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J_tour

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Everything posted by J_tour

  1. Oh, I'm happy enough with a dirt cheap MIDI controller as a lower manual. I can't recall the brand or model off hand (what, I'm going to walk ten feet to find out? I don't think so!). I do get a kick out of that the box it came in has a handle on it, so it came with it's own cardboard carrying case! Meh, good enough. USB powered, and just use a little three-foot MIDI cable to connect it to the XK1 on top, and another three-foot cable to connect to the pedals. I comp a lot on the lower manual, just old-school jazz style (LH bass, and "chuffing" between the manuals in the Jimmy McGriff style, as well as just comping at maybe 848 or so), but I basically never change the drawbars to the lower manual, so don't have a need to have any advanced features. Diving board keys, and a just-adequate spring-loaded synth action. Works fine for me.
  2. I haven't seen word one here or much anyplace else about TOOB speakers in the keyboard world. No, I don't have any financial or other interest in the company, but they've been kind of on fire for the past two years among jazz guitarists, at least, for an ultra compact speaker cabinet (I think they go from a 6.5" to a 12", some various speakers offered as options, all in the 100-130W range, it seems). I've just put on order a TC BAM200 (a micro 200W bass amp head) intended, for me, for keys and guitar duty. Yes, I play keys and I struggle with jazz guitar, so for at home, this is going to do double duty. I have other stuff I use at home, but I'm kind of tired of moving around large PA monitors or even smaller powered monitors even in my own space, as I search for the best setup for my front room/music room. Mostly for at home use, I'd be thinking a TOOB Metro 6.5FR with the BAM200 just might do the trick for Hammond (XK-1, with lower manual generic MIDI keyboard and pedalboard, plus a Lester-K).....as well as the rare times I feel like scaring the neighborhood animals by plugging in my little Ibanez AF55 archtop. Don't plan on gigging anytime in the near future again...meh. So, these TOOB cabinets equipped with various speakers are getting all kinds of raves in the (jazz) guitar world, for being surprisingly tasty sounding, and loud as hell, given their size and form factor (and weight). As in, plenty loud enough for a small bar job, or use as a personal monitor. Any experiences?
  3. I'd like to know opinions on this as well. I just learned about the Korgs recently. Of course I don't know, I'm just idly counting my chickens before they hatch, in anticipation of a pay raise at the straight job. Seconded! One must know!
  4. Well, this might have been addressed many times, and I'm sure it has, but as someone who is about due for a new digital piano with exceptional Rhodes piano sounds, I've not seen anything that seems to come close to the Korg SV-2. Fully-weighted keys, some nice/adequate onboard effects, and toss in some Wurlitzer sounds, as well as a few extra sounds that don't interest me. The thing that attracts me to the SV-2 is that it's really just a digital piano with a lot of options for vintage electric pianos (among some other things, but I only care about acoustic, Rhodes, and Wurlitzer). I already have a nice Rhodes and a pretty cool Wurlitzer 720A at home, but it'd be nice to have it all in one board so I don't end up with Hammond one side, acoustic on the other, the Rhodes on another, plus speakers and mixer and everything, with me being boxed into a little three-sided square at home. The Crumar Seventeen and the Seven seem more like a dedicated EP than a digital piano base loaded with nice extras. I'd need to play classical repertoire and jazz on the acoustic, lots of the time, but dial in a great Rhodes. For me, I haven't seen anything that fits that bill better than the SV-2. Again, if I really desire to play the Rhodes itself, I'll just play that at home (no, not ever bringing that out of the house again....it's road-worthy, but not worth it, IMHO!)
  5. JG3 Tech 24-note pedalboard for my Frankenclone/Faux-gan...to be used solely at home. Hasn't arrived yet, but I'm plenty excited to get on the pedals again. Also, the Lester-K I've had for a few weeks. Very easy to get that nasty, spitting early Jimmy McGriff sound out of it, if that's what one is after (I am, lots of times, but it isn't limited to that sound at all). No, I'm not too pleased with using the stomp-box style buttons to change the "Leslie" speed, but I'll get used to it, I guess.
