Irv Nelson is our keyboard player and rhythm guitarist. He also sings many of our lead vocals.

In addition to The Fender Benders, Irv also performs with Relic Acoustic Band, and also with Cristina Edlund, as well as a guest artist with many other groups.  He is also a tenor vocalist who has performed with many bands and in many choirs, as well as on stage as an actor.  He is also a composer, arranger, choral conductor, organist, and musical equipment technician who loves to modify musical instruments.


Irv has been playing keyboards since the age of eight.  He can play just about any song by ear, often after hearing just the first few bars.  He also has a rare talent for the technical side of keyboards and knows how to dial in great sounds.

Irv has played in rock bands since 1975 in California, Nebraska, and Utah, including "Christopher," which was one of the top bands in the Salt Lake area in the early 1980s.  He has always been obsessed with having the very best quality keyboard equipment.  Here's a photo of of Irv performing in 1982, playing a Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 synthesizer stacked on a Yamaha CP70b electric grand piano (exactly the same setup as Journey's keyboard player used in those days):


Irv is very thankful for modern technology.  Back in the 1970s and 1980s, his performing keyboards and amps that he hauled to every performance weighed nearly 1,000lbs and filled a pickup truck bed.  Today he performs with single 40-lb professional Korg Grandstage digital keyboard that he has painstakingly programmed to do far more than all his old, back-breaking vintage keyboards put together.  His acoustic grand piano (Steinway, Yamaha), electric piano (Wurlitzer, Fender Rhodes, Yamaha DX7), organ (Hammond/Leslie, Vox, Farfisa), and analog synth (Arp, Prophet 5, Moog, Roland) sounds are amazingly authentic.

Irv's craziest toy is a vintage 1980's-era Casio AZ-1 "keytar" MIDI controller keyboard that he has modified with an internal cordless MIDI transmitter that allows him to play his Korg keyboard remotely, guitar-style:
 
Irv loves playing rhythm guitar on songs that have no keyboard parts. His main "axe" is an Agile AL-3200MCC "Les Paul" style electric guitar (below) that has a through-neck design.  Irv has blueprinted and modified this guitar with custom coil cut and phase reverse switching, audio taper pots, and Pyramid hand-wound, round-core, pure nickel strings.  He plays through a Fender Mustang III V.2 digital modeling amplifier that he has expertly programmed to very accurately imitate many different tube amplifiers, including a more than dozen different models of vintage Fender, Vox, and Marshall amps.  This combination plus tons of built in effects pedals allows him to dial in the sound of virtually any classic rock guitar part.