Mididude

I own an XK3c too. No lower manual though (not sad about that, I have limited space anyway). One thing I just discovered after having this board for years and years is if you go into the vibrato chorus menu and turn the values for C1, C2, and C3 down to zero but still push the button down that engages the vibrato/chorus...according to my ears something happens....it just sounds better than were you not to push it and have just the Leslie sim. turned on. I never have liked the vibrato/chorus dsp effect on the XK3c. The C3 is ...ok to me if I have the Leslie on 'brake' position. Oh, I also think I turned the 'treble emphasis' (or whatever its called) all the way down in the vibrato/chorus menu.

Thanks for the unique historical insights. Having that Lee Michaels greatest hits cd that I originally mentioned at the beginning of the whole post, my mind has wondered (wandered) about the background of the recordings. Wikipedia has some info on the albums, but I thought it was somewhat sparse. His song, 'If I Leave You' interests me big time. The well-recorded and well-mixed bari sax and other supportive instruments reminds me of Brian Wilson in his 'Pet Sounds' mode circa 1965 or 1966, and the trumpet(s) part reminds me of Sly and the Family Stone. The cavernous reverb on the distorted elec. guitar sounds great....late 60's vibe (similar to Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin mixes). Music worth relaxing and enjoying.

I watched this clip recently. So neat that Burt Sugarman and the Midnight Special people uploaded this. I don’t think there’s like a ton of filmed or videotape footage of him, so I think this is really neat, that it’s available to watch. Love that distorted tone of his Rhodes through the amp/s. His playing ‘feel’ is great too. ,

Hi All, I have the ‘Hello, The Very Best of Lee Michaels’ CD in my car that I often listen to, and for a long time (even when I would hear it on the radio) on his tune ‘Do You Know What I Mean’, I thought he must’ve using some kind of synth with a chorus circuit like maybe a polysynth like Garth Hudson (did) in ‘The Last Waltz’ or something…Basically I didn’t think to investigate it. Well, I thought I had a memory that Wikipedia said Lee Michaels: pipe organ in the ‘liner notes’ which their term for that, as you probably know is ‘Personnel’ section of any given article about an album but no dice now (Wikipedia is frequently edited so I think they deleted what I’d seen)… BUT, Allmusic.com states in their review that Lee played not only Hammond organ, but pipe organ on it. It clicked suddenly that that’s what I’d been hearing all along. That highly animated, tremulant sound. I suspect that real pipe organ might have been out of tune relative to itself. All I know is, it sounds cool.

My communication style is not concise most of the time. The steps I had to take to get the option I was going for were simple and trivial, and were done blindingly fast. That’s my point. Kudos to Hammond Suzuki, and also to Apple. I like stuff that just works.

I had a very enjoyable experience over this last weekend. I have a Hammond Suzuki XK3c and nowadays I play in a room in my residence just for my own enjoyment. I decided a while ago not to use the Neo Vent mark 1 with it. I like clean, direct aesthetics, if you know what I mean, and the built in Leslie sim is not intolerable to me. I’ve made some great presets over time and backed them up to the smart card thingy in the back. Anyway, going with what I believe is the modern impatient zeitgeist of ‘get to the point’…I have a discriminating set of ears and I decided I don’t like the ‘click’ in the XK’s bass pedals samples. It cannot be dialed out. I won’t digress into theories of different rig options (e.g. 11 pin connection to a newer Leslie idea)….I was just plugging the XK keyboard into a Yamaha MG06x compact mixer in stereo and into some Mackie HR-824’s. I did a bunch of thinking about very convoluted ways to get some *unmodulated* B3-like left hand bass going on that would not have annoyingly excessive note on and note off click sounds. Here’s where I will try to cut to the chase: I used the used the ‘use external zone’ template of the XK3c, and connected it up to a MacBook Pro (2018 roughly) via a PreSonus interface that I think is model 24C….via midi, and fired up GarageBand, and selected a track and made that track be tonewheel organ, and put its Leslie on ‘brake’…I had to do just some easy tweaks on the XK’s midi or zones page I believe…Voila: organ bass happening in left hand with adjustable (good job, Apple!) key click, and the XK’s sound engine providing several octaves of sound for my right hand. End of story. Oops, I lied about that being the end: I practiced ‘More Today Than Yesterday’..I’m studying Earland’s arrangement gradually.

