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WHY do they insist (in warm countries) on having air conditioning in public places which is so cold that you have to wear a coat! :mad::rawk: :idk

OMG - you dont have to tell me! Houston is horrible for that. Ill be perfectly fine, walk inside and be freezing! Or, Ive had indoor events and would go outside on breaks just to warm back up. I actually perspire more in places on my body because of clenching myself to keep warm.

 

The locals mostly act like its great that way. It seems backwards but because they grew up with A/C I guess they prefer it.

"I'm so crazy, I don't know this is impossible! Hoo hoo!" - Daffy Duck

 

"The good news is that once you start piano you never have to worry about getting laid again. More time to practice!" - MOI

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WHY do they insist (in warm countries) on having air conditioning in public places which is so cold that you have to wear a coat! :mad::rawk: :idk

 

This -- and the flip side.... I lived in Chicago for a while and took the bus. It was absolutely frigid outside while we waited for the bus on winter mornings, so we dressed with multiple layers. The bus driver didn't wear a jacket, etc., and so had the heat cranked.

After getting on the bus and sitting for a while, we'd melt like Frosty the Snowman! :)

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  • 3 weeks later...

I played a luncheon for a business event and had to stop for a bit so the various speakers could do their speeches/presentations. High-end location. When the first speaker started to talk I couldnt believe how good it sounded. Ive never heard those ceiling speakers sound so good. So I look up...

 

http://a63.tinypic.com/2s7x2es.jpg

The fact there's a Highway To Hell and only a Stairway To Heaven says a lot about anticipated traffic numbers

 

People only say "It's a free country" when they're doing something shitty-Demetri Martin

 

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Did you know that soldering a replacement CR2032 button cell into a circuit board ('cuz that's what the manufacturer did 30 years ago) can cause the cell to explode?

 

I know that now.

-Tom Williams

{First Name} {at} AirNetworking {dot} com

PC4-7, PX-5S, AX-Edge, PC361

 

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Did you know that soldering a replacement CR2032 button cell into a circuit board ('cuz that's what the manufacturer did 30 years ago) can cause the cell to explode?

 

I know that now.

Yeah, you cant solder them directly. You need to solder in a holder.

 

http://www.batteryholders.com/search.php?cat=Coin+Cell+Holder&num=&type=CR2032&term=

 

 

The fact there's a Highway To Hell and only a Stairway To Heaven says a lot about anticipated traffic numbers

 

People only say "It's a free country" when they're doing something shitty-Demetri Martin

 

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Yeah, you cant solder them directly. You need to solder in a holder.

 

And you need to be careful when desoldering the spent battery, I believe.

 

Cheers, Mike.

This is where you need a professional soldering gun that gets super hot super fast, hot enough to melt the solder before whatever you are soldering even gets warm. Consumer irons take forever to get up to temp and dont get hot enough.

The fact there's a Highway To Hell and only a Stairway To Heaven says a lot about anticipated traffic numbers

 

People only say "It's a free country" when they're doing something shitty-Demetri Martin

 

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Thanks, guys. Desoldering the spent battery was a bit of a pain, but between heat and cutting I got it out. I have several soldering irons, including a 40-watt that was plenty hot -- problem was that the solder / flux combination I used could not properly adhere to the new battery before it exploded.

 

Having exploded a new battery on Thursday, that evening I ordered a ten-pack of CR2032 clips for about $5 US on Amazon Prime. They were delivered to my doorstep in less than 40 hours -- and I live in a rural area. Anyway, the old Roland Octapad actually had holes exactly where I needed them (which makes the soldered-in battery even more infuriating). A few minutes later, the job was done. So I guess I'll have the drum pad for another decade or so....

-Tom Williams

{First Name} {at} AirNetworking {dot} com

PC4-7, PX-5S, AX-Edge, PC361

 

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  • 1 month later...

Found this in the garage. Looking forward to hooking it up to the iPad. Eight more sliders for MIDI Learn. ð

 

http://a65.tinypic.com/el2ux4.jpg

The fact there's a Highway To Hell and only a Stairway To Heaven says a lot about anticipated traffic numbers

 

People only say "It's a free country" when they're doing something shitty-Demetri Martin

 

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Loved the JL Cooper stuff. There aren't a lot of companies left doing deep MIDI hardware. I had some of the JL Cooper MIDI patch bays - I forget the main flagship....MSB+ maybe? Something like 8 in 8 out with Merge and patch storage. I also had the Nexus which was just a nice scaled down patchbay with switches. They had a lot of cool stuf for sync to SMPTE, MIDI, and other timecodes in the early days trying to bring it all together.

