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Churchy Sound - Gospel Harmony


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Awesome job. On a side note. He"s using Midiculous from Gospel Musicians so we can see the notation and keys.

 

Thanks Elmer. Jamal is a true blessing for us musicians and fans of Gospel music.

 

Just loaded in his five acoustic pianos (team-up with AcousticSamples) for the Motif/Montage/MOXF/MODX last week. Good stuff.

Yamaha: Motif XF8, MODX7, YS200, CVP-305, CLP-130, YPG-235, PSR-295, PSS-470 | Roland: Fantom 7, JV-1000

Kurzweil: PC3-76, PC4 (88) | Hammond: SK Pro 73 | Korg: Triton LE 76, N1R, X5DR | Emu: Proteus/1 | Casio: CT-370 | Novation: Launchkey 37 MK3 | Technics: WSA1R

Former: Emu Proformance Plus & Mo'Phatt, Korg Krome 61, Roland Fantom XR & JV-1010, Yamaha MX61, Behringer CAT

Assorted electric & acoustic guitars and electric basses | Roland TD-17 KVX | Alesis SamplePad Pro | Assorted organs, accordions, other instruments

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Problem is with this genre is you have to live in this world and I have found they weren't guys that liked to share. Same with playing Caribbean music. You have to search it out and teach yourself at some point.

 

I was complaining about the exact issue you had brought up, in another post earlier: https://forums.musicplayer.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/3067080/sorely-lacking-of-good-keyboard-courses#Post3067080

 

Besides the many valuable inputs from our forum members in that post, Gospelmusicians.com and Hearandplay.com are two excellent sources of Gospel learning materials.

 

I've also noticed that with the growth of Youtube over the last 10 year, lots of Gospel cats have share their secret sauce online. The amount of Gospel education we can get from free Youtube videos is something I could only dream of 15 years ago.

...

The roots of the COGIC church are very interesting and few are aware of the huge influence of William Seymour on 20th century Christianity:

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

...

 

Thank you for enlightening us on the beautiful history of COGIC music, uhoh7. I've been a fan of The Clark Sisters but didn't know about their family musical heritage that dates back to the Civil Rights movement.

 

The Eddie Brown lesson is awesome too, thanks for sharing it!

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Backing up preachers is an Art in itself and i always look with envy! These guys are born into this tradition, even the way they change chords under the voice is unique. Thanx for sharing

 

Glad you enjoyed it Yannis. Given how bad Pop music has become over the last 25 years and how tone-deaf it had made the millenials and GenZ, I'm grateful for the musical standard Gospel folks managed to maintain.

Since there's already some spirited debate in this thread, I'm going to object to this line of thought and point out that the Millennials and Gen Z gave us Snarky Puppy, Turkuaz, Vulfpeck, Jacob Collier, and surely a host of other musically mind-blowing artists who don't immediately come to mind, despite the Boomers and Gen X establishing radio conglomerates that would never play them. The enemies of musicians and art are the same, not confined to a single generation, and are responsible for, rather than the result of, cultural deficiencies. :wink:

Samuel B. Lupowitz

Musician. Songwriter. Food Enthusiast. Bad Pun Aficionado.

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The example makes me want to puke, ugly chords, ugly tone, bad rhythm, nothing much in common with traditional gospel music, chords "taken" from other genres I can recognize easily in the pieces I've put myself to watching, but without much taste. Ok, it's sort of harmonic, it contains some licks reminiscent of good gospel licks, probably some of it will fit with singing hymns or traditionals, but I wouldn't much feel like visiting a congregation with this going on.

 

Gospel I think is right can be a bit up tempo and uplifting, but there needs to be a certain amount of rest, without some cocky guy wanting to cover all the music and take musical phrases without caring about taste in where those phrases come from. The harmonic ideas are ok, but why those and not many others?

 

TV

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They always get away with inefficient fingering. Mostly the firth finger.

Which finger is firth?