I even thought Wix’s early 90’s playing in You-know-who’s band was impressive (such as his ‘piano’ solo’s on the ‘Tripping the Live Fantastic’ album).

I heard some similarities in the rhythms of the chords on the piano (and maybe the actual chords)…can’t remember; I listened quickly yesterday. Maybe he was influenced by Rick Wakeman’s part on that tune.

Music-playing takes up too many parts of the brain to always smile on cue…I try to force one out though if someone has a camera. I don’t check back on the results later.

I think in this song, after the single organ notes at the intro, he has the Leslie on stop, and plays a chord and turns (the Leslie) to fast. Neat, like a ‘blooming’ sound.

I used to have that book. I left it at a musician friend’s house. I recall that it’s author, Colbeck, lauded the Yamaha CP-80, saying it was a breakthrough for touring musicians (who presumably still needed roadies), in that they could get the majority of a grand piano’s sound (not withstanding the low register) & feel, in a package with lesser weight. I remember getting acquainted with the Moogs, like the Prodigy and Multimoog through this book.

Just a random comment here, I’ve never owned a DX7, but I’m 50 years old, so I’m of the generation that were (roughly) teenagers when that sound was dominating the charts. I remember going to my aunt’s wedding in circa 1985 and the cover band she & her groom hired had to keyboard player with a DX7. I thought it looked really neat with its (pastel?) membrane buttons. Shortly after that, I think I saw one in a music shop and toyed around with it, having no earthly clue what I was doing, of course. One of my favorite DX7 sounds is that ‘zee-yowng’ patch (with tons of bright harmonic content appearing to be filter-swept or something) in ‘Money for Nothing’ by Dire Straits. Also, assuming that this was the keyboard used, the synth bass line from ‘Into the Groove’ by Madonna. In that list that the O.P. provided a link to, ‘When I Think Of You’ stood out to me. I remember watching that video on MTV as a kid. Very neat bass line. I think that’s why we like the DX7, that bass patch has a ‘heft’ to it… those of you who own an original one, or have a software emulator, might know if they use the same patch in the Mr. Mister tune. I don’t, but without A/B’ing them otoh I’d guess it might have been the same one used, or tweaked. I have the book ‘Keyboard (Magazine) presents the best of the 80s’ sitting in a space in my coffee table next to me. I know they have an excerpt from when they interviewed Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and they talked about the DX7 a bit.

Good thread. I like playing this tune occasionally, in E minor. I was looking at a chart to ‘Europa’ a couple of years ago, and thought there were a bunch of similarities in chord structure to ‘Autumn Leaves’. I just kind of played along to the Santana recording (not intending to make it a regular practice or repertoire thing). don’t remember what key it was in, I thought it was one of the flat keys, like E flat. My memory might be fading… I think both tunes cycle through at least a portion…of the circle of fifths quite a bit.

I have a ‘dirty’-sounding MXR Phase 90 pedal that I bought around the year 2002 (maybe slightly earlier) from Guitar Center. It doesn’t seem to have much headroom. It clips fairly easily without much level put into it. I thought about looking up a tech online who works on guitar stomp box pedals who might know a way to modify it, and give it higher headroom, but I gave up on that. I ran my Moog Little Phatty into it a while back just to experiment, and it sounded interesting… paired up with that keyboard it actually sounded good because it took a fairly pristine signal coming out of the L.P. and distorted it & added gnarly noise, along with the animation provided by the phaser doing its normal thing. It sounded kind of more ‘vintage’ to my ears.

I think these transistor Hammond models are detailed in Mark Vail’s ‘Beauty in the B’ book. I talked with a barber in Walnut, CA a few years ago when my wife and I were living there, who told me he owned an X-66. I think he owned a Leslie too. He said he loved playing the X-66. My XK-3c was in a storage unit at the time but I told him about it, and how satisfying I thought playing it was.

