KEY!

I've gotten burned a few times when the band plays a song in a key other than the album, and didn't inform me. They often look at me like, "I thought you knew?". It's usually a guitar thing. Some songs were recorded with detuned guitars (particularly early 90s), or songs from the 60s-70s often had the tape speeds changed. As a keyboardist, we don't really have "good keys" and "bad keys", but guitars do to a larger degree. For instance, you will often find GnR or U2 songs played up a step from their original since the guitars were often tuned to Eb or D, and it doesn't make sense for the guitarist to retune. Guitarists and bands need to be more upfront about this, but I've played with guys who have been in the rock circuit for so long they figure that everyone knows (because there are some fairly universal standards). Those are some of the few times I've gone, "to hell with it" and used the transpose button.

The aforementioned "Baba O'Riley" is one of those landmines. The recording is in F, and Pete wasn't a stranger to capos, but some guitarists don't use them, so my band plays it in E. I've played Baba in many bands, and learned it in F. I decided not to relearn it in E for fear of getting my wires crossed while playing with another band.

I've gotten some pretty good hammond sounds on the Montage/Modx8 with some modified ksounds samples. As for Jazz on the modx8, I would think the action would not be suitable. I found it terrible for anything other than playing basic chords on the white keys. Actually bad for that too. ymmv.

Outstanding thread, thanks heaps for putting this together!!

I don't know if this is true or just a fable.

There once was a fabulous carpenter. He could build anything and then something happened to him. He started spending more time a fixing up his shop and less time actually building furniture. Eventually he never had time to build furniture, only time to fix up his shop.

Dan

As expected, Eli Manning retired today. The Giants plan to retire his number as well. More here:

Giants' Eli Manning retires after 16 seasons, 2 Super Bowls

NFL world reacts to Eli Manning's retirement, news conference

Best,

Geoff

Melodeon maybe? If you don’t have one.

Its fun and can make a nice visual presentation. Stick a transducer on it and gig with it.

Or the cheapest Akai sampler for one shots.

https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/MPX8--akai-professional-mpx8-sd-sample-pad-controller

To be fair, though, you're still getting lifetime updates, AND because your old account is still open, you have access to all the plug-ins, content, and extra goodies that the newcomers to "Cakewalk free" can't/don't get...not too shabby a deal, really.

Nord Grand in the wild.

...so to speak

Just speculation, it’s always hard to read Yamaha. But what is for sure is that the YC and CP models this year share a similar interface but one is organ centric - has a 61k “organ type” action, and the other is piano centric 73/88k weighted “piano-like” actions. I doubt they would do the YC in a weighted action, but I could be wrong. Offering the YC in a 73 or 76k variant would make sense, not sure why it doesn’t exist at inception the way the CP arrived immediately with 88 and 73k versions.

I've been using a Yamaha DXR 12 for 7 years, and it's been rock solid. A few years ago I picked up a Line 6 L2t, which is now my keyboard cabinet most of the time (The DXR 12 does band monitoring duty more frequently). No complaints about either cabinet.

Btw: Reliability first!

OTB is its own thing, ITB another. For example...



Fortunately, that 24 dB/octave ladder filter is well-represented in the Arturia Moog emulations, and they have external inputs so you can feed tracks through them. I found that when t in a mix, there was no significant difference between using the Arturia filter compared to the one in my Minimoog. (Interestingly, when Arturia asked Bob for his endorsement, he refused and sent back a relatively lengthy list of things he thought weren't right about the emulation. The company went about fixing them, send the revised plug-in to Bob, and then he ended up endorsing it. I wonder how many companies follow the same path...)

Also narrow notches are quite easy to do ITB nowadays, you can get very sharp -24 dB filters, and linear-phase ones as well (although they chew up CPU). Do they sound as good as analog filters? Well...having been raised exclusively OTB, sometimes I've found the best way to get the desired sound with ITB is to "downgrade." For example I know exactly what you mean about that reverb lifting a source out of the mix, but good luck getting that with a reverb plug-in...I can't. But what I can do is put a lot of short delays in parallel, set to prime number delay times so they don't "step on" each other. IMHO that gives me the best sound.

As to compressors, I avoid them as much as possible because I do manual gain changes with DSP to even things out, and then add a little bit of limiting. That way I don't get a "compressed" sound although of course, for some projects you want a compressed sound. I just have a "thing" about how I want to hear vocals--on a recent mix with Chuck D's voice (from Public Enemy), compressing it seemed like a crime, and the laborious manual changes really made his voice boom. But one of the biggest advantages of ITB compressors is that multiband dynamics processors are so much easier to do in software than hardware. Not all of them sound good, though.

One outboard piece of gear I simply cannot duplicate with any software is the Dolby 740 Spectral Processor. I have some other hardware devices that are useful, like some of the older Aphex tube gear...and I haven't sold my PCM-70 yet .