I honestly thought this was an intentional portmanteau word. If you count the thumb as the first finger then it's fifth, if you start with the index finger then it's fourth.

Unless Madea is saying it, that still doesn't explain the typo. :laugh::cool:

 

Or it could be the Firth of Forth. Proving once again the Scots invented everything.

____________________________________
Rod

Here for the gear.

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despite the Boomers and Gen X establishing radio conglomerates that would never play them.

 

Hey now. GenX hates the Boomers as much as the Millennials do. We grew up bored and hungry. My favorite song is "The Next Great Song I Hear." We gave you hip-hop, disco, punk, funk, and grunge. We can't help it that you messed the whole thing up and turned it into Mumblerap.

Now out! "Mind the Gap," a 24-song album of new material.
www.joshweinstein.com

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The example makes me want to puke, ugly chords, ugly tone, bad rhythm, nothing much in common with traditional gospel music, chords "taken" from other genres I can recognize easily in the pieces I've put myself to watching, but without much taste.

 

Gospel I think is right can be a bit up tempo and uplifting, but there needs to be a certain amount of rest

The police just showed up. :laugh:

 

It's fine that you don't like what you heard but then to describe what you think would it make it better is arrogant.

 

This is exactly why I think these cats are doing a huge dissevice in "sharing" what they do. :cool:

PD

 

"The greatest thing you'll ever learn, is just to love and be loved in return."--E. Ahbez "Nature Boy"

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Backing up preachers is an Art in itself and i always look with envy! These guys are born into this tradition, even the way they change chords under the voice is unique. Thanx for sharing

 

Glad you enjoyed it Yannis. Given how bad Pop music has become over the last 25 years and how tone-deaf it had made the millenials and GenZ, I'm grateful for the musical standard Gospel folks managed to maintain.

Since there's already some spirited debate in this thread, I'm going to object to this line of thought and point out that the Millennials and Gen Z gave us Snarky Puppy, Turkuaz, Vulfpeck, Jacob Collier, and surely a host of other musically mind-blowing artists who don't immediately come to mind, despite the Boomers and Gen X establishing radio conglomerates that would never play them. The enemies of musicians and art are the same, not confined to a single generation, and are responsible for, rather than the result of, cultural deficiencies. :wink:

 

You're not "objecting" what I said at all. We are saying mostly the same thing. You just put it in a different way.

 

Being tone-deaf is not the Millennials and GenZ's fault. For most casual listeners, taste is much more of a result of "nurture" than "nature". Boomers and GenX weren't born with better taste than the younger guys, they were just lucky enough to have a music industry that hadn't been commercialized to the point of suffocation.

 

You used musicians, brilliant musicians, to argue about a generation's musical taste. That's not statistically representative at all. Having one Nazi officer who plotted to assasinate Hitler doesn't mean the vast majority of party weren't delirious.

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A few years ago, i attended a workshop taught by DC pianist Eric Byrd. He asked the class "How many of you play piano?". After an awkward second or two of looking around and not seeing anyone else raise their hand, I reluctantly raised my hand. I can find notes on the keyboard, but call myself a real pianist? Please.

 

He pursed his lips in thought for a bit, muttered something like "How to go about this..." then proceeded to start the workshop. I don't feel like he was holding anything back or trying to keep secrets. He tried his best to answer questions with information that would be useful to this particular audience, but not be too overwhelming with data that people were not ready to process. One of my takeaways was the differences between playing gigs for jazz, straight blues (not so much jazz), traditional church, and contemporary church. He explained and demonstrated them in ways that I thought were easy enough to hear and understand.

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You're not "objecting" what I said at all. We are saying mostly the same thing. You just put it in a different way.

 

Being tone-deaf is not the Millennials and GenZ's fault. For most casual listeners, taste is much more of a result of "nurture" than "nature". Boomers and GenX weren't born with better taste than the younger guys, they were just lucky enough to have a music industry that hadn't been commercialized to the point of suffocation.