 

Closest thing I owned to the fadermaster was the Peavey PC1600x. 16 sliders and 16 buttons with I think 128 programs. I used that thing to death - very versatile and handy, but not real reliable. I went through 2 that both eventually died. If they would have lasted, would have been great. You could get pretty deep into things like SysEx assignments with automatic channel assignment and checksum calculation.

Dan

 

Acoustic/Electric stringed instruments ranging from 4 to 230 strings, hammered, picked, fingered, slapped, and plucked. Analog and Digital Electronic instruments, reeds, and throat/mouth.

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I posted this on my Facebook page because I couldn't find this thread here:

 

Two weeks ago, one of my bands had a gig in Rio de Janeiro. It looked like a well-promoted gig, we were treated incredibly well, and I had certain expectations about attendance. We walked onstage to a half-empty theatre, and I was instantly deflated. I suffered some technical difficulties at the top of the show and it threw me off. We start the show with a sample, and instead of setting up my laptop for that one thing, I played the audio off a USB key plugged into the backline RD700NX. I didn't realize until I walked out on stage that the RD doesn't go back to the beginning of the audio file once you press stop.... so I walk out onstage to launch the sample and it was already in the middle of the file. :facepalm: I recovered about three songs in, but was stuck in my head about my own playing, the less-than-ideal stage sound, all the causes we like to cast blame on for shows.

Then on the last song, the lead singer/rapper invited all the high school students onstage and it just became a huge party. One kid (maybe 10 at the oldest) said to our drummer, in earnest and halting English, 'I am your fan.' THAT is the payoff of doing what we do; THAT is why you can"t give up on any single performance. Every song is a chance to affect somebody. Thanks, kid. I needed that reminder.

My Site

Nord Electro 5D, Novation Launchkey 61, Logic Pro X, Mainstage 3, lots of plugins, fingers, pencil, paper.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Gary Husband continues to amaze me. Long recognized for his excellent drumming, he"s a phenomenal keyboardist, also. Check out this short clip. Sorry I have to send you to twitter but it"s not up on YouTube.

 

The fact there's a Highway To Hell and only a Stairway To Heaven says a lot about anticipated traffic numbers

 

People only say "It's a free country" when they're doing something shitty-Demetri Martin

 

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Loved the JL Cooper stuff. There aren't a lot of companies left doing deep MIDI hardware. I had some of the JL Cooper MIDI patch bays
Funny story: I just set up a Yamaha piano lab at one of the schools where I work. One snag was that several of the cables weren't long enough to get from the pianos to the audio controller; worse yet, the troubleshooting guide cautioned against using Ethernet cables as replacements.

 

So I contacted the retailer, and asked if I could get specs on the cable so I could make custom lengths. They didn't know what the deal was with the cables.

 

The retailer contacted Yamaha USA. They didn't know the make-up of the cable either. But they confirmed that Ethernet cable would not work, although they didn't know why. They did tell my retailer that the piano lab controller was actually manufactured by JL Cooper, and then given a Yamaha Badge.

 

I looked on the JL Cooper web site, and discovered that they make a piano lab controller for Roland too. In fact, it may be the same unit -- it looks the same except for the paint color. So I called up the JL Cooper folks and asked if they could share the cable specs with me. Their answer was "Not normally, but we see that Yamaha has opened a ticket with us for this, and it's obviously referring to your specific situation."

 

Happy ending: JL Cooper sent me the pinouts, and Yamaha USA sent me some short cables that I could splice into my existing cables to get the length right. Both companies took great care of me. And the high school kids are pretty thrilled with their piano lab too.

 

 

 

-Tom Williams

{First Name} {at} AirNetworking {dot} com

PC4-7, PX-5S, AX-Edge, PC361

 

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  • 1 month later...

