Nowarezman

We were in the totality line here in Texas (another reason for you to hate Texas :)) It was mostly cloudy as the eclipse began, but then about 10 minutes before total eclipse, the clouds thinned out and we got a great view of about 90% eclipse just sitting in chairs on the driveway. But at total eclipse, a big stupid cloud blundered into the path...but then, to our great delight, there was just a short 5-7 second break where we could see the corona - wow! All that drama of the clouds obscuring and revealing...it was a cosmic striptease! nat

So what's next, going to concerts to watch a box write a song? nat

I played a Studiologic SL88 for a long, long, time. The action was heavy, sure, but when I dug in, it followed nicely, I sold the SL88 and bought an Arturia Mk II 88 keys board. Well, the old SL88 was sloppy and funky, where the Arturia is heavy and accurate. The Arturia is bringing out a lot of subtle touches in my playing that the SL88 just bulldozed over, no question. But it is a heavy action. I use a MIDI compressor to help me play within a certain velocity range - makes things much easier. When I play on a, say, real acoustic Yammi C7, I can just fly as the action on the acoustic piano is much easier than on the MIDI controller. The thing is to find a keyboard that lets you FUNK with the fingers you got. Cost is not an issue - feel is all there is to go on about. nat

I kinda like the yellowed keys - could perhaps help a tiny bit with locating key positions when playing changes that involve larger skips - especially when improvising. nat

I didn't list the System 8 because it's digital. But I have to say, it sounds so good and accesses so much Roland magic from their vintage analogs, that it's kind of slaked my thirst for the biggest, baddest analog poly. I have a the 4-voice Poly Evolver rack and a Mono Evolver Keyboard, so I've got a 5-voice analog/digital Dave Smith hybrid, a very unique synth, seemingly best of both worlds. But since I got the System 8, I just keep gravitating to it daily and blissing out, month after month, on the 106, the Jup8, and the System-8 synth itself. nat

I try to just leave the doctoring up to my docs. But I do read up - I find the websites for the Mayo Clinic and the NHS to be pretty reliable. The NHS seems to give more "try this at home" advice, which, since they have their heads screwed on right, can be helpful. Misinformation about medical stuff is now a real threat to public health, especially for pop-med topics like diet, immune systems, and the sketchy world of alt medicines and trendy potions/herbs/vitamins/powders/pills and other various cures that range from "won't help but can't hurt" to "you just shortened your lifespan taking that stupid stuff!". What happened to societal progress in a discernible, albeit slow and wandering, direction?? nat

Hey you're right. I always forget that when I'm on the GForce website. Looks like the GB pound is coming off it's big low against the USD..... nat

What's easy to believe is that the VSM IV is worth the price. The GForce website has demos, and the current price posted is just $69.99. I'm sure this price is just for a limited time. nat

Prophet 10 I guess. I have digital synths that have multi-verses worth of options and routings and endless mod matrices and all that. For that one analog, I'll take the classic Sequential beast. nat

Wow, thx many tons, all. I'm going to check out all suggestions. nat

Abercrombie with Dan Wall on B-3. See JA's albums While We're Young, Speak of the Devil, Tactics, Open Land. nat

I snagged a Mojo dual-manual off Reverb. Shoulda done this ages ago! I've been playing keys, 95% self-taught, for a long, long time. Like most self-taught folks, I have huge gaps in my training. I'd like to brush up on and advance my skills on organ - been a Jimmy Smith fan since the 60s, especially his collabs with Kenny Burrell. Also like Medeski et al, Booker T, and the other assorted Jimmys and Lonnies on the Hammond. I've been looking at Tony Monaco's Youtube channel. Thinking about trying his $14 per month Hammond class. Anyone here taken his classes? Or any others to recommend? I don't need to start from scratch, but I don't mind revisiting the basics as long as there's more advanced material to challenge me and move me along. My goal - oh, besides playing parts for my self-recorded songs and such, I would like to, if possible, get to the level that I could hold my own in a local B-3 trio or quartet. Nothing too out there, not looking to book Carnegie Hall - just some Home Cookin' as it were - jazzy blues and standards mostly for the locals. nat

I have a mild case of Raynaud's disease. Doc says we'll just watch it, no action needed so far. At times, grabbing something cold (say, under 50 degrees) gives me a sensation close to pain, sort of in-between cold and pain. And my fingertips turn whitish at times - that's the small arteries shrinking up in a sort of faux/minor shock-like response. I get by fine - I warm up my hands running warm water over them or heating up a bean-bag to hold. I have good circulation in general and have been a regular exerciser since about age 15. Just one of those things - I got a bunch, not just one of those things, believe me! Best of luck - yeah, just pay close attention to your symptoms, maybe make some notes on your phone, then tell your doc, especially if there are changes in severity or your condition starts to hinder your daily activities. nat