By and large, though, having been around when Pultecs were new instead of emulations (yes, I really am that old!), I've found that outboard gear takes less effort to sound good than ITB processors. You also have to go through a bunch of ITB processors to find the ones that really shine. Some of the Waves plug-in, like the Abbey Road Chambers, are amazing. Other reverb plug-ins could be bested by an ART 01. And I'm on the fence about tubes. I'm totally down with your using mild distortion, but often, I end up using tape emulation plug-ins, driven hard.

But to get back to the OP about EQ, it's really instructive to set a bunch of EQs to the "same" settings, and then compare. There can be a huge difference. I think this is because some companies do a good job of emulating analog EQ, phase shift warts and all, while others do more "theoretical" EQs that don't have the same kind of color, but more precision.

Some time ago an aunt of my wife offered me her old Pizzini accordion that was send for repair. It was in a box for years and it needed some care. I payed 300 euros for the repair. The technician told me that these older models are rare to find and very expensive so i guess 300 is not a big deal... And it's true that Its a very sweet sounding instrument with 5 registers and 90 basses. Plus, the black keys are... red! Very funky sparkling red (as the colour of the accordion itself).

These days I have more and more l8ve for accordions, piano, organ, melodica and everything acoustic

The 710 is the home/church version of the road-ready 760, which is a good sounding Leslie. The 760 has wheels but the 710 does not. They're a pretty bulky cabinet to lug around without wheels.

Indeed he did...

George's mixing skills completely knock me out. If I had to pick a fave, I'd probably be stuck somewhere between Earth, Wind & Fire and Lyle Lovett.

dB

I second the Fantom!

Was a blast meeting everyone from the forum at the dinner we had. Many new friends and a few old ones, too. Oh, and the gear was nice.

I've not had a chance to work with one, but have heard nothing but good things about them. Looking forward to your feedback once you've had a chance to dig in and spend more time with it!

dB

Just for fun (and comparison) I looked up the production run and number of units sold for several classic flagship analog polysynths. My guess is that Moog's corporate size and target numbers would be more in line with manufacturers of 40 years ago rather than today's Behringer (for example).

Source: Juilan Colbeck's excellent Keyfax Omnibus.

Yamaha CS80: 2000 (1978-1980)
Roland Jupiter 8: 2000 (1981-1984)
Rhodes Chroma: 3000 (1982-1983)
Moog Memorymoog: 3500 (1982-1985)

As far as I know these were all considered successes, and if Moog sold 2000 Ones in just 10 months... well they're in pretty good company.

Back in those days Dave Smith hit it out of the park with the Prophet 5 (8000 units and a six year production run) but that was a groundbreaking product that hit the market at just the right time.

If you look into audio archiving, the important thing is to separate the audio from ANY computer program or OS. WAV files are NOT tied to any particular computer, program or plugin - that's the point. Sure, software prepared the WAV, and software opens and plays the WAV file. But once it is prepared or recorded, it is no longer dependent on that computer or software to have use or value. There's no long term guarantee that old session files, plugins, will remain openable or run on newer versions of the same software.

That's why WAV files work as an archival format. The spec was originally released in 1991 (29 years ago). All those files still play identically, despite the dozens of OS's, and thousands of programs that have gone by the wayside. Photographers export uncompressed BMP and TIFF images for the same reason - Photoshop will come and go, but the finished images will still be openable in something. The samples I make run on my DAW (Windows), my laptop rig (OS X) without any difference. I can take those same samples and put them in a Nord or a Kronos. If UVI (Falcon) goes under or Kontakt, the WAV files will still load into some sampler. It takes literally 10-15 min to tweak the samples into playable shape. Not perfect, but far from a big deal.

Composers and producers regularly export final copies of mixes and then mix stems that rendered through all plugins and processing (even external gear). In this way, the mix can be reconstructed without opening any session files. If the stem WAV files are all placed on a timeline and played together, the final mix is the result. This is how masters are being archived. Cubase/Nuendo just got a new export utility that makes it trivial to render out the stems properly. ProTools has had this for a while. Of course, the session files are saved too, but they are not as permanent.

And, as always with digital data, 3 copies is minimum. Cloud storage is wonderful for this.

That's a rare blonde or lime oak model also. Damn.

I almost bought one of those once. Picked it up and set it back down. Was playing in some rough bars, you could cave in a few skulls with a T40 before you busted the body off and still crack skulls with the neck. :- D

Hahaha, I accept your hatred, and your compliment. This band is definitely more of a side project (the rhythm guitarist is also the bassist in Noon Fifteen, and the lead guitarist plays with me in everything), but it lets me keep playing bass in something, and that was really my primary instrument through most of my teen years. I was a piano player first, but as soon as people started putting bands together, everyone needed a bassist, so that's what kept me busy until I started my solo project after college, after which everyone in Ithaca got to know me as a keyboard player, and started calling me for that.

I've particularly enjoyed the Whiskey Crisis as an opportunity to live out my John Paul Jones fantasies; aside from being encouraged to play too many notes, I wound up playing a bunch of organ, synth, and electric piano on the last record, so occasionally I'll double on keys and keybass at gigs.