I remember reading an article a few years ago where Tom Oberheim spoke at ‘The Red Bull Academy’ or something like that (it was a talk sponsored by Red Bull), and he said that in the early days of his company he would test job candidates out to see if they knew their way around subtractive synthesis signal flow…In the same article IIRC he basically said they flunked if they conveyed that one oscillator run through a low-pass filter sounded good…He said it takes at least two oscillators, preferably slightly detuned against each other, to begin to make a sound that’s not cheesy. I think he was alluding to the phase cancellation and alternate reinforcement that happens say when you have two detuned sawtooth waveforms sounding, versus the static and ‘plain Jane’ one-oscillator-by-itself thing. I got the impression that Tom thought the latter approach sounded awful.

Sorry if I didn’t use the tools right to make clear I was trying to quote you (original poster), and then I add my own comments. That last paragraph is me.

I had the Little Phatty fired up the other day, so I thought I'd have a go at that patch again. Please excuse A. the poor (grainy etc.) image quality (made the video with wife's 2006 MacBook) so it looks like an ancient webcam, and B. the sloppy playing. I wanted to just see if I could get good audio quality going into the computer from my old Tascam Firewire interface, and it worked. I'll have to upload something more rehearsed next time. Here's the link: .

The Google Drive link you provided was apparently to the Windows version. I think I'm going to go with the John Melas software soon, as I suspect it might get my limited goal done, and I don't feel like chancing clicking on 'iffy' websites out there for a possible Mac version. Thank you though.

Thanks for the tip. I’ll get it & try it out this weekend, & report back how it worked.

Thanks, I’ll try it out a.s.a.p.

Hi All, A friend of mine has graciously lent me his MX88, and I made a bunch of Performances with customized (by me) user edits to voices. In my perfect world, I could easily hook it up to a computer and be able to move around Performances (with each Performance’s parts & split parameters intact; side note: I rarely use ‘layers’, but splits: I use constantly, lately) from one ‘slot’ to another. Apparently there’s 128 Performance ‘slots’ (you can correct my terminology if I used the wrong term). For example, say I’ve saved/overwritten Performance number 1 as my own user Performance, and I want to move that to location 31….Can it be done? If so, how easy is it? Trivially easy? Onerous? Apparently this John Melas guy developed multiple software editors for this board (as well as Motif, MOX, etc.). He wants some money for the unlocked version. I’m on the fence about spending on it, but inclined to spend…I’ll be honest, the GUI looks ‘Windows’-ish to me. I’m using a MacBook Pro (roughly 2018). Is it (John Melas’ software) clunky, & likely to make me want to drink tons of coffee to get into it? Here’s a link to his site: http://www.jmelas.gr/motif/products.php Thanks in advance for any input. -John F.

Thanks, The Real MC!

I remember reading a while back (probably via Keyboard Magazine) that Billy Preston played an ARP synth on ‘Space Race’. That got me thinking, there’s another song called ‘Struttin’ on ‘Billy Preston - The Best’ (CD that I think is out of print) that has him playing an ARP. His lead synth has a cool tone that sounds to me like a large amount of lfo, assigned to filter with a pretty high rate, …and also either the same lfo simultaneously assigned to pitch or, (alternate theory) maybe another lfo assigned to pitch at a little lower rate. Any ARP players out there who know if I’m correct in remembering there was a button called ‘Wow’ on some of the old ARP’s that did these kind of routings for you when engaged? I think I played around on my Moog Little Phatty once before trying to do something similar, but didn’t nail the tone. Maybe I’d need some additional c.v. (an extra lfo) brought into the instrument, since IIRC (the Little Phatty is in its soft case right now) the L.P. is designed stock, with simple mod. routing; I don’t remember the modulation section allowing routing of its one lfo to two destinations, namely filter & pitch in this case, at the same time. I am not looking at the synth now though, so I apologize if I might have forgotten if it actually is simple to program the sound on the L.P. Thanks.