Mark Schmieder

What are Krystal Hamburgers, and are they legal? Meth-inks they are not.

I have not experienced ads and get zero spam on Yahoo Email, but often on weekends it takes up to a day to receive a message or send one, and several times recently it has arbitrarily deleted a bunch of emails with no recovery possible (and yes, I know how to dig deep on this sort of stuff). I only started using my Yahoo email account (after years of neglect) due to Google blocking Apple Mail logins in June 2022 or thereabouts. I can still use GMail on my iPhone, surprisingly. It's a mess as I like to keep tidy email folders by topic and I also don't like to splinter conversations by using two email accounts, but it is what it is.

I consider myself to be a better chef than musician or engineer (despite my patents). Perhaps when I retire, I should take up teaching vegan cooking to musicians. 🙂 George was a vegetarian also, but he never gave up chain smoking. I don't think Paul or Ringo did either, until George's death brought it home to them.

You haven't seen me dance at my jazz gigs. 😜

Now there are quite a few audio demos up, and it sounds good, if a bit aggressive (probably their intent). Reminds me a bit of Korg CX-3 overall. https://www.toontrack.com/new-year-new-gear/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=102 2 New Year New Gear Up to 40 off Session Organ EKX out Feb 13&utm_content=102 2 New Year New Gear Up to 40 off Session Organ EKX out Feb 13+CID_091a1fd53ee8dc9587e573a5ff0ca23a&utm_source=Campaign Monitor&utm_term=COMING UP#coming-up Not sure if these are the same audio demos that didn't work for me previously or if they are new ones.

I'm not talking about home loans (mine is around 4%), which tend to be fixed. The only thing I ever had 2% on was my current car, which I paid off anyway in less than a year after the downpayment. 33% to 38% and higher, on most real world loans for consumer cards, large installations like windows, flood damage repairs, etc., is pretty impossible to cut into interest. That's well more than a doubling in under a year. With a longer rollout time, one could cut into principle BEFORE rates skyrocket.

I remain shocked at how many of my items have zero attention even after going below rock bottom prices. I can't figure out this market, but maybe everyone is in the same boat I am in, being eaten alive by the sudden astronomical rise in interest rates before there was a chance to pay down principle, combined with overall inflation (especially groceries). Even the small items, which are posted for non-locals, have gone unnoticed.

communications

I don't pay attention to the Grammy Awards, so I was surprised when I received a neighborhood bulletin today that said that the best music educator award went to a teacher at our local high school who specializes in special needs students.

I've had almost zero success selling anything on this forum over a couple of decades. Keyboard stuff seems impossible to sell at the moment, but I did well last year up until the fall. It seems no one wants Hammonds anymore, at ANY price! 🙂 Selling accessories for keys is hard also, but even guitar pedals have suddenly become difficult to sell. I steer away from FB marketplace due to bad experiences a couple of years ago with scammers. I've had my best luck with CL but you have to be patient, then someone sweeps in at stated price. Next to that, eBay unfortunately, but huge fees these days. Sweetwater Gear Exchange is barely known. I considered joining Reverb due to the selling challenges but have heard it has gone way downhill. I have had good experience with comms on that site as a buyer, so it may be worth considering. Sweetwater Gear Exchange is far and away the best for policies, protection, fees, if only it wasn't secret. Other than that, I have occasionally traded high end stuff for credit at pro audio shops like Sound Pure.

That's strange that Akai skipped the show. Didn't the other inMusic brands show up? I thought they usually ran it as an overall multi-brand booth? Maybe not since Moog... although with all the horse-trading of subsidiaries, I don't even trust that I remember who owns what anymore.

That's funny, because my own gramma always wanted to join a nudist colony. She said it's the way God made us.

It sounds like people are trying to thread the needle...

Must be a browser issue. On macOS, Opera is my preferred browser. I'll open up Firefox or (egads!) Chrome after dinner and see if the link shows up. I NEVER use Safari after identifying it a few years ago as the source of a data breach.

All the people I know under 30 prefer live music and recordings of live music (when relatively unadulterated) because the "album versions" are so overproduced. I'm sure I'm dealing with a small sample set, but I've been part of blind tests on several occasions and we did not note age or generation differences in feedback. Paul Simon had a mostly acoustic album maybe in the early 2000's that was peak limited and sounded loud at the minimal possible volume for sound to transmit. Due to the instrumentation and style, it sounded completely unreal and was physically painful to listen to. Had they retained dynamics, it might have been lovely. I thought the volume wars were over? At any rate, almost all the older singers are being auto-tuned now, which is sad. Is it even possible to auto-tune Bob Dylan?