 

You used musicians, brilliant musicians, to argue about a generation's musical taste. That's not statistically representative at all. Having one Nazi officer who plotted to assasinate Hitler doesn't mean the vast majority of party weren't delirious.

No one is tone deaf, except old people who think good taste died with them.

 

Every generation has the same proportion of cream and crap.

 

Years later, what remains of the older music, is the cream. But lying in its wake is a mountain of crap.

 

We see what we want to see. You see "tone deafness" in someone young, I see willful blindness in someone old.

Now out! "Mind the Gap," a 24-song album of new material.
www.joshweinstein.com

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I'll chime in.....

 

I have been digesting a huge amount of music in the past several years, set off by my inheritance of a blonde RT3. Before that I was wraped up in the American Song Book and music I loved growning up in the 60s. This included alot of folk and African American spirituals. I played fairly often on my AP. I seldom used my MIDI stuff.

 

The Hammond really opened my eyes to a bunch of fantastic music I had totally missed in the 60s and early 70s, before the evil DX7 appeared ;) I'd heard Billy Preston, of course, we all had, but I had no idea who he was. I did not know the Clark sisters from the Andrews sisters. I'd never heard of Cory Henry or the Cogic church. A revelation each and all.

 

Not to long after I got a DM12 and got into the synth world inspired not least by our local guru, Paolo who guided me both into the world of 80s and 90s synths, but the music he loved at that time. I'd never heard much of that music. I wanted a hardware sequencer, and ran straight into the MPC1000. Researching that led me to the history of "Rap" and the multiple genres into which it has evolved. I did not understand Rap at the time, it was harsh to me, and I did not think I liked drum machines...did not understand samples.....but I have grown. That MPC and the ones which came before, all under the influence of Linn, was THE instrument in alot of famous tracks from 2000 on where samples carefully chosen took over rhythums and layers. It took sound design out of expensive studios in into the hands of young people like we once were.

 

I started listening to "Producer" interviews and podcasts, where these guys talked about how to make a living making music. Who influenced them, and what their lives were like. Turned out many were connected to the African American churches where they grew up. Some played organs in the church.

 

Those young people don't find a conflict between Cory Henry and Lay Lay:

[video:youtube]

They love both styles, honestly. Rap has come a long long way, and you can tell somebody on Lay Lay's team knows alot about sound.

 

And then there is Wynton Marsalis who will never miss and oportunity to trash young producers. Ironic since he thought Armstrong was just a Uncle Tom in his early years, and it took him quite some time to get past the generation gap. Armstrong never missed a chance to rain on "Boppers", and this sort of music snobbery is.....not their best trait. It's human nature. Out-group hostility. Baked in by 200,000 years of practice as humans and millions of years of evolution before that.

 

Paolo was a great example to me of how to forget my first impulses and try to understand things before I dismissed them. I fail at that on the gear front, carrying some pretty stupid opinions, but not too rigidly ;) But in terms of music, I love almost every flavor now. Of course like any dish, they all can be burnt or undercooked. My own cooking is pretty sketchy in every genre, but improving.

 

So genre trashing I say is.......

[video:youtube]

RT-3/U-121/Leslie 21H and 760/Saltarelle Nuage/MOXF6/MIDIhub, 

SL-880/Nektar T4/Numa Cx2/Deepmind12/Virus TI 61/SL61 mk2

Stylophone R8/Behringer RD-8/Proteus 1/MP-7/Zynthian 4

MPC1k/JV1010/Unitor 8/Model D & 2600/WX-5&7/VL70m/DMP-18 Pedals

Natal drums/congas etc & misc bowed/plucked/blown instruments. 

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...

Those young people don't find a conflict between Cory Henry and Lay Lay:

...

 

These Lay Lay songs (if we call them that. I'd use the word "trash") put everything wrong with the "nurture" (or rather, the lack thereof) part of Millenials' and GenZs' musical taste on full display.