I have to give a recommendation to these short cables. I use a small Yamaha 8 channel tabletop mixer that sits inside a Gator 4 space rack, along with a rack module and my VoiceLive 2 effects unit, so space is tight. I generally don"t like plugging/unplugging things from my mixer and would rather leave things plugged in when possible. I put right-angle adaptors on the plug end of these little cables and that end stays plugged into my mixer while the other ends hang out the back of the rack, which I plug long cables into that go to my Spacestation or whatever speakers I"m using. They have held up with no issues after almost 2 years. Pretty good!

 

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07DK4LZ5F/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

619-bFjz0AL._AC_SX679_.jpg

 

 

The fact there's a Highway To Hell and only a Stairway To Heaven says a lot about anticipated traffic numbers

 

People only say "It's a free country" when they're doing something shitty-Demetri Martin

 

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I have a bad habit of holding my breath when I"m playing a solo.

The fact there's a Highway To Hell and only a Stairway To Heaven says a lot about anticipated traffic numbers

 

People only say "It's a free country" when they're doing something shitty-Demetri Martin

 

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The fact there's a Highway To Hell and only a Stairway To Heaven says a lot about anticipated traffic numbers

 

People only say "It's a free country" when they're doing something shitty-Demetri Martin

 

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On a recent gig most of the people were gone when I started the last hour, except for a couple of 6-tops. Usually I take these 'opportunities' to play songs I rarely play, to keep them sharp. So I may go from Thompson Twins to Jim Croce to Jethro Tull. When one of the groups left, a 40-ish guy came over and said 'About three songs ago you played 'Song Sung Blue". That was my absolute favorite song when I was a little boy. My mom used to sing it with me. I haven"t heard it in ages. Thanks - that made my night.' Well, it actually made MY night. It just goes to show that you never know with music. I see it as a cheesy throwaway 1970s background music fluff but to him it was a treasured memory.

The fact there's a Highway To Hell and only a Stairway To Heaven says a lot about anticipated traffic numbers

 

People only say "It's a free country" when they're doing something shitty-Demetri Martin

 

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Random thought: Drawbar colors are everything.

 

The last two weeks my Mojo61 has been down while I wait for a replacement power supply. I'm using the 9 faders on my Arturia Keylab instead. But man... I never realized how much I relied on the color-codings for my quick tone switches. If I'm looking for pure flutey tones, I start with the white bars (I barely use the 1' as I almost always have perc on), and then bring in the complex harmonic black bars for grittier sounds. I used to start from the left side and go up, but these days, I rely more on how harmonically complex the drawbar is. Faders aren't color coded, so I found myself having a few brain-farts when trying to think of the right patches.

 

I was using B4-2, which was my goto organ for years, but I've gotten much more used to the mix of VB3-2 in the Mojo as of late, so it's been kind of interesting going back and comparing.

Puck Funk! :)

 

Equipment: Laptop running lots of nerdy software, some keyboards, noise makersâ¦yada yada yadaâ¦maybe a cat?

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  • 2 weeks later...

Back up your synths! Two iOS to help:

 

Via SysEx:

 

SysEx Base

 

Have you got older synths you want to back up and edit?

 

Patch Base

 

The current list is here, with a list of future synths to add: https://coffeeshopped.com/patch-base

The fact there's a Highway To Hell and only a Stairway To Heaven says a lot about anticipated traffic numbers

 

People only say "It's a free country" when they're doing something shitty-Demetri Martin

 

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  • 3 months later...

Oblique Strategies Is available as an Android app.

 

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.monoloco.obliquestrategies

 

 

If you"re not familiar, it was created in the 1970s by Brian Eno as a way to help artists with things like creative block.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies

 

 

The fact there's a Highway To Hell and only a Stairway To Heaven says a lot about anticipated traffic numbers

 

People only say "It's a free country" when they're doing something shitty-Demetri Martin

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

I hate to criticize . . . I mean, I don"t have an album (CD? release?) coming out. But this doesn"t sound like Kansas to me. The slow song has a little 'Lonely Wind" vibe, but it"s not doing it for me.

 

[video:youtube]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://ultimateclassicrock.com/kansas-preview-new-album-absence-of-presence-track-listing/

The fact there's a Highway To Hell and only a Stairway To Heaven says a lot about anticipated traffic numbers

 

People only say "It's a free country" when they're doing something shitty-Demetri Martin

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
I"ve done more yard work in the past 3 weeks than I"ve done in the past 3 years. Having all your income shut off overnight has me looking for every diversion possible.

