TommyBoy

I have their 18810 with my Montage M8x. LOVE this stand.

I have two Yamaha HS8 Studio Monitors connected to my Montage M8X. I love them. Deep bass, clear highs, they can thump with the drums and play the orchestral sounds beautifully. I am not recording so in my case they were more for just enjoying the keyboard. As a bonus they were on sale when I bought them back in November for somewhere around $300-$350 each. I can't recall if they were $400 normally or $350 normally. Whatever it was Yamaha put them on sale for a couple of weeks for $50 less each than normal pricing.

I'm an accordionist. There are hundreds of videos out there of players just playing notes as fast as humanly possible. None of it is musical. I can usually take about 10 seconds of it before I move on to Frank Marocco and some musically brilliant jazz chords or improvisations. I saw the OP's video in my feed one day and started watching. I lasted about 10 seconds.

That was my feeling as well, but I chalked it up to being an accordionist and never having been trained on jazz theory. I found the books difficult to get any useful knowledge from. I have always felt that if I could find the right teacher and just concentrate on the right hand solos I could improve dramatically. All of my accordion lessons were in-person and it helps immensely. YouTube instruction just isn't the same because it isn't interactive. I have a lot of questions.

I was just glad he didn't say use an accordion. After all, you could leave one of those on stage for days and nobody would steal it.

Somehow this surprised me. Wasn't expecting that.

It's an age thing. I'm middle 50's now and have been a professional accordionist for literally 40 years. I've told the story here before: everybody in my housing development of 400 homes decided that THE guy to power wash your house was worth the $300 he charged. My wife decided we should do it as the houses did look nice when finished. Guy shows up absolutely methed-out. Tweaking. Has a long plastic pole with a normal hose attachment on it. Maybe his equipment is worth $50. Uses our hose and our ladder. Walks around the house and hoses it off. Took maybe an hour and a half. $300. Licensed, bonded? Nah. Just a dude. He even managed to accidentally power-wash a nice Z into our stucco because he was too close at one point. It was very disappointing. Yet he probably did 50 houses in our development. I tell the story because the Board wanted me to play accordion for a function. My FR-8X was $5200. My custom Excelsior 960 from Italy was $7500 (back in 2001). I took lessons for 10 years. The BK-7M arranger is $1000. The QSC-10 was $600. Tens of thousands of hours of practice and paying my dues. My pay offered? NOTHING. Come on, it's something you enjoy right? I always think about the Nordstrom pianists that used to wear a suit and play. I would just stare at the beautiful renditions with Bill Evans-like transitions that I could never dream of playing. And people walked by like he was playing Jingle Bells. So, yeah. At this point I guess I'm just bitter. On a side note, I'm purchasing a Montage M8x which will be my first synth since selling my S90ES around ten years ago. It's been absolutely thrilling learning about what it can do and getting back into the synth world will be wonderful.

$50. Nobody cares about musicians. If you pulled up to a group of guys in front of Home Depot and asked "I need somebody from 2pm to 7pm to move some equipment a few times from a stage to a car and back" a couple would step forward. Then when you say "Pay is flat-rate: $50 for the afternoon" they would all return to their place in line. It's a labor of love.

Yep, your asterisk answers the question for me. I was a 16 year old kid with money saved up from long hot summers working in the fields on the ranch. The Mirage had a bunch of 3.5" diskettes with tons of samples and in my mind I could play any sound I wanted to with it. The DX7, well, a bunch of bells. Of course that morphed into me coughing into a mic and duplicating the Ferris Bueler scene and playing endless repetitions of the Led Zeppelin Whole Lotta Love samples!

Played one in a music store when they first came out. Loved it. Opted to purchase an Ensoniq Mirage instead and always regretted it. So that was 40 years ago? Ouch.

I understand about Waldorf, but I had thought there was some cohesion amongst the Sequential folks and Groove. They split off of Prophet and Dave Smith gave his blessing to build it and applauded them for undertaking the project. I'm definitely not well versed in the subject, just was fascinated by the 3rd Wave machine since the PPG dominated my youth.

Aren't they all the same folks?

Lugged a Cordovox accordion and amp, the big single one, all over in my teens and 20's. Probably weighed 100 pounds. Had a huge metal bar handle on the top and wheels, but stairs were an issue. I abused the poor thing. Have to go up a flight of stairs for a gig? Pull it up backwards with each stair hitting the amp and making a THUMP sound. It worked for 30 years until the day I sold it a few years ago. They don't make 'em like that anymore.