 

As much as I dislike the Purist attitude of some Jazz musicians/critics like Wynton, and despite the fact that musical preference IS a highly subjective matter, to compare garbage like these to Cory Henry's work is an insult to the ingenuity and sophistication of Soul music and human intelligence.

 

What's next? Shall we declare that Britney Spears' music is as beautiful as Debussy's or Bill Evans' best work? After all, it's just "subjective preferences", isn't it?

 

Btw, I have nothing against Rap/Hip-hop as a genre, The Sugarhill Gang, 2Pac, The Roots, J. Dilla, among many other HipHop artists, have excellent taste and are excellent musicians.

 

These songs you just posted though, they are pure garbage.

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You're not "objecting" what I said at all. We are saying mostly the same thing. You just put it in a different way.

...

Every generation has the same proportion of cream and crap.

...

 

That's not statistically true, and it's a cop-out.

 

Compare the Top 40 charts of any of the last 10 years to the same charts between 1975~1995 and tell me "Every generation has the same proportion of cream and crap." again, with a straight face.

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I don't think these kinds of "new" music possess originality under self control guided by proper knowledge of for instance classical harmonic theory and proven excellence in terms of performance skills of some known musical genre, and I don't think gospel hip hoppers or self appointed evangelists of nerd funk are going to be satisfied with the rather new-ageish musical genre they might be trying to carve out, and IMO proper musicians from classical through New Wave don't entertain the amount of opportunism for reasons of self respect. In the western rather protestant oriented history chosing minority groups or fascist views to please nerds isn't a great philosophy in my not so humble opinion. To everyone their own, but I don't aim for a redo of the musical order in order to satisfy my desire to realise some unique musical identity, or a rather double minded tendency to devine the boundaries between being a protagonist or a sophist.

 

T.

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Compare the Top 40 charts of any of the last 10 years to the same charts between 1975~1995 and tell me "Every generation has the same proportion of cream and crap." again, with a straight face.

 

I am inclined to agree, but with the awareness that whatever I would consider to be good songs that have charted in the last 10 years, I have likely missed, as I am not exposed to top 40 radio. This hurts me when playing poptail piano for non- boomer audiences, who I tend to think of as indifferent to live performance by musicians not of their generational "tribe" (while also entertaining the possibility that maybe my piano playing just sucks :)). "Good songs of the last 10 years" is a future thread, to remedy that, but I know most of the responses will be rants and bashing RE the current music scene .

 

The early part of the decade I spent in a house band fronted by a Gen X singer, that did new country and some pop. I enjoyed Bruno Mars, Pink, and even Katy Perry's Dark Horse (the DJ would join us for the rap part). So I'm inclined to think that there has been at least some decent stuff every year. Although I can't think of any "Bohemian Rhapsody" equivalents for that time frame.

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That's not statistically true, and it's a cop-out.

 

Compare the Top 40 charts of any of the last 10 years to the same charts between 1975~1995 and tell me "Every generation has the same proportion of cream and crap." again, with a straight face.

 

Do you see what happened here though? You started out saying something about statistics, but then you relied solely on the self-confirming measure of your own opinion to support it.

 

It's pretty simple: we like the songs from when we were the age that the people who like today's songs are now. That's completely natural. It's also natural for us NOT to like the music of the next generation, since it's designed for us to hate, just as our parents hated our music, and so on forever and ever amen.

 

But I hope we can all agree that the only thing actually special about the music we grew up loving, was solely that it was the music we grew up loving, not that some mystical hand of a musical overlord blessed our particular 15 years of musical prime, with something no one else has ever had.

Now out! "Mind the Gap," a 24-song album of new material.
www.joshweinstein.com

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These songs you just posted though, they are pure garbage.

 

Exactly what I heard during the 60s about many songs I liked.

 

"pure garbage" is a great oxymoron, BTW :)

 

Specific critique is more interesting.