Are you tempted to leave the 145 at home and use the sim, playing out? nat

Been a big Metheny fan since I heard Yolanda You Learn on a transatlantic flight on headphones in the 80s. Got back home, I bought First Circle and over time, just about everything else. But I never dug into Metheny's backstory much - I knew he was with Gary Burton as a very young dude, that's about it. So now I've been digging - bunch of great YTs from Oslo in the 70s with Burton, Swallow, PM, various drummers. And in PM's interview with Beato, he mentions how important Swallow's tune Falling Grace was to him (and a lot of other people, apparently.) And Burton's Duster album (1967! hard to believe!) with Coryell, Swallow, and Haynes. One link leads to another - so in this age of access to so much video and audio, I'm just super pumped to be learning about and listening/watching the very seeds and roots of what would become the Metheny thing. My birthdate is within months of Metheny's and my birthplace was just over the Missouri border in Illinois. So I get his vibe to some extent from similarities in background. What's going on with Corea, Jarrett, et al, in the same time frame is another encyclopedia entirely....later, if I live that long. Wot larks nat

Yeah, I'm shopping for one of the bigger uprights. Kawai has prices I can live with. If the YT I watched had it right, Kawai has drawn even with Yamaha now in worldwide sales. And the quality of Kawai is right up there with Yamaha. I prefer a darker voicing, and a "humanish" sort of tone, especially in the upper mids where so much melodic expression needed. Kawais in general have a somewhat darker tone than Yamahas, but of course you can find a particular Kawai that's brighter than a particular Yamaha. I'm thinking of the Kawai K-500 upright. Enough quality and specs to allow pro-level nuance and tone at a pretty fantastic price. At least that's where my shopping has me at the moment.... nat

I listened to a Spirio at the Steinway shop in Plano, TX. It's like an enhanced MIDI - lots of high resolution detail in the playback system. They even have live events where you stream a video of the performer playing in real time and data of the live performance drives your piano to play (almost) simultaneously. It is impressive, and eye-wateringly expensive. That said, these playback systems just don't move the needle for me. Any live performance is, to some extent, in a mode of response to the actual physical space, the audience, the specific instrument being played, the humidity, temperature, and so on. A recording captures the actual room sound which the player is in a sort of give and take response with. That won't translate to a remote playback piano. If you transported the performing artist to the piano bench of your Spirio, the artist would not play exactly the same as in the original venue. I prefer live music in the actual space at the actual moment, and recorded music to be a documentation of all those subtle things. And I like just being there, right there, watching, listening, getting my coughs into the pauses between movements Still, I'm probably quibbling and nit-picking. All good wishes for happiness and amazement to those who can afford and enjoy their six-figure Spirios. nat

The truth is not exactly the same thing as compliance, legally defined. You can put the truth down on the wrong line, wrong form and they gotcha. You can leave off a form you think didn't matter 'cause all the info is on another form and they gotcha. You can not know a thousand things that they know and you won't know how to answer them when they ask about one of those thousand things. Example: home-office deduction. The space for the home office is supposed to be used 100% for business. Real story: agent says, "is this space used 100% for business?". Taxpayer, "yessir. Nothing in there but office stuff." So the agent makes a note, moves on and later, everything seems done, agent asks kindly about taxpayer's family, how was Christmas just past and so on. Taxpayer feeling like its all going great. Spouse pokes a head in and adds "Oh, we had a houseful - we ended up putting someone up to sleep in every room of the house, it was crazy but wonderful!". Agent and taxpayer and spouse are all smiling. Got 'em - one sleeping bag one night on the office space floor. Not 100%. No deduction, and the tax due is tripled by interest and penalties. nat

IRS auditors are well known to buffalo taxpayers with bullshit, get 'em confused and scared, tell the taxpayer they actually are taking it easy on them, so just sign off on the changes, write the check and god bless america. I'm not joking - I've been there numerous times representing taxpayers. Addendum: not all auditors are as described above, to be fair. In my experience, the trickiest auditors to manage are either the most experienced old hands, and the green new ones. IRS is hiring now...most of the old crowd are gone, right? So there's likely to be a new army of greenhorns (undertrained and over-incentivized to bring home money), eager to go huntin' and come back with pelts. The IRS system does have many features in place to actually help taxpayers deal with difficult or overly-aggressive auditors - you can always ask to talk to a supervisor, and then there's a big, rather complicated system for appeals and so on. But do not do not do not ever think you can just represent yourself 'cause the truth will prevail. You're out of your league, a newbie going one on one with Draymond Green - you'll be on your ass with no shorts on before you know what happened. nat

Random responses on the internet....make notes but use them to ask a pro. It's all far more complicated than you imagine. U.S. Tax law is the epicenter of the universe named, "Unknown Unknowns" for anyone but experts. Get a good tax person to help. A really good one might be able to teach you how to do your own taxes - but just remember, next year will have some different rules, and the year after that, too, and the year after that......it's a struggle for even the pros to keep up. I'm an expert, but retired. Lots of well-meaning responses above are from some great people who absolutely don't know what they are talking about, God bless 'em. nat