  6. At least one PA speaker, plus small mixer, would seem to be ideal. Although I use the KRK Classic 5s in my home office with a cheap amp emulator (Joyo American Sound), a touch of reverb, through a little line mixer for those few times I want to hear something different than the acoustic sound of my Ibanez AF55 (cheap-but-adequate archtop hollowbody guitar....hint....I suck at guitar!) I don't know that either option (powered PA monitor, with whatever size speakers) or a studio monitor is *wrong*, in a tiny space with only a few people (yes, you *could* add maybe some kind of multi-effect processor in front of the studio monitors, to dial in EQ, which you could just as easily do with a mixer), but unless you're just using equipment you already have around, might as well buy the proper tool for what you need. You wouldn't play a show with studio monitors, even for self-monitoring, not least because you'd probably end up destroying them, so while it would work for just intimate reheasals, it's not that versatile a purchase, IMHO. And, yes, stand please for the PA monitor. It might look a little silly, but IMHO it must be done!
  7. Well, for my part, having learned most of Chuck Leavell's parts, even writing down a bunch of it, from the "Brothers and Sisters" album, I knew I heard the Doctor influence on all those octave walk-ups, but I didn't learn until recently that CL actually played with the Night Tripper on tour when...he must have been not even a teenager but like a teenager without a draft card or something. To me that explained some of what he was doing on the Allman Bros. record.
  8. Yeah, I know. So, I can pick up a Mini Vent II in the "instrument" version, but not the "organ" version. Of course I'd be using it for a clonewheel. What exactly is the difference between using the "instrument" version between the organ version? I imagine line-level inputs, and some EQ burned into the outputs maybe. Never been that clear, despite the numerous threads on here. Also, even on the "instrument" version, I assume I can use a half-moon switch drilled into my old XK-1, yes? I understand there may be a mod needed, but it is possible, yes?
  9. Yeah, it's tricky, because while there are cases with the Ibanez emblem designed for the AF55 (actually, I'm very happy with this guitar as the first I've had since I sold my 1974 SG Special a while ago....it's not a boutique nor an expensive guitar, but it does the trick just fine)....I just have a real preference for rectangular cases. No real reason, I just prefer the look of them and, it occurred to me that I could get some double duty out of one for my old XK-1, should I ever decide to start playing out again (not that likely, since I'm working my way up the corporate/logistics straight job that requires me to be awake at 0300 most days....and run the voodoo down till about that time in the afternoon. Plus, I despise most of the "crowds" [well, you know....small handfuls!] that infest the clubs and bars in mid-to-late-afternoons/evenings....people who can't hold their liquor and stuff....had enough of that over the years). The AF55 is an odd size to match up with a case that would hold the XK-1 in a pinch....19.5" x 15.75" x 3⅝" Just a matter of trial and error. I think one of the double rifle cases will fit the bill just fine....or, when I pull the trigger on some Thomastik-Infeld George Benson 14 flatwounds that a local music shop happens to have in stock, just bring the guitar in, pay them to change the strings, just for goodwill and to save time with me monkeying around with the floating bridge and tweaking the intonation, and see what they have. Trust me, the old XK-1 has seen so many gigs just carrying around naked, or crammed into an 88-key Yamaha soft case, she won't mind a bit. She does want me to replace her CR2032 battery, though! Probably should do that sometime!
  10. Not a bad idea, at all, ]KuruPrionz. I do like having separate cases for all things....a nice case for my Mackie 1202 mixer would be good too. (Or at least a nice "utility case" for mixer, cables, pedals, all that stuff). But, yeah, I don't foresee a time when I'd be carrying both the Hammond and the guitar at the same time! Nobody, but nobody, wants to hear me scratching and clawing at Wes chord solos or my lame attempts to try Mark Knopfler's fingerstyle! I haven't even plugged the guitar in at home, and probably won't for a long time. It's plenty loud enough, as a full hollow body, for just plinking around on!
  11. Nice. I did recall hearing about people using rifle cases for instruments...possibly from here. I'll check it out! Thanks,.