 

It's pretty simple: we like the songs from when we were the age that the people who like today's songs are now. That's completely natural. It's also natural for us NOT to like the music of the next generation, since it's designed for us to hate, just as our parents hated our music, and so on forever and ever amen.

 

But I hope we can all agree that the only thing actually special about the music we grew up loving, was solely that it was the music we grew up loving, not that some mystical hand of a musical overlord blessed our particular 15 years of musical prime, with something no one else has ever had.

 

What's different is our generation now owns everything, LOL So I go shopping and they are playing the Doors. I love them, but wtf? I never imagined "classic rock" would be the politically correct music of my old age. But as you say that's human nature.

 

Bach's music fell deeply out of favor for 2 generations or maybe more. Now it's the holy grail. What we call "classical music" is actually a product of technical showmen of the 19th century who raced through composers works to impress large crowds. What it is celebrated today in that genre may be great---or not, but has little to do with the original intention of the composers. Or that seems to be increasingly clear. More to do with holding up an elaborate pedagoical artifice which has a few bizarre and unhealthy aspects, but does support many musicians and teachers.

 

Underlying generational change (which is not really "normal" for most of human culture) might be a more fundamental one: the transformation of culture from one of participation to one of consumption. The sheet music business was huge, way bigger than records untill when? 1950s, if I'm not mistaken.

 

What changed? Mass penetration of radio. No participation needed. We who play every day are outliers. You can tell the talent pool is smaller when you listen to records from the 30's. Not just the famous ones. Man, those guys/gals could play. Not just Fats Waller and Teddy Wilson. I went through a large family collection of all kinds of music on 78s and I was taken aback by the chops. They didn't have to deal with MIDI ;)

 

The extreme exceptionalism we celebrate and the contempt with which we hold average players....not so healthy. Perhaps that's why it's easy for so many to tolerate the current culling going on.....we spent 180,000 years living in small groups where the loss of a member was such a big deal we might disfigure ourselves in grief. Counterculture? Really only started to appear with the rise of elites and princes impatient to suceed. Or so I'm learning as I study prehistory, inspired by ancient DNA revelations in the last few years.

 

Music and genre wars are an interesting reflection of modernity. What I like about today is the ease of access to learn about them.

RT-3/U-121/Leslie 21H and 760/Saltarelle Nuage/MOXF6/MIDIhub, 

SL-880/Nektar T4/Numa Cx2/Deepmind12/Virus TI 61/SL61 mk2

Stylophone R8/Behringer RD-8/Proteus 1/MP-7/Zynthian 4

MPC1k/JV1010/Unitor 8/Model D & 2600/WX-5&7/VL70m/DMP-18 Pedals

Natal drums/congas etc & misc bowed/plucked/blown instruments. 

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when you listen to records from the 30's. Not just the famous ones. Man, those guys/gals could play. Not just Fats Waller and Teddy Wilson. I went through a large family collection of all kinds of music on 78s and I was taken aback by the chops.

 

They didn't have to deal with MIDI ;)

 

...and yet, in their day, they were condescended to and dismissed for playing primitive and lowly, culture-destroying styles not worthy of consumption by the educated and proper masses.

 

Which is really my point.

 

Times change. Genres and tastes change. The human condition is constant. Pretending our 15 years of cultural relevance is somehow more blessed than others' is 1) universal, but also 2) foolish. We like the music we like because it's the music that was predominant when we formed our aesthetic. But there is nothing more or less special about it than the music of the previous generation's, or the next.

Now out! "Mind the Gap," a 24-song album of new material.
www.joshweinstein.com

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Not to disagree with the above- if someone loves the late 80's hair band era it usually means they are 10 years younger than me, the only possible explanation I can think of lol- but does it leave open the possibility that music can also have intrinsic appeal, not dependent on trends/peer pressure or any particular time frame? How many of us as kids, had no experience with a particular kind of music and then when we heard it for the first time, it "lit us up"? I suspect many of us can recount an experience like that.