In the world of financial transactions, blockchain has the potential to wipe out fraud and other financial crimes and misdeeds. Fraudsters such as Madoff simply could not hide what they were doing. Think of a particular market as if all the players were represented as individually identifiable, unique icons on a huge screen that anyone in the world with an internet connection could watch. And all the goods that come in to the market are also represented as individually identifiable and unique icons. So this market opens and the buying and selling kick off. Every transaction gets recorded as an individually identifiable and unique icon as business commences. So all the players are identified. Each transaction is recorded in an irrevocable, unchanging, traceable format. Each asset that changes hands is recorded as to where it came from, where it went to, and the prices involved and the actors involved. Nothing happens that is not irrevocably recorded and transparent. So you can see that a sort of database of icons/information starts to grow and put out branches as the transactions pile up. All that happens is recorded as an encrypted, unchanging icon and all the details known to all - and the chain of events can be traced back at all times to the very first transaction. An accountant would say the system is self-balancing. Any change to the records after-the-fact would cause the system to crash instantly. If I've done a decent job explaining this - it should be apparent that you can't cheat in this environment. You can't steal anything. You can't claim something is yours when it's not. You can't alter the records of what actually happened. You can't move assets out of sight of, say the State Property Tax auditors, or your wife or your business partner. You can't claim to have bought 10 of something but you only paid for 5 of something and cooked the books to back your fraudulent claim. You can't magically show up with more assets (dirty money you've smuggled in) to trade with. You can't do anything at all under the table, you can't skim, you can't double-deal, you can't cook the books - there is nothing done in the dark. There is no separate bookkeeping kept by each actor involved in the transactions - it's all instantly in the public realm, transparent and can't be altered. In theory, sure. But it's an amazing theory and it's clear that such a system could certainly work, and such systems do work right now. The problem lies in the interactions between the closed off blockchain and the "outside world". Inside the blockchain itself everything is kept honest. So say a government was able to corral (by decree and whatever amount of coercion needed) all transactions in a nation within one humongous blockchain (impossible, but let's play with the idea.) No one could then cheat on taxes - no politician could be bribed - no black market could slip around darting into and out of one big system - no hush money could be paid in secret - no contraband or illegal goods could change hands without it all being instantly apparent. So you can see this is something with exciting potential - but anything involving humans....we'll just have to see how blockchain plays out in the jungle of human society. nat

I like dissonance. So I tune to 432.666. Hahahahaha I'm possessed!!!! nat

I was thinking mainly about instruments that have no tuning mechanism - like the oboe. Or instruments that are a lot of trouble to re-pitch - say the harp and piano. And my (old fashioned) piano tuner has a tuning fork that he uses as ground zero - gotta be some basic pitch to tune to! But I take your point about instruments not being built for a specific and exact tuning frequency. Or, on the other hand, what would the instrument makers say about this? I confess that I just assumed that instrument builders would "build around" some fundamental, central pitch, trying to tweak the purest, fullest resonances from some particular pitch center. Maybe not - I should read up on this. Maybe they build to a range of tuning possibilities. I suspect each type of instrument has its own behavior and building issues to sort out when it comes to achieving a fully resonant, well-balanced tone. In my experience with acoustic guitars, it's clear to me that I can't tune up or down and not change the resonance profile - the guitars just play and sound a bit differently when tuned differently - they are not the same "just a bit higher or lower". If I tune up or down significantly, there's like some small amount of comb filtering or a new resonant note pokes out. It's those guitars that resonate "just so" with a particular tuning that are the real, rare beauties. nat

So I guess the teeny-bit added sharpness is enough to create some perceptible level of additional brightness, but not enough to create intonation issues for instruments that either can't be tuned or not without a lotta lotta fuss and trouble. But surely there's a limit to this - at some point of pitching things up, it would all go sour as it were. I'll defer to the conductors (or whoever calls the shots on this) - they of course all have better ears than mine. I still would like to ask "who are you kidding?" as to whether these tiny tweaks create any demonstrable improvement in actual performance and listening. nat

Orchestras nudge up from A440? I'll take your word for it, but instruments are built to perform at their best at a specific pitch. I would think there could be perhaps trade-offs with tone, moving off of the standard. And what about the piano??? Do they tweak the Steinways to 444 or 448??? What a pain that would be! And to have to tune it back down afterwards. Uh-uh, buddy, you ain't tuning up my Steinway (if I owned one The harps? And the oboe is basically un-tunable. And the percussion instruments - marimba, celesta, glockenspiel, hand bells, vibes, xylophones - they all have to be tediously tweaked? How about just play brighter from A440? Or slap an EQ on the mix. Sounds like a sane solution. Who is making such decisions? I guarantee the audience does NOT CARE - nor do the streaming services or consumers of streamed sound, CDs, etc. I can think of one exception - perhaps medieval music or other period music performed on instruments from those days perhaps. I don't care much about that form of authenticity - but I respect the attempt to recreate some semblance to hear what things actually sound like back in the way, way back. Or are they just speeding up the recording after the fact, similar to what Craig mentioned? nat