My Senior Project in college was the design and construction of a MIDI interface for my Amiga 500 computer. Connected it to my Ensoniq Mirage. Good times.

Still love video games dating back 40 years. I run an hour a day. I play accordion an hour a day. And I play the latest Call of Duty an hour a day. Currently Black Ops. I'm mediocre at all three, but they all serve the same purpose. They clear my mind and allow me to relax.

I don't log in often and I post even less frequently, but I've been around this forum for 15 years. Your post is why I keep coming back. I don't know anything about trumpets other than Miles Davis' work. I never heard of Ryan Anthony. I never heard of Ennio Morricone although I am apparently familiar with a lot of his work. But this was just incredible. So moving. Just a beautiful performance and so emotional. Thank you for posting this.

Heck, accordion is actually my primary instrument, believe it or not (at least from a skill level side). I've played accordion for a little over ten years and have had about eight and a half years of lessons (there was a year and a half gap between teachers). Piano on the other hand I've played for sixteen years, but I've only had about four and a half years of lessons, and only about five months of those were proper classical training (long story). I've applied the music theory and techniques from my accordion lessons to the piano so I've continued to progress somewhat with the piano. I've only had accordion lessons - maybe ten years of them. I'm a hack piano player. I've played piano in restaurants when I was younger but was never what I would call "professional". The main issue is that I can't read bass clef well at all. Accordion music usually has the treble clef and then just "C Maj" or "D 7th" for the bass clef. So I relied on basically octaves or slash chords for my left hand piano playing. My right hand is proficient and could usually fool people in restaurants after a few cocktails. But whenever I would walk into any Nordstrom's and hear any pianist (back in the day when they used to have them) I'd marvel at how poor I really am at piano playing. I really love the accordion, however. Being able to play a walking string bass on the left hand while improvising on the right hand is just a great feeling.

"The piano is the worst invention ever. Discuss." I play the accordion. So....

Have to admit back in the 80's sampling my own cough into my Ensoniq Mirage after seeing Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Those were the days....

The first keyboard I ever bought new was an Ensoniq Mirage back in 1988 I believe. It was $1800. That's the equivalent to $4000 in today's money. I had around five 3.5" disks for it and would load samples. I loved it. That same money today gets me a top of the line Kronos with money to spare. You can spend $1300 on a new iPhone today. You can have three iPhones or a Kronos. My Roland FR-8X was $5200 five years ago when I bought it new. I think prices today are fair. If you want you could just buy a really nice controller, Logic X for a couple hundred bucks, and have thousands of free samples at your fingertips. Or a full-blown workstation for $2500. It's a niche market. I read the posts here and realize I know nothing about keyboards. These guys know so much about envelopes, synthesis, effects, etc. I basically just load up a sample and if I adjust one parameter I think I'm Bob Moog.

About 20 years ago I heard Herbie play On Green Dolphin Street on the piano. Just skipping around on XM radio in my car and it came on. I was mesmerized. It spiraled me into a jazz-listening and studying endeavor for probably two years. Prior to that I knew the name but to me he was "just" the guy that played on some Top-40 hit back in the day. Impossible that he is 80 years old. What a talented person.

I believe this one still has some legs, Godwin's Law and all..... Oh, and the guy is an idiot. Communication is simple in these times and sometimes all that is required to assuage the situation. Your list of dates is important.

No Social Media for me now for over a decade. Never been happier.

Roland. I don't need to tell Ed what they did with their premiere V-Accordion product evangelist and demonstrator. Pages and pages of angry people over on the accordion forums about that debacle a couple of years ago. I own two Roland V-accordions and that's because they are the ONLY player in the game that does what they do as well as they do it. Best of luck to you.

As a longtime Porsche enthusiast I had saved every issue of Excellence magazine going back to 1982 when I was a 15 year old kid with dreams. I moved boxes and boxes of them each time we changed apartments. Then I got married and had an entire garage shelf dedicated to them. I never looked at them. And then the Internet age happened and I could find so much more information online. One day my wife and I were talking and I said "It's time. They have to go." I ended up giving all of them away. Somebody else now has boxes and boxes of them. I've never saved another magazine since then and I feel extremely unburdened by their removal. And Happy Halloween to all of you!