10 Greatest Keyboardists In Hard Rock

Keyboardists as a whole have been pretty neglected in the world of hard rock. For a genre that focuses so much on the swagger in your step, it's hard to really pull that off when you're sitting behind a piano all the time. Then again, the true artists are the ones able to make it work outside of their usual instruments.

Whereas the guitar gets the cool factor in rock music most of the time, the keyboard gives you a lot more opportunities to explore different sounds that you wouldn't think were possible. From synthesizers to grand pianos to full on church organs, each of these rockers were able to not so much tickle the ivories but rather put them through absolute hell. One minute you might think a guitar solo is coming up, only to be treated to one of the most ferocious walls of sound coming courtesy of the good old piano.

The best of these are when the artists in question bend their instrument to their every will, either through the different notes they play or morphing it into something than no one would ever think of. Even though rock is a guitarists' game, these folks behind the piano have the potential to put their six-stringers to shame.

Ever since the '90s, the world of hard rock has had somewhat of a tolerance for some weird stuff. Hell, as far back as the '70s, acts like Frank Zappa were rewriting what rock and roll could be in their own bat-sh*t crazy image. Though Faith No More fit right in with their zany mixes of funk and rock, no one could have predicted an actual keyboard would factor into the mix.

Across Faith No More's classic output, Roddy Bottum's piano lines were very much an oddity compared to some of the punishing riffs across songs like Mid Life Crisis. Just when you think you're going to play out on some heavy riff on a song like Epic, Bottum's keyboard would come in and treat you to a damn recital in the middle of things. While this may have pulled you out of the groove sometimes, these keyboard riffs always brought a certain level of sophistication to the band's tunes.

By the time that Mike Patton and co. actually started to branch outside of their comfort zones on later projects, it was Bottum's piano lines that made them unafraid to take on some outlandish material like covering the Commodore's hit Easy. For as much as this shouldn't work on paper, Faith No More have always been masters at making their crazy ideas actually palettable.