 

Classical music for example, yes it has a particular structure that props it up (as does Lincoln Center jazz ala Wynton Marsalis) but that isn't the only reason it is ongoing. It seems to appeal to people of many different cultures and ethnicities.

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I dunno why we're getting hung up on what's on the charts. :idk:

Brotha Eric, as a young man, sit back with your favorite food, snack and beverage and enjoy reading this thread. :popcorn:

 

Hopefully, a few decades from now, you will not be that older muso calling that generation's music garbage and/or longing for the days of Bruno Mars, Snarky Puppy and Cory Henry. :roll:

 

Now, this thread reminds me of the conversations I had with my dad back in the 1980s. The Motown sound and 1970s Soul were the epitome of music for him. To his ears, the music I listened to sounded like garbage regardless of genre. Some of it is classic stuff now.

 

Today, when working on a home improvement job with my dad, he likes listening to Smooth Jazz and I want to run my drill straight through my head. :sick::laugh::cool:

PD

 

"The greatest thing you'll ever learn, is just to love and be loved in return."--E. Ahbez "Nature Boy"

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Not to disagree with the above- if someone loves the late 80's hair band era it usually means they are 10 years younger than me, the only possible explanation I can think of lol- but does it leave open the possibility that music can also have intrinsic appeal, not dependent on trends/peer pressure or any particular time frame? How many of us as kids, had no experience with a particular kind of music and then when we heard it for the first time, it "lit us up"? I suspect many of us can recount an experience like that.

 

Classical music for example, yes it has a particular structure that props it up (as does Lincoln Center jazz ala Wynton Marsalis) but that isn't the only reason it is ongoing. It seems to appeal to people of many different cultures and ethnicities.

This is going to be hard to do in a bite-sized way, but: in short, no, there is not "intrinsic" appeal that exists independent of the cultural agreements we have made amongst ourselves. There is not even a single thing that every person, everywhere, across time or geography, would call "music."

 

There is indisputably agreement around certain practices that originate within a particular culture. In our case, we use elements like melody, harmony, and tonality, as our touchstones. These are NOT universal touchstones; they are remnants of a particular chain of events that led Europeans to conclude that purity of pitch was pious, and that the ability to produce melody indicated that they were closer to the angels than the cultures that foregrounded elements other than melody. "Our" touchstones are ridiculously new to the table, evolutionarily speaking. There were hundreds of thousands of years of traditions that we would call "music/musical" before we came around and decided none of them were valid anymore.

 

There is a story (which to be honest, I have some questions about) that a famous Japanese musician visited some European counterparts and was taken to the symphony. Afterward, the hosts asked him what his favorite part of the performance was. He said, "The first part." After some clarification, it became clear that what he actually meant was the period of time during which the orchestra was tuning up, before they "started." He liked that "movement" the best.

 

Classical music persists not because it's inherently "superior"; rather, the reverse is the case: we based our sense of what was musically superior based on the products of church- and court-sponsored composers, whose work was guaranteed to be performed and preserved. They were vanguards, and we built an aesthetic around their output. Plenty of other people composed at the same time, maybe even producing "better" compositions, but without the patronage mechanism of the two most powerful institutions in the land, their work was not preserved, performed, or exalted.

 

And in every case, this output represents an almost immeasurably small proportion of the various practices across time and across the globe, that we would call "music." To think ours are superior to the rest of those practices--many of which exist within cultures much longer-established than ours--is to be a bit solipsistic, to put it mildly.

Now out! "Mind the Gap," a 24-song album of new material.
www.joshweinstein.com

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I'll chime in.....

Those young people don't find a conflict between Cory Henry and Lay Lay:

Speaking of Lay Lay, she should to an autotune version of this to a hip hop beat.

I'd be perfect.

[video:youtube]

J a z z  P i a n o 8 8

--

Yamaha C7D

Montage8 | CP300 | CP4 | SK1-73 | OB6 | Seven

K8.2 | 3300 | CPSv.3

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