harmonizer

J. Dan made an excellent point, which I think is being overlooked. All this talk about "which turntable is best" is rounding error, when you consider the impact that the cartridge will have on the sound quality. The guy who had the best stereo on my dorm floor at college had spent more money on his cartridge than on his turntable. And his speakers were absurdly efficient stage monitors (with 15 inch woofers). Every piece of his stereo between his cartridge and his speakers was crap, but the sound of his stereo blew away everyone else's because he had put his dollars in the right places.

My sister is 3 years older than me, and she brought The Yes Album and Fragile into our house. Yes is one of many bands that she introduced me to while I was between 10-15 years old.

I took my best shot at the piano-only intro from the LP version. It was harder to pick out the inner notes than work I had done before on the horn parts for the Steely Dan song Deacon Blues, which is saying a lot. The rhythms are not right partly because of rubato playing, but I think the notes are pretty close. I only got through the first 25 seconds, but thought I would share it anyway. You should be able to download the PDF from a post on page 2 of this thread: http://www.norduserforum.com/post72301.html#p72301

Jazzmammal, apparently you can cast aspersions, so don't sell yourself short.

I found the chords in Lamm's Texas Pop Festival version to be closer to the original, than the longer intro he played in the Chicago IV version (live at Carnegie Hall). But I had not listened to the Carnegie Hall version for many years, and hearing it again made me realize how good it was (I'm not a big fan of most of the rest of that album). If our band had enough people to do this song live, we would probably start the intro where the horns come in.

I did some surfing on Youtube, and could not find anything that explained how to play the first part of the piano intro, up to where the first horns come in. This guy did a good job showing how to play the later portion of the piano intro, starting from where the horns join the intro:

I think this is an interesting topic, from a few angles. Regarding new vs. old, once upon a time "Amazing Grace" was new. I'm not sure if all Christian denominations now have this in their hymnal, but for many it is now a staple. How did it become a staple, and was it at first considered too new, or too straightforward in its statement of belief? A second thing is that I (like others here) feel that many of the songs that fit the CCM category just aren't really that good musically. No matter how spiritually inspired a composer might feel, the resulting composition might not be inspiring music. I think that those of use who have some interest in religiously inspired music (from any faith) might have heard many songs in this category that did not inspire us at all. In my experience, the good ones are the exceptions rather than the rule. And the third thing is how do you make a good CCM song fit in a church service....if it's possible at all. Our church has a band made up of high school age musicians which performs religious songs in a more contemporary style. These are usually performed at a second service once or twice a month, and even the adult attendees who may not love the style see the value of helping these young adults get better connected to the church. But these type of songs would not work as well if they were performed every week in the first service, which is more heavily attended.

Rob Mathes' "Evening Train" is one of my favorite albums. Perhaps half the songs on this album are religious-themed in some way. There is some absolutely smokin' horn section playing in some of the others, and geez he's got a voice.

I looked at the FA-06/08 reference manual, and chapter 4 describes editing a "Studio Set", which can have up to 16 parts, each of which can have a different patch, low point, and high point. I am guessing that a Roland FA "Studio Set" can do everything that a (older gear) Roland XV "Performance" can do, and that that under the "Pitch" tab there is a way to specify a separate transposition amount for each part within a Studio Set.

I play the lower line. Only the two F# keys need a different treatment (+8 half steps for the two F# keys, +7 half steps for the G-F keys in between). On a Roland XV this was easy for me to set up, and I suspect it would also be easy to set up on a Fantom or newer Roland successor products. There are probably other products out there that make it easy to set up such custom splits, but I know my Nord Electro cannot.

This is one of those threads that just makes me feel thankful for those post transcriptions and other helpful info. The Q&A on the Youtube video describes his use of the "Pro-5 BrsSRX" patch, which it turns out is #377 on the Roland SRX-07 card, which I have. I had been struggling to find the right sound for this song, so this was a big help. The linked Youtube video also includes a link to http://jonkubis.com/ from where one can download a complete transcript of this song. This helped me put together a more complete rendition that of the keys part for me to play with my covers band. But there are a couple of things I simplified - depending on how much other stuff is being played by other band members, I'm not convinced the audience is necessarily going to hear everything. If there are some notes on this transcription that you cannot easily hear on the original, or that don't cut thru when you play this with your band, you can probably leave out some notes. Finally I will offer a confession that I occasionally use the multi-part "Performance" capability on my XV synth to get past my minimal keyboard skills. I'm the guy in my covers band who has a keyboard sitting in front of him because someone has to do it, and no one else in our current lineup does. I have a specific performance on my XV which is used only for this song, and on the chorus I only have to press the keys for one moving line, instead of for both of the moving lines shown above.

I like several of the "Classic Albums" documentaries, which interview the musicians and producers on how certain albums were made, but the best "Classic Albums" show I have seen is the one for the Tom Petty "Damn the Torpedoes" albums. I could not find the entire episode on Youtube, although I did see some snippets there. The full episode does a fantastic job at explaining how the songs were made.

Here is a pretty cool cover of Superstition that (I believe) does not have any keyboard playing in it. Does not try to duplicate the original:

The musicnotes.com transcription sounds very good to my ears, that is, from the place this transcriptions begins. This transcription does not capture the piano-only intro that you would hear on the full-length version of this song from the album (LP, for oldtimers like myself), which precedes the point at which the horns come in. But the voicings I hear on this transcription sound just right to me.