CyberGene

Numa X piano line but there’s no 61-key option.

No synth would wake me from a coma. Only an acoustic grand piano touches my heart more than any other instrument. P.S. If there are VCD-s (voltage controlled defibrillators), the chances are high for a properly wired Minimoog to wake me though 😉

What do you think about your Take 5 and how often do you use it? I find myself in a contradictory mood about it. I love the way it sounds and how flexible it is. On the other hand I haven’t played it for a long time. When at home I just prefer using the Hydrasynth more, especially when programming patches because it can do everything the Take 5 can and then much more, has better keyboard, endless encoders with rings and OLED screens which helps tremendously when tweaking patches, but most importantly has more polyphony. Besides, I have so many virtual synths that can sound as analog as the Take 5 or even more, yeah 😀 I guess the Take 5 was meant to be a gigging instrument because it’s very compact and light but then in live situations the real analog sound is not really making a difference compared to even a rompler. And patch management is awful. I’m fed up with having to import/export sysex files and I tried that SoundTower thing and I hated it. And there are quirks to the Take 5 for live playing too. Once in a while it would suddenly lose tuning which I’m sure is a bug and not a temperature thing because I’ve calibrated it many times over various temperatures and it’s very stable. However I plug in an audio cable and that would mysteriously trigger some erroneous action that would make it so out of tune that it sounds like a mess. And I hate that when I load a patch I can’t see the patch settings: you turn knobs but can’t see on the screen what’s the stored vs current value, only when you’re exactly at the stored value you’d see a dot in the 3-digit display but blink and you’ll miss it. With all that in mind I think I’m over with my “real analog” period and am probably going to sell it. I’ll only keep the Behringer Model D because its simplicity is its power. Here’s the most recent time I got it out of its case, to try to recreate a Lyle Mays pad sound as requested by a user on the Take 5 forum. However I could have done that sound as easily on the Hydrasynth too.

Although they are technically separate chords (depending on the context), the 7#9 chord is sometimes interchangeable with what is a very common chord in jazz that is only labeled as “alt” chord. So, it’s actually pretty easy to just write it down as e.g. G7alt. In jazz, the meaning is that all extensions are altered, namely: b9, #9, #11, b13. Those are of course optional and only the #9 is assumed. Also, these alterations outline a melodic minor based on the b9 degree, e.g. a full G7alt chord contains all the notes of the Ab melodic minor scale.

To add to what has already been said. Often what’s confusing in identifying diminished chords is the presence of additional notes, in this case the A. However, any note that is a whole step above any of the four diminished notes C#, E, G, Bb, hence Eb, F#, A, C, still counts towards a diminished chord. Which is also why the diminished scale, AKA whole-step-half-step is the one that sounds good over dim chords.

Porcupine Tree 😀 But they’ve been mentioned so many times over here they actually left the list.

I think in the previous video they should’ve switched to any of the Yamaha samples on the Numa, not the default German grand which is horrible. Actually that German grand might be the worst of all the samples, at least to my ears, not sure why they decided to use it as their main sound 🧐

Yes, I agree. My very first Behringer synth was the Poly D and I actually disliked it for the lack of a 440 Hz reference. I mean, why would you release one of the most notoriously pitch-unstable synths and then remove the A-440 reference 🤦🏻‍♂️ And the keyboard was cr*p anyway. And who needs that sh1tty distortion? Or a fourth oscillator? I mean, yeah, it's POLY but I could never make it sound in tune when played polyphonically. I sold it and replaced it with a Model D which was spot on. BTW, there's one improvement on the Model D, compared to the original which I really love: turning ip the EXT source knob without a source plugged in, would overdrive its own signal which is really useful, no need to patch that yourself as on the original.

Jose, it would be helpful if you could also describe the exact mechanism of the fraud, so that other people know how to recognize it. The scammers can be very creative and even very cautious people can be mislead. In my poor country (Bulgaria) we have serious issues with phone scammers that call elderly people and come up with all sorts of stories around how they are their children or relatives, and how they were hurt in a car accident and need money for surgery or something like that, I'm not even sure how they manage to convince them (these are usually really old people who already have cognitive degradation), but in most of these cases these old people throw their life savings, like e.g. $10-20k in a bag of cash through the balcony 😱 And what's more interesting is the guy who's getting the bag is one who has been scammed with some other story to get the bag, so it's almost impossible to catch the real receiver of the money. It's also a reasonable good question why elderly people here keep all their savings in cash but that's a sad memory of Bulgarian history when in the early 90-s we went through a hyperinflation and many people would find their entire life savings turned into pennies overnight, so there's some general distrust towards banks in elderly people. Now, what's interesting is there's a lot of awareness among elderly people about these phone scammers and they are wary, but then the scammers come up with even more inventive scams, such as one case when the scammers told an elderly man they are the police and are working on a anti-phone-scam case and would appreciate the assistance of the old man in capturing the scammers, so he should still give them the money but they will then intercept it and return to them, etc 🤣 OK, it's not funny, since the poor guy fell for it 😢 Anyway, what I'm saying is, it would be great if all possible schemes are shared, so that people learn to recognize them.

