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Steve Nathan

MPN Advisory Board
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Posts posted by Steve Nathan

  1. Welcome, and it's good you're asking.  I'd assume it took you some time to recognize a Strat from a Les Paul, from a Country Gentleman, and even longer to hear and feel confident you were hearing a Twin or a Marshal or an AC30.  We all spent years listening to records and turning knobs until it sounded closer or further away, until we eventually got to know what filters, oscillators and ADSRs did.  There's not really a shortcut, but some of the tutorials above should be helpful in getting you started.  

  2. I'm doing an event in a couple weeks, and the backline has a RD-700GX & a RD-700SX.

    Is there much difference between them? Which is the better choice for Piano/3 songs?

    As always, thanks in advance for your wisdom.

    PS. I also now see a Nord Stage 3 is available

  3. 1 hour ago, Bill H. said:

    The reason you can't hear those piano parts ( and I never did until now with that iso track) is that everything was already so busy that they didn't survive mixdown. 

    It seems hard for some to grasp that sometimes, the keyboard part is just not  important to the original recording.  Sometimes you're a feature, or one of a number of important elements, but sometimes you're just along for the ride,  there to fill out the track without getting in the way.  Not unlike how I made a lot of money creating synth sounds that listeners  never notice, but if you mute the sound, the track falls apart.  And I would submit that learning how to respond, to play spontaneously, with heart and soul is much more likely to make you a better musician than clinically analyzing every note of someone else's performance.

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  4. I watched some of it. I've been a fan since hearing him play Wurlitzer live. His band is TIGHT!  The performance with Chris Stapleton on the CMAs a few years ago was DEEPLY SOULFUL! 😎

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  5. I sometimes find that doing non-musical work (recently I built my daughter a horizontal fence), takes over my brain and gives my musical grey matter a little break. Pretty soon, I've got the fence figured out and the music starts flowing again.  I also like to take simple common tunes (Over the Rainbow, Twinkle Twinkle, etc) and doing re-harms.  

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  6. 2 hours ago, Dave Bryce said:

     

    IIRC, Mr. Lange was married to Ms. Twain when he produced her record.

     

    dB

    Mutt saw Shania in a bikini at one of Harold Shed's pool parties and apparently decided to both produce and marry her on the spot!  I doubt he was thinking of Rock vs. Country at the time 😉  I did one record with Mutt and though I initially found his process unbearable as a player, once he let me play B3 on a track, he kept me there and left me to my own choices for the rest of the sessions.  I did learn a lot about Production from the experience.  I was never a fan of his records, but you couldn't deny their success.

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  7. On 2/5/2024 at 6:12 AM, George88 said:

    Stevie Wonder didn’t actual piano, right? His arms were moving as if they were.  However, his arms moved the same way when the piano wasn’t sounding and the camera never caught his hands on the keyboard. Why?

    The piano you heard at the beginning of the Tony Bennet tribute was coming from the Tony Bennet video. Probably the great Ralph Sharon.  Stevie played after that.

  8. I don't know.  I had 3 kids who all banged on the piano.  At 18 months, none of them played a G with their left hand and followed it by spreading their little chubby fingers into a perfect G triad with their right.  Even after he bangs on that F# that people say stops the video, his left hand moves to a B minor triad.  

  9. Curious to see what this will be.  

    Used, but I paid $50 each for a 200 and a 200A in the late 70s, and $100 for my 126.  Darrel Combs and Tom Bromfield (two of the greatest techs ever, sadly longer with us) took parts from both 200s to make the one I still play today (which has been called "the best sounding Wurlitzer I've ever heard" by many of the world's best engineers 😊).  

     

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  10. $150!  When the Summer shows were in Nashville, any member of the Musicians Union could attend for free. Of course, for keyboarders, those summer shows were barely worth the cost 😉  Then again, seeing Mike Martin and Dave Bryce always made up for the lack of gear wow.

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  11. 10 hours ago, cassdad said:

    Yes - I understand the argument FOR insurance;  seems to be the general consensus here.  However, I was raised differently - with the applicable motto being “don’t be insurance poor”.  It’s easy to get caught up in the game of playing it safe, “peace of mind”, and spend, spend, spend on insurance.  That’s why insurance companies are so profitable.  I guarantee you that any insurance offered takes in more money for the insurance company than they pay out.

     

    My Dad sat me down one day, and we ran the math looking at it over let’s say a 30-year time period:  “How much do you spend on XXXX (house insurance, car insurance, etc)?”  And then:  “How much has it ever paid you?”

     

    He always self-insrnados, hurricanes, ured on everything.  (And yes, for example, if you check with your DMV, self-insuring is an option for auto insurance.  You simply basically pledge some bank savings as a “bond”.)  Even after having a fire in his bar business - it was always, LONG-TERM, less expensive to just take the hit and pay for the damage himself as opposed to the cost of insurance.

     

    Of course, one can cite a situation where insurance was / is a life-saver.  We each have different tolerance levels for risk.  I’m just saying that after many decades of owning musical equipment, knock on wood - in my case I’ve never had any expensive equipment stolen or damaged.  Just lucky I guess, and yes, that could change tomorrow.  But perhaps, being able to bank that premium money myself over all those years allowed me to afford new equipment.  Just giving another perspective.  YMMV.

    It costs me $500//year to insure a $50,000 piano from a house fire or other disasters.  Are you suggesting that, I should set another $50,000 aside in a bond of some sort instead?  I'll take the $500/year peace of mind. It will take a Hundred years to have paid the Insurance company more than its value.

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  12. What's the big deal about the nose.  I thought it was very well done. In fact, all of the make-up in this film was outstandingly done imho.  They captured his physical look at all ages with incredible accuracy, and Cooper's mastery of his movements, facial expressions and body language was equally impressive.  

    For people who weren't/t alive at that time, or tuned into popular music yet, it may escape them, how well they portrayed that time in history.  The smoking and the dominance of Broadway Musical scores in Popular Music are just 2 of the many well done aspects of this movie.  

    What I didn't know as a youngster (or until now) was his personal life.  Apparently his daughter's book is deep, and she has given Cooper high praise for accuracy.  

    Turns out, Bi-sexuality is not the recent invention of the Woke that half the Country insists it is.

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