  12. So, I've got a situation I want to take care of on the cheap. Emphasis on cheap, which you'll note when I state what instruments I wish to carry. Not one at a time, but either-or. I've been looking and looking for a case that can fit my old Hammond XK-1, and yet have enough room to double as a quick-and-dirty case for my Ibanez AF55 hollow-body guitar (yes, probably add some padding for the guitar on my own, but I'm a terrible guitar player, so it's not for live shows or anything, just keep from getting banged up unduly for bringing it out occasionally to friends' places and such). The Hammond-Suzuki might get pulled out for the odd job or so, but it would travel in my own vehicle, so it doesn't need to be super-robust. Don't like soft-sided "gig bags" for either guitar or keys. Just to restate, a rectangular case with enough room to hold either instrument, for less than 200 bucks US, for quick and dirty transpo. Any ideas or suggestions or both? OTOH, although just a gig bag, the Hammond XK-3 should hit all the marks: I don't mind the Hammond-Suzuki insignia. That *should* be deep enough for the Ibanez hollowbody. Something a bit more durable and subdued would be ideal, but that's about as far as my "research" has got me for something that *might* work, as a compromise. "
  13. I still have a JBL Eon 15 G1 (powered monitor) at home..................it's loud. Add some gain through a mixer, and then it's super loud! That's about all I can say for it for using at home. That and maybe throwing an 18KHz tone at high volume for...unspecified reasons. I've been using smaller speakers, a modest solid-state amp, and a subwoofer and that modest setup is much more controllable and pleasant for a digital piano, which is mostly all I play at home these days. I do run it through a Mackie 12-channel mixer, but I rarely tinker with the EQ on the (mono) channel.
  14. Any pop/rock/bubblegum/soul/funk cover attempting to recreate the original recording. Pure dogsh*t played by and for mental defectives. If it pays, and pays well, fine. That's an exception to the rule. It's still trash, but money is money.
  15. Sure. I was pretty big into copying lead guitar things by the some of the main blues-based/rock guitarists (Clapton, Duane, Freddy King, Page, Albert King) on a Gibson SG Special as a teenager. Sold the guitar when I needed the money after I realized I wasn't "getting" how to read standard notation, which makes more sense to me than some of the "box" positions, or just following slack-jawed at some tablature, although I was doing transcriptions of classic bebop+ guitarists and doing mostly the right chord voicings by ear a decade after having put it down and picked it back up. Never played it in public â only keys â but I'd like to pick up a nylon-string acoustic (or a fat semi-hollow Gibson/Epiphone knockoff) just for fooling around when I don't feel like walking the twenty feet to my keyboards at home. You know, ear-work, get some new ideas, steal some more things from Wes or Grant, that kind of thing.
  16. How about just a good old-fashioned mini-rant. No, I was screwing around on some other keyboard forum, supposedly for "advanced" classical/legit pianists, primarily, and apparently you can't even self-censor your "bad" words with asterisks or whatever. What the he** kind of Beaver Cleaver ess is that, MF? Yeah, I understand not everybody earned how to curse properly as a child or a young adult, but I can respect that even some limpd*** mo*&^**ers of elderly years may have tender little sensibilities. Just fix your profanity filter, if it's a problem, or let me self-censor! First time I ever heard of some "musicians" who never heard even censored salty language. That just shocked the fu*&^U he** out of me.
  17. I really wish I knew the best answer. I've LastPass and a number of others, but TBH I just got sick of making sure my local DB was backed up, and I wouldn't do it in the cloud. Much like it sounds like OP did, I just decided eff it and keep a long list on pencil and paper. But, there's some problems there. You spill a beverage on your desk, or whatever. I think the real problem are the ridiculous ever-changing requirements for passwords etc. I think that's known to be a non-optimal security procedure. So, I just go all Rain Man and come up with ridiculous schemes and basically keep it in my head, with paper backup.
  18. Yeah, that's no perfect answer to that one. When I get convinced, very rarely to bring some gear out, just locally, in my own vehicle or possibly split a ride with somebody, I just go with soft cases plenty of padding. Not the super thin ones, but still soft, lightweight. For piano, I still use a Yamaha bag, had it for years, decades, it's not frayed, no broken zippers, none of that. I don't know the Nord case: sounds a little thinner, if I'm remembering stuff people have said a while back. Could probably be OK if you're not banging it up or any of that. I like the fabric bags for practicality, weight, but as you know there's different "grades" of them out there.
