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SamuelBLupowitz

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About SamuelBLupowitz

  • Birthday 09/09/1989

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  • homepage
    http://www.samuelblupowitz.com
  • occupation
    Media development for language education
  • hobbies
    Songwriting, DIY recording, forcing bass players to listen to James Jamerson
  • Location
    Ithaca, NY

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  1. I've been playing left-hand bass in a project pretty regularly for the past six months, and ergonomics are SO important. I also like having a dedicated bass board (I've gone the analog synth route in this case; gives me some Stevie Wonder energy, but like if Stevie's synth bass parts were toddlers still learning to walk...) but getting it positioned in a way that is comfortable and intuitive for my left hand the whole show is paramount. I'll let you know when I've finally figured out how to nail it!
  2. There are a couple of great stock flute sounds in the Roli NOISE app that would probably do the trick -- I'm not sure if that's still free since I have a version of it from like 2019 on my iPad that I don't update anymore. You could take a look though; the "Breath Flute" patch would be pretty close.
  3. Yeah, it's all little compromises and I figured it was worth brainstorming with the crew here! I'm playing left hand bass a lot, so three octaves is great in that instance. But I also play bass with the pedals, and if I wanted to do that while playing a two-handed piano part, I'm much better off doing what @D. Gauss suggested and just using one of the Mojo manuals to control a piano sound over MIDI (unless I want to go the full L-shaped setup like Eric Finland does in the video below).
  4. Yeah, thanks for turning me on to this, y'all! It's not in my budget at the moment of course, but it's very much the sort of thing I was looking for. Good to know!
  5. I've got a Korg Prologue 8 that I've been using for bass, and that's on a stand above the Mojo with the low C keys lined up vertically (it's also MIDI'ed to a set of Roland PK-5 pedals underneath). I either send it to a dedicated bass amp, or to a separate channel of my Motion Sound so I can EQ it differently from the organ. I often pair it with a SansAmp DI as well. The Prologue is bitimbral, which is another way I've thought about getting some extra sounds, but since I'm amplifying it in a way that will emphasize it as a bass instrument, it's not the simplest solution.
  6. Sure, I'm definitely trying to give myself as little to schlep (and to fit in the vehicle, if it makes the difference in the number of cars going to the gig) as possible. So switching non-organ sounds on and off the manuals is definitely a simple way to do it. But to answer your question about how many hands I have... 😉 There are times in this project when I'm kicking bass, playing a pad or comp on the lower manual, and playing a lead line on the top manual, and sometimes I want to be able to hit a bell or jump to a synth lead in the same tune. What's easier in those instances: having to change patches and then change back while I have all four limbs engaged with playing the instrument, or having the patch already cued up and waiting for me if I move my right hand up and to the right a bit? "Easy" is a bit of a compromise, since having sounds dedicated to certain boards rather than having to scroll through them is my always my preference, but space considerations and *my* aging back lean in favor of fewer things to carry. It's likely I'll be going the organ-doubling-as-MIDI-controller route at some upcoming gigs, but I'm trying to brainstorm to see what my options would be if I wanted to simplify the workflow without bringing a full-size third board.
  7. My live organ is a dual-manual Mojo, so one option I have considered (and have used in the past) is just controlling additional iPad sounds from one of the manuals. So that's a route I may take here, but in this project I really do make use of both manuals within a tune pretty often (part of why I went with a separate sound source for bass instead of using an organ registration), so I'm just trying to consider as many options as I can. And I'm glad I asked the group, because there are a lot of great ideas here!
