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SamuelBLupowitz

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About SamuelBLupowitz

  • Birthday 09/09/1989

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    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. 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?
  2. 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!
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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!
  7. 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.
  8. Here's one of the few clips I could find on YouTube of Lee Michaels at the Hammond and Frosty on drums: Ferocious!
  9. Back when we were young teenagers in our first band together, one of my longtime guitar player buddies and his family befriended a New Jersey-based band called the Dead Elvi, sort of a horror-themed rockabilly outfit where everyone (hence the name) dressed up like Elvis, but, like, zombies or skeletons and stuff. Anyway, the lead guitarist told my young friend a story of his first band's first big gig: the talent show at their school auditorium. Knowing this was the opportunity to show all of their peers what they were made of, they went for the jugular with a cover of -- before it became a running joke for the whole music world -- Free Bird. The guitarist recounted how when the time came for the solo, he stepped out onto the catwalk that had been constructed for the event, the stage lights shining bright on him as he tore into the solo, closing his eyes and giving it his all. The song ended. The house lights came up. He could see, then, that the audience had gotten bored, and during his long solo, most of them had slipped out the back door of the auditorium. Despite having heard it secondhand twenty years ago, I think about this story... often. 😆
  10. Okay also other than having heard "Do You Know What I Mean?" on WMGK growing up, I knew nothing about Lee Michaels... now I'm checking out this rock piano/organ duo stuff, and how has it been missing all my life?! Definitely going to dig into him some more.
  11. I know I've talked about it on the forum before, but one of my favorite recording adventures of my life was when I booked Sage Chapel at Cornell University (where I have my day gig) to record the pipe organ there for a record my band was making. There were just one or two spots that demanded a little bit of grandiosity that stuck out from my usual big Hammond pads, and setting up a stereo pair of condensers and recording that room trembling with sound really got some vibe. When we went back to the studio and loaded the recording into the main Pro Tools session, we found that the pipe organ was not quite at concert pitch, enough that it was a hair distracting. After puzzling over the challenge of using any kind of pitch correction with all those overtones, our engineer had the idea "what if I just pitch shifted the whole stereo track up a few cents and see if that helps it?" So he went "cha-CHUNK" and there it was -- the internal tuning discrepancies were no big deal, it was just that the organ sound as a whole was a hair flat of A440, and shifting it up made it sit in the track perfectly. Every time I go back and listen to that record, I get a huge grin on my face.
  12. Wow, what a sweet, heartwarming thread this turned out to be! Some of you older folks are really giving me something to aspire to. I just celebrated ten years (in various overlapping projects) with my guitar player of choice, and of course my wife and I (together 13 years total) have been playing music together since early on in our relationship. I have a few other ongoing collaborations with musician friends from the past decade, give or take, though they're not usually uninterrupted. I am still very, very close with my three dear friends and bandmates from growing up, two of which I met and started playing music with over 20 years ago (the third, the drummer, is coming up on that second decade in a year or two). The musical part of our relationship hasn't been consistent since I settled in central New York in the early 2010s, but we still like to find opportunities to play together every few years. I would feel truly blessed if 20, 30, 40 years on, like some of you folks, I am still celebrating these creative relationships. A musical connection is like a marriage in so many ways -- sometimes it burns out violently, sometimes it winds down and runs its course, and sometimes, whether through circumstance or hard work or both, it sustains and grows. It's definitely something worth appreciating when that happens.
  13. I've been playing a lot with a drummer who was born and raised in Denmark, and his favorite joke is to announce that he's going to play "the German clave" and proceed to play unison quarter notes on the kick and snare. 😆
  14. Much respect to all y'all older players who had no choice but to use the real thing -- what you are describing sounds like a literal nightmare to me and a perfect example of why my A100 stays at home. And I say that as someone who gigged with a Wurli for several years with minimal (but memorable) issues as described above. Having a good tech on call was essential.
  15. Got me there. Ian McLagen's Wurli sound on Stay With Me is one of the early recordings that made me obsessed with the instrument, probably a solid decade before I ever got to play the real thing.
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