This is one of the reasons why I never buy second hand and why I only sell my gear to buyers that come to pick it up. I know that there can be bargains but life is more than bargains. Jose, sorry to hear about your misfortune. Hope you can get your money back.

I don’t think the one for iPad was meant to replace the desktop version. IMO Logic for iPad was meant to be the Apple’s answer to Cubasis, Korg Gadget, etc and I think it’s pretty good for that. I haven’t used an MPC One but from what I’ve seen the workflow of a MPC through a rather small touch screen is kind of similar. But I also agree that Logic Pro on my MacBook Air M2 is a much better experience than the one for the iPad while being almost as portable. Which is why I don’t see myself using Logic for iPad outside vacations or late night sofa/bedroom experiments.

I've been using mine for our "band" which is basically me with two of my best friends from the university, one of them sings, the other plays guitar. We play a mix of our own music and some covers and I use the iPad Mini to compose and arrange on the sofa. I then use it to replay the arrangement live and we play on top of it with me adding live keyboard from my Numa X Piano 73 (which acts as an audio interface for the iPad) but also playing synth tracks on the iPad controlling them through MIDI. It works really good for that and I actually find that creating arrangements while on the sofa without any MIDI keyboard and just using the screen to sequence notes or play the on-screen keyboard is rather inspirational 😀 It seriously gets me out of my comfort zone and triggers my creativity. Here's a copy/paste from another forum where I described one of the Depeche Mode arrangements I made: I decided to recreate the Depeche Mode song Behind the Wheel on that new iPad since it's a song we like with the guys I play with, we also try to compose and make dark wave music. It took me a few hours to make that song on the iPad, I didn't use an external MIDI keyboard, only the touch screen keyboard, as well as drawing on the piano roll, sequencing drums in the drum machine pattern grid, I even used the Alchemy Sampler with an existing bottle blow sample that I managed to twist into something "flutey" sounding but not too acoustic and reminiscent of the bottle sound. With one exception, I only used patches and effects that come with Logic Pro but I tweaked all of them. I also used an external AUv3 synth called Zeeon where I programmed a tuned white noise since I couldn't find the embedded Logic Pro synths providing oscillator modulation with noise as a source. In no way I was trying to recreate the original song verbatim though. Of course there's no vocal, it's only the instrumental parts and our vocal will sing on top of it. I have to decide which parts I will mute during our rehearsal, so that me and the guitarist would have something to play Here's the result: Behind the Wheel (Final) 02.m4a

Dave F is probably the baddest badass jazz pianist on this forum and not only 😲👏🏻

I’m not sure why it has to be locked, again. The last few posts contain very valuable opinions about comparisons between a Minimoog and Behringer clones, as well as the durability of actual Moog synths. If anything, the Pro-800 stuff can be separated in another thread. Why lock?!

I’ve seen that guy who is blindfolded in other videos and I’ve always been impressed with his jazz/gospel/pop piano playing. But what’s more impressive is I always thought something was not quite right with his right hand posture (no pun intended) and upon careful examination it seems he never uses his right pinky 😲 He uses his 4th finger as the highest finger. Wondering if it’s due to an injury or he is self-educated and learned to never use it but it’s even more impressive that he plays so well with 9 fingers. (And I’m sure he will play better than me even with two fingers for that matter 😀) As to his preference for the other pianos over the Numa due to the touch response. Yeah, that’s my opinion too. It was my first impression with my 88 and later with the 73. I’ve learned to cope with it and they improved it further in one of the newer firmware versions but it’s still slightly awkward although in no way bad. It’s just it could be better.

It’s exactly the scale at which Amazon is destroying businesses that should make it a much worse offender than Behringer. Double standards, anyone? 😉 They both offer something good for the customers but at the price of arguably unethical business practices. However while Amazon is killing living competitors, Behringer is mostly “stealing” from companies with long expired patents and that went into bankruptcy long ago. The company that owns Moog now, I give negative sh1t about. And for the record, I chose a Sequential Take 5 over the Pro-800. But I would never buy a Minimoog reissue at the current price. That’s outrageous and arrogant. And it doesn’t benefit Bob Moog and his legacy in any conceivable way. It’s just milking snobs for the benefit of some people who, again, I give zero droppings about. And for the record 2, I have no issues with Amazon, and I love big online music stores even though they destroyed mom and pop stores.

It’s the Yamaha AvantGrand N1X and I absolutely recommend it! It’s the only digital piano I’ve owned that I never stopped loving. The real grand piano action is a delight to play.