The fact there's a Highway To Hell and only a Stairway To Heaven says a lot about anticipated traffic numbers

 

People only say "It's a free country" when they're doing something shitty-Demetri Martin

 

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Loved the JL Cooper stuff. There aren't a lot of companies left doing deep MIDI hardware. I had some of the JL Cooper MIDI patch bays

 

 

Funny story: I just set up a Yamaha piano lab at one of the schools where I work. One snag was that several of the cables weren't long enough to get from the pianos to the audio controller; worse yet, the troubleshooting guide cautioned against using Ethernet cables as replacements.

 

So I contacted the retailer, and asked if I could get specs on the cable so I could make custom lengths. They didn't know what the deal was with the cables.

 

The retailer contacted Yamaha USA. They didn't know the make-up of the cable either. But they confirmed that Ethernet cable would not work, although they didn't know why. They did tell my retailer that the piano lab controller was actually manufactured by JL Cooper, and then given a Yamaha Badge.

 

I looked on the JL Cooper web site, and discovered that they make a piano lab controller for Roland too. In fact, it may be the same unit -- it looks the same except for the paint color. So I called up the JL Cooper folks and asked if they could share the cable specs with me. Their answer was "Not normally, but we see that Yamaha has opened a ticket with us for this, and it's obviously referring to your specific situation."

 

Happy ending: JL Cooper sent me the pinouts, and Yamaha USA sent me some short cables that I could splice into my existing cables to get the length right. Both companies took great care of me. And the high school kids are pretty thrilled with their piano lab too.

 

 

 

Just curious, but this story doesn't make sense to me. Why would a manufacturer not have the pin out diagram in the owners manual? Unless they want your business to buy a super pricey custom cable from them. But if that was the case it would have been made easily evident how to get a custom cable from Yamaha or Roland.

 

This post triggered my aversion to proprietary standards!

Numa Piano X73 /// Kawai ES920 /// Casio CT-X5000 /// Yamaha EW425

Yamaha Melodica and Alto Recorder

QSC K8.2 // JBL Eon One Compact // Soundcore Motion Boom Plus 

Win10 laptop i7 8GB // iPad Pro 9.7" 32GB

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Just curious, but this story doesn't make sense to me. Why would a manufacturer not have the pin out diagram in the owners manual? Unless they want your business to buy a super pricey custom cable from them. But if that was the case it would have been made easily evident how to get a custom cable from Yamaha or Roland.
I tend to feel the same way.

 

I think the rationale is that they want to sell a turnkey product -- an appliance. Just as your HDMI patch cable from your to your HDTV doesn't come with a pin-out diagram; people just want to use it.

 

The super pricey cable is available -- but most people buy them all at once when they buy the lab from the music store. So my approach -- a lab that was actually designed and implemented by a musician / semi-engineer -- was apparently pretty unusual.

 

What I find funny is that the Roland and Yamaha products appear to be identical, save the badge and the paint job. I had always assumed both companies made all their own stuff.

-Tom Williams

{First Name} {at} AirNetworking {dot} com

PC4-7, PX-5S, AX-Edge, PC361

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

How about just a good old-fashioned mini-rant.

 

No, I was screwing around on some other keyboard forum, supposedly for "advanced" classical/legit pianists, primarily, and apparently you can't even self-censor your "bad" words with asterisks or whatever.

 

What the he** kind of Beaver Cleaver ess is that, MF?

 

Yeah, I understand not everybody earned how to curse properly as a child or a young adult, but I can respect that even some limpd*** mo*&^**ers of elderly years may have tender little sensibilities.

 

Just fix your profanity filter, if it's a problem, or let me self-censor!

 

First time I ever heard of some "musicians" who never heard even censored salty language.

 

That just shocked the fu*&^U he** out of me.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Wifey saw this on the internet today.

 

B0BD9710-41D8-4CB2-A509-945CCEB44EDE.jpeg

1059.jpg.b86941dc2e9d1c3cd905fb208816b9bc.jpg

The fact there's a Highway To Hell and only a Stairway To Heaven says a lot about anticipated traffic numbers

 

People only say "It's a free country" when they're doing something shitty-Demetri Martin

 

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