  19. No kidding. I was just fooling around last night/this morning with the *New Jazz Conceptions* and was knocked out, once again, by how much technique he brought to the piano, and by how relatively early he had his thing all together. I mean, I don't know that this book has all this, but how to move with tunes like "Easy Living," or "I Love You" and get it all done. Movement of the voicings, harmony, some stuff worked out ahead of time, likely. I'm not a bit ashamed to still take a page out of his style, just get some new ideas or find some technical bits I can work on, you know, as an adjunct to running scales or whatever. Yeah. I know there've been reasonably accurate (as far as it seems to me, I'm not a scholar of Bill's music) of, speaking of traditional tunes, "Five," and "Peri's Scope," and, pretty much everything from the late 1950s-mid 1960s. A lot done in the several books for Hal Leonard, pretty sure. It would be a pretty good for a budding young scholar to see what's been put on the page.
  20. Gloves. Oh. Wait. Keyboards. Well, still. Gloves! And splash goggles. I'm thinking about cutting my hands off entirely. Not doing much performing or recording these days.
  21. I gotta know, is that for real? Because yeah, I've known people like that, as I'm sure we all have, but I....well....bassists.... Never mind. First genuine laugh of the day. Not a mere chuckle: did that a bunch already on the day job today, but that is effing funny.
  22. Yeah. All keys, but also know the constraints of all keys. Find something "to do" in any key, for sure, but know your limitations. Play Bach. Play Czerny or made-up exercises. Play Mozart. Haydn. Debussy. Memorize some of it. Learn music at the sports bar, but keep it low by keeping bits of scores inside this month's Hustler or the local weekly rag or else you get the nickname "maestro"! Play everything. Read everything you can manage, throw every trick in the book to keep it fresh and keep excited. If you're watching the TV? Play the music from that! If you don't feel like hobbling over to the keys, turn on the metronome and work out the groove by tapping your toenail clippers or Zippo against the desk. Write it down, or remember it! Too tired to do that? Fire up MuseScore or a notebook+pencil and write out some lines from whatever. Too tired for that? Fire up Youtube and check out Aretha. That's my rules.
  23. I would take the cruise ship approach here. Have a bottle of hand sanitiser available for the students to use before and after they play the keyboards. I like that one. I confess I'm still a bit of an eye-roller, but then again that's just concern for my own health: absolutely concern for populations who are more susceptible is responsible and reasonable. Maybe this is one area where Glenn Gould's hand-washing rituals will prove to have been a bit prescient! TBH, besides (obviously) washing the hands thoroughly, the places where when performing seem risky are: if you wear glasses (nerd glasses or Blues Brothers types), you're probably adjusting them every so often. If you're anything like me, you sweat like a mofo, just on a typical session, even just practicing. Just off the cuff, maybe just have a towel around your neck, like a boxer, to add one extra layer when you need to get sweat out of your eyes or off your brow? I think Richard Tee used to perform, at least sometimes, with a towel around his neck. I mean, you're going to pick all kinds of nasty stuff up anyway, so, obviously, wash hands before and after (yes, I know it's kind of a hassle to get your hands just the right amount of dry before playing), and be vigilant about touching your face or picking your nose while playing. Seems about the only thing to be done.
  24. All I know is it's plenty difficult to me: as you know, it's not just playing a few montunas you cribbed off a few recordings: it seems to me just a whole huge tradition, in some ways parallel to jazz, occsionally overlapping. If I'm remembering right, though, some of the more jazz-oriented people incorporating, like salsa stuff, are often all about improvising in octaves. Which is fun for me to do, just for the sound on the piano and the few extra brain cells it takes to come up with and execute a nice line. If I'm lucky I can fake a samba or bossa nova, at least to where most people would probably say, "Oh, OK, that sounds not bad," but I'm missing all the subtleties. I was talking to a sax player not long ago at some bar and he had this whole theory that jazz music in general is built off the clave or maybe a reverse clave, but for me I'm happy to know my limitations, and occasionally dust off a few tunes if I want to have some different things people would recognize.
  25. MuseScore runs on macOS and Windows for free. Grey was only talking about getting the latest version running on a specific Linux setup he was doing. That's what I was thinking as well. Now that the topic has been expanded on, I'm kind of interested. The few times I use MuseScore is on older Ubuntu releases, and my version of MuseScore is just 2.02. From scanning the GitHub page, it looks like it's written in C++ with the Qt graphics library, so I would guess you could just compile the latest version with gcc, I guess. Probably would work, I guess. Any real advantages to upgrading? I mean, it's a cute little program even in the older version I have. Occasionally frustrating to enter notes with precise ways you want the stems placed, like for breaking down a fugue or whatever, but it seems to do what it's meant for, IMHO.
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