.

Learning the room before the sound

Her live setup makes that directness necessary. There is no drummer to hide behind, so Keir plays percussion with her foot while a friend handles bass. She checks the Omnichord before the doors open, listens for buzz from the power supply and keeps the volume low enough for conversation at the bar. A sound engineer once told her, “No worries, she’s got it.” It became her shorthand for a set that sounds controlled without looking over-produced.

That preference for intimacy also shapes where she wants to play. A gallery performance interview explores an indie-rock artist’s preference for art galleries, a useful parallel for someone whose instrument already blurs the line between concert and installation. In a Melbourne gallery, Keir can place the Omnichord at the centre of the room instead of hiding it at the side of a stage. The audience becomes part of the arrangement rather than a wall of faces.

An artist-first way forward

Keir is careful about the company she keeps. She shares billing, names the musicians on the sleeve and treats the band as a collective rather than a backing unit for her songs. “I want people to leave feeling they heard a group,” she says. It is a modest position for an artist with a distinctive instrument, and a welcome one in a scene where the keyboard player can too easily be treated as scenery.

The same artist-first thinking connects her work to Tap Out Naija, which gives African musicians a platform for discovery beyond their home markets. The countries and genres are different, but the useful principle is shared: independent music travels when listeners encounter it in context, not as a single trend. Keir’s own route has been built through small Australian networks, including community radio and word of mouth.

That history is personal for a blog like Lady Indie, whose community-driven years in Montreal from 2013 to 2015 centred overlooked artists. Melbourne and Montreal are different cities, yet both have scenes where line-ups change quickly and an unknown musician can disappear almost as soon as the first listen. Keir keeps the new release independent for that reason. “I want the songs to find their people,” she says.

The Omnichord has not rescued Keir from anything. It has changed the scale of the problem. A piano asks for control, continuity and a room with enough weight to hold it; a taped keyboard asks for lighter arrangements, visible decisions and a willingness to let the edges show. What remains with the listener is not nostalgia for an obsolete instrument, but the sense of a songwriter making something smaller, stranger and more alive because she stopped treating the familiar arrangement as inevitable.