  8. I'm looking for a supplemental board for my organ trio live rig, to cover a wide spread of sounds outside of my primary setup of dual-manual organ and synth bass. The combination of our tunes evolving in the studio, and some of our collaborations with other artists, is making me want to have some more sonic options (piano and EP, clav, bells, lead synth, Mellotron), while keeping the organ and the bass synth the main focus of the rig. My 61-key Nord Electro checks a lot of these boxes, of course, but I'm wondering what my options are these days for a smaller footprint than that. I'm planning on playing around with my little two-octave Bluetooth MIDI controllers and an iPad and see if that's low-maintenance and low-profile enough to cover the wide array of sounds I want without taking up quite so much space, but my experience with that setup is that it can be kind of finicky (also trickier to hook up to sustain or expression pedals). Any thoughts on what might be a good compromise between those two things? The Yamaha Reface is the hardware solution that's closest to what I'm envisioning, but of course with those you have to pick if you're going the CP, CS, or DX route. The CP would probably be my best bet, but I'd love to cover more diverse ground in a similar form factor. Without a hardware option, the most logical thing for the smaller gigs might be sticking to the iPad as a sound source, but getting myself a three- or four-octave controller with sustain and expression pedal inputs.
  9. Every now and then I see a post about someone converting a set of Hammond pedals into a MIDI controller, using kits like you might get from https://www.midiboutique.com/ or similar sources. Wondering if anyone has any experience with this sort of mod, and how involved a process we're looking at. In my perfect world, I could use the bass pedals on my A100 normally, or MIDI them up to a synth or laptop, or both at once. But I worry this might be out of my technical wheelhouse, prohibitively expensive, or both, in which case I'll have to settle for swapping the original pedals out with my set of Roland PK5s like I've been doing. What say you, forumites?
  10. Howard Stern can really be grating as an interviewer, but for better or worse, he gets much more out of his interviews than the usual talking points and canned responses, and you can tell Billy Joel LOVES to answer a question that he HASN'T been asked dozens of times. Even Paul McCartney has to go off book a bit with Stern, despite his best efforts to tell the same six Beatles stories he's been telling for the past fifty years. 😉 Thanks for sharing, bud!
  11. I'm so sorry to hear that. Certainly, a downside of singing with earplugs in is that your voice resonating in your own head is MUCH louder (not entirely a downside depending on the monitoring in the room, but certainly I've had the experience where my voice with plugs in is too loud to be certain of my intonation). My personal experience with custom molds, both earplugs and my IEMs (more specifically custom molded sleeves for my off-the-rack Shure 215s), has been incredibly positive. I have tiny little ear canals and universal fit products NEVER stay in consistently. I'm no longer getting distracted trying to shove them back into my ears while I'm playing. So, as another forumite said, worth trying some of the cheap solutions and see if they work for you before you spend more money on something that's been unsatisfactory! But I suppose it is possible that there was some sort of manufacturing/molding issue your first go-round.
  12. When I'm not using in-ears, I have a set of Westone custom molded earplugs with exchangeable 15dB and 20dB filters. They're one of the best purchases I've ever made ($200 I think? They've made some changes to their line in the past couple of years) and they're invaluable for rehearsals, attending concerts, and small gigs without a full PA/sound engineer. https://westone.com/defendear/defendear-recreational I lost a set once at a show I went to out of town. That was a bummer, but I replaced them immediately. I spend so much of my time with my head five feet from crash cymbals, and I credit the musician plugs with keeping my hearing as good as it's been.
  13. This thread is reminding me that I need to take some time to tweak the Leslie sim on my Mojo, now that I'm gigging with the sim a lot more often ... I bet if I even just tweak the speed and rampup/down times to match my 147 a bit better, it'll sound a little more natural onstage to me.
  14. I think it must be Townshend. Chris Stainton is credited as pianist on three specific tracks ("5:15," "Drowned," and "The Dirty Jobs," which is one of my very favorite Who deep cuts) and none of the other members of the Who are credited with any keyboards, while Pete is credited with the "remainder." It's funny, I think of him as a synth guy and assumed he did all the arpeggiator stuff throughout that record, but it didn't occur to me that he'd have played that piano feature. One of my favorite albums, but it's been a few years since I've given it a spin. Need to listen for that G in the intro to "Love Reign O'er Me" now!
  15. I remember playing an arrangement of George Harrison's "Something" in a combo in college, and the faculty mentor saying to the piano player (I was on bass at the time) "You know, some songs just don't sound right if you add color tones; sometimes you have to just play the triad." I have kept that in mind when I worry about writing something that's not "sophisticated" enough.
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