I couldn't find any audio demos, just a JPEG photo preview of the upcoming product. Are people judging by TT reputation or are there demos somewhere?

So what will you use for boring song arrangements? 🤪

In my personal experience as someone who is primarily a bassist, the drummer is usually the most reliable person in the group, the easiest to get along with, and the best ensemble skills. And yet, I have been in bands where the guitarist/leader fires one drummer after the other. I have also been primarily a keyboardist or double-duty, in several bands, and the equation did not change. This has been true for me in every region I have lived in. In some cases, it's a matter of being embedded in the local music community or not, as you tend to meet better musicians at that point, but I got lucky here and also in NC. Interestingly, most of the drummers I've worked with since COVID did not start on drums. Programming is super time expensive if you do it with feeling, which I do, and even stuff I have manicured forever still sounds better once a real drummer is brought into the studio. I was in a band once, that used drum tracks live, and we ultimately hired a drummer even though we were synth-pop. When 80's bands that used drum machines tour these days, they almost all use live drummers, even if playing an electronic kit in some cases. Such a difference! Drums are the heartbeat, and the voice (or winds/strings/etc.) is the soul. I have heard bad bands with good drummers and it remained interesting enough to stick around, but I've also heard great singers with lousy drummers and it was time to leave the room. To me, the drummer is the most important person in the band. If this wasn't the case, you wouldn't have so many drum circles on campuses etc.

I finally received an email alert from NI regarding this new release, with a link to an audio demo, and it sounds dreadful to me: https://blog.native-instruments.com/chillstep/?lid=brnc6vhz873k&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=Blog content en | producers | 04/02/24&utm_id=8775c9a9-98bb-4c61-8aec-31666d4d8740 I've never heard of "chillstep" so maybe I'm just not a fan of that genre(?), but the library sounds aggressive, harsh, and super-bright to my ears. Oh, I finally got the demos to play at the link in the initial post (didn't work for me previously), and they have similar sharp-edged characteristics. The walkthrough posted by drawback has a few more tolerable segments, but overall I think Scarbee 88 slaughters this library on all counts.

Not to mention auto-tune, as I am fairly certain I am detecting artifacts of such processing. Or maybe that's the over-compression making it sound phasey and synthetic? I found it painful to listen to, despite the good songwriting. After all, she did love him like a rock.

I was premature; I received my 1099-K form from eBay today. I guess they reported everything before Congress delayed the enactment of the new rules, yet again. When I do my taxes, I'll do what I did the past two years, and write an explanatory note to the IRS that I am saving them money by not declaring losses. Some of the posters are confused because they think these rules are about people's amortization or resale of business deductions. It is 100% unrelated to that. This was a simple money grab, akin to instituting a VAT in the USA. But lobbying our representatives has helped kill it for three years in a row, except for paperwork. I forget the exact threshold, but it doesn't take much to meet it. I think $600, or 20 sales of any value? I often resell books or comics, also at a loss. I'm not a business, and I don't claim any business expenses. I did for a few years when I made $10K+ at music, and I did the proper Schedule C etc. To reiterate, this isn't about that, but it can be confusing as you may have to fill those same forms to offset 1099-K, as though you were a business. The mechanisms were already in place for people to be honest about reporting business losses and gains. The new online sale rules are ignorant.

They don't have a choice; it's the law. So, of course Sweetwater Gear Exchange also follows these rules. Luckily, they didn't have to send out 1099-K's this year to average people WHO ARE NOT TAX CHEATS, as the new laws have been deferred for one more year. It's equivalent to charging income tax, atop sales tax, to taking your stuff to a bargain store to unload it.

They shouldn't have sent you anything THIS year, as, unlike the PREVIOUS two years, Congress acted on the issue soon enough, before eBay and others had sent out the 1099-K forms. Yes, it is ridiculous, to pay "income" taxes on losses! Of course, you can file capital gains and losses form, but what a PITA, and for stuff like books, comics, other small items, you likely don't have the original receipts for amortization etc. It's an incredible hardship and I have no idea what the intent was, as the limit before declaration used to be $20,000. Let's hope they kill it for good this time.

Awesome news and info, Mike! I'll check when Chuck Levin gets these in stock and finally schedule my long-delayed virgin visit to that store!

Very impressive playing and believable (plus musical) sound from those 2024 NAMM demos. A bit of woofiness in the bass register, but it could be the speakers, and it is by no means annoying, or muddy. A lot of acoustic pianos are woofy in the bass anyway, especially in certain acoustic environments. I frankly can't find any deal-killer flaws, and most importantly, I hear absolutely zero phase issues, which are what ruin most digital pianos for me.