That's why on my forum I've made such a configuration that political topics are not visible for unregistered users and are not indexed by Google and other search engines. So, only people who register for pianos would see those political topics which is already a pretty good first filter. Besides, newer users' posts in the political threads would first go through an approval to verify that those are still not users who registered on the forum to start posting about politics right away. Once again, my forum is a very good demonstration of how a complete freedom of speech allowed for people to first enter some heated political debates that indicated their position, after which everybody kept calm and respected the other one and we rarely discuss politics nowadays. Not sure where that came from, but thanks for the feedback anyway 😀 I don't think I've ever been "unwelcome" at PianoWorld because I've never discussed politics there (I'm a Bulgarian, I'm apolitical and I'm not familiar with the US politics and PW is mostly a US forum). I was banned for a month once because we started some off-topic about Soviet era cars in a Nord Piano thread 🤣 But that happened long before I created my forum. On my forum when there's off-topic I just split the posts into a separate discussion. I abandoned PW out of respect, not because I was unwelcome. And I created my forum because other people were banned for off-topic too and I wanted for them to have a place to post their response to the ban-crisis because the mods didn't even give them chance. As a matter of fact, on PW I used to discuss almost predominantly hardcore digital piano topics in very detailed manner and in a calm way. Now a bit of boasting, but I created my own DIY project that turned a grand piano action into a MIDI-controller by designing my own optical sensor scanning electronics from scratch and that proved to be a very popular project on PW that inspired many other people to start working on their own similar projects and they cite me as an inspiration. Here's a short video that I created for the software company I work for, that presents my project for a talent day. (Excuse my bad English ☺️😞

The guy plays two Hydrasynths at the same time! I love him already 😀

That was my intent too. On the other hand, after some experimentation, I’ve finally settled on a hybrid between DAW-ful and DAW-less setup for the project I have with two other guys: I use an iPad Mini 6 with Logic Pro and arrangements that I’ve sequenced in advance but I also control virtual instruments within Logic through my Numa X Piano 73 that is also a USB audio interface, so basically it’s a setup that’s very similar to the Jupiter X or Xm. Of course, I lack direct synth controls which is why when I’m in the mood I also bring my Sequential Take 5 but honestly I think I’m gonna sell it. One needs direct controls when programming patches. For live playing I use an expression pedal and the mod-joysticks.

I agree fully. My suggestion for deleting posts was in response to a call for locking the thread. I'm not sure why a thread should be locked when it's not the thread itself that is at fault here. If you ask me, all topics should be allowed, even politics and religion and no posts should be deleted, or threads locked, unless of course there's hate speech and personal insults. I've created an offshoot forum to PianoWorld called PianoClack in response to the overly restrictive rules at PW and I've successfully proven that when there's complete freedom of speech and no banned topics, the net result is people quickly learn what others are concerned about and after an initial stir with heated arguments, we all resorted to a friendly and calm atmosphere where we mainly discuss pianos. I hope more forums and Internet places adopt such a policy. On the topic of Behringer and what is a personal opinion. There's a slight difference between "I would never support this horrible company" and "Please don't support this horrible company"

Maybe if the thread didn’t contain calls for boycotting a company, it wouldn’t end up like this? 🧐 How about admins deleting all the posts after (and including) the first post of Jim that ignited it all?

I once ordered a Jupiter XM that was backordered and while I waited for availability I started reading the manual. The things looked so complicated while at the same time there’s just a tiny screen to control that complexity, that I canceled my order. It’s just too expensive for what it is IMO. I guess the bigger brother Jupiter X is better with more hands-on control but it’s still the same mess of Zen-Core that you control on a small screen. I also read that the aftertouch on the Jupiter-X is hard to control.

“You get what you pay for” has many meanings. Sometimes paying a lot means paying for a brand name, not necessarily quality. How much do you think a bunch of transistors and resistors cost? Because that’s the cost of a Model D. In the case of the Minimoog reissue, there’s also a cheap Fatar keyboard and a nice wooden case but is it €6000 worth? One reviewer (out of three on Thomann, because these Minimoog reissues are not selling like hot cakes apparently) says: On this synth, they have used wood that has defects, poorly unevenly ground edges, screwed together so that it is crooked and cannot be folded. You notice that the soul of the company has shifted to "money making". Moog completely sucks in how the final, insanely expensive product looks as they have completely lost quality control. How does it sound then? Yes, it sounds amazingly nice and it's beautiful to look at if you haven't been so bad at working with wood. Would never buy one again. The €300 selling price of a Behringer Model D is realistic for what’s basically a very limited number of simple electronic components.

I’ve read about the Cork Sniffer parody and from what I understood that guy didn’t actually review their products but was known to be criticizing them for their ethics for years. I’m not defending Behringer for what they did. But unless I got things wrong, that guy didn’t “honestly” review their gear for the simple reason he didn’t review their gear at all because he didn’t like the company. Here’s a summary and a timeline: https://musictech.com/news/11-things-need-know-history-behringer-peter-kirn/ The synth community is an elite club. Many of those people are not even musicians. They are geeks or just collectors of valuable vintage items and understandably they don’t like that cheaper replicas are available. It’s like a vintage Ferrari being copied nowadays and sold cheap. It’s only nobody does that with cars but imagine the outrage if it happened 😀 Copying current products is wrong. I hope they are sued for that. However their vintage replicas are great and allowing so many people to own a synth they could only dream of is admirable. Things are not black or white. Which is why big software companies were mentioned here as an example. Because they do despicable things but they’ve also created good products. But again, software is not an elite possession. Vintage synths are. Hence the hate. Yep, it’s hate 😉