Sam Mullins

BTW, just noticed that Casio must have a manufacturer-sponsored sale on CT-S1000V (CT-S500 + vocal synthesis engine); the US online stores have it $100 off through the end of the month, making it $10 cheaper than the CT-S500. Of course, you have to put up with the ugly red areas (IMO) on the panel; too bad because I think the CT-S500 is pretty nice looking for a budget keyboard.

I would add that although the main keyboard sounds (piano, e-piano) are better on the CK, there are categories of sounds that are better on the Casio, e.g. electric bass.

Another vote for CT-S500. Great couch keyboard with enough pro options (1/4” outputs, volume pedal, multi effects, splits, etc) and very good sounds that you really could get through a lot of gigs with it. Also the best unweighted “compromise” key action for playing piano that i have used on any keyboard regardless of price. (Note that this is a different consideration than best pure unweighted keyboard for non-piano …which I would probably give to something like Kronos 61). The best $350 I’ve spent.

I will say that my use case is mostly set at sound check and only occasionally tweak between songs. So the adjust on the fly issue you cite isn’t as much an issue for me…but may be for others.

I’ve had good luck with mine. Decent sounding, small footprint and the right set of features for my duo use case (two vocal mics, guitar, two keyboards, stereo mains, one monitor).

Those are three great ones. I find Steve in particular to be endlessly inventive. You could take the guitar tracks off of Get Happy and still have a great record.

For sure, it’s a bit out of control…Caitlin Cam and all; like Tiger Woods coverage on golf used to be. That’s the media for you.

And another one from 2011: old thread on taping over brand name

Which is your prerogative as Cyclone fan I grew up about 40 miles from Ames and went to Cyclone football/basketball games on a semi-regular basis back then. Love watching the Cyclone Bball team play defense (a term we aren't familiar with for Hawkeye basketball )

They are a lot of fun. I go to a few a year. As a 30 year season ticket holder for the football team, I also find it a refreshingly different crowd...far less drunk bros, lots more screaming grandmothers and adoring grade school girls. My son, his wife and daughter have mid-court season tickets and couldn't make it to a recent game; with the jacked up secondary ticket prices they basically paid for the entire season a couple times over by selling one game. Quite the phenomenon, not just here but everywhere she plays.

Need 8 to break record. How bout 49 for the hell of it. And 13 assists. Something else.

My MOTU micro express can do this. You can select any MIDI command (including patch change) and suppress it at any of the 4 inputs or 6 outputs. I’m not using it and listed it on Garage Sale sub forum a few months ago but got no takers. PM me if you are interested…could probably work out a good deal. https://forums.musicplayer.com/topic/186477-fs-motu-micro-express-4x6-usb-midi-interfacemergerrouter

I would look into the new Mackie Showbox. Tradeoffs for sure (no stereo option) but having something with battery power and detachable 5/6 channel mixer might be useful in a lot of situations. The features look great but of course the sound is the deciding factor.

Not doing a Valentine's show this year but for years my duo has done Fiona Apple's "Valentine", which starts: You didn't see my valentine I sent it via pantomime While you were watchin' someone else I stared at you and cut myself I'm guessing that's NOT what most people want on a V-day date 😏

The Staves. I saw them open for Nickel Creek last night. Lovely stuff. I've been around a while and seen hundreds of shows, but this was the first time I've seen the headliner (i.e. Chris Thile) come out and introduce the warmup act and talk them up. A small but generous gesture

As a former Stage 2/3 owner, I can say the complaint about split points goes back years and I wouldn't hold my breath. I suggested 10 years ago that they simply allow a mode where the split points are arbitrary and the lights are off (like many of us do with most keyboards).

for $1200. OP wanted $400-700 range.

Of course, the proof will be in the sound of this thing. But I really like the features they have included. I bought a JBL Eon Compact One in Dec while they were on sale for $500...it was the only one of the competition that had the 4 channels I required for my duo. Would have considered this strongly because of the additional channels and features if it had been available (even at the higher price.) Will be anxious to see what people think of it.

I got an Arzopa 15.6 Portable Monitor last July off of Amazon. I didn't do a ton of research on it, just found something that was USB-C powered, around 15" and inexpensive ($96) at the time. Another goal of this transition was to get something bigger than my iPad Pro screen size. This is nothing I would do a lot of programming on (old eyes) but I do that on my normal 42" monitor. It's big enough that in Perform screen I get an adequate size on chords/lyrics/etc. And it's very light and works fine in the iPad holder I was using previously. Doesn't look like that particular model exists on Amazon anymore. FYI, I use the audio interface on my CK88 (works like a charm) and in addition to the cabling hassle, it means that since the Mac audio and CK88 audio are both coming out of the CK88 outputs, I can get the balance right on that single stereo feed and never have to worry about it (unlike when I had two keyboards feeding two mixer channels.) So overall I'm liking the whole change and wish I would have done this initially instead of detouring through the iPad route for a year (after my previous 7 years on Stage 3/Kronos) But some of that iPad learning will still be useful....I've put together a portable battery powered rig that is iPad mini velcro'd to CT-S500 running Camelot Pro with just a few bread and butter keyboard apps (B-3X, Ravenscroft, Neo-Soul Keys) and a JBL EON One Compact. One trip from car.

One more detail on my transition: In the end, the Mac Mini plus USB-C Monitor route resulted in a lot less cabling mess than the iPad (no USB Hub, no camera kits, no cables for the USB power into the camera kit, etc) Pretty clean setup on Mac Mini: two USB cables to keyboards to Mac Mini, one USB-C cable to monitor and AC cord. Keyboard/mouse is bluetooth.

I'll just add that this comment is relevant to setting up set lists for each show with the existing patches. For creating a new individual patch, I find Mainstage to be more straightforward than Camelot Pro on the iPad. I seem to get to an acceptable place quicker.

This is on my to do list...I occasionally get stuck notes and jumping for the computer keyboard is not great in the middle of a song. I will likely find a button on my Arturia KeyLab 61 (maybe Transport Stop) that I don't normally use in performance. Thanks for your detailed post!

I've played a couple gigs since changing over and everything seems to be OK. I'm relatively new to Mac's (last couple years) after using Windows for music for decades. So part of this was just understanding more about the metrics in Activity Monitor around dynamic memory usage...and not panicking about the used figure but paying some attention to memory pressure and swap. Also I did the following: - Separated the ~80 songs (by alphabetical order) into four concerts. - When I do a show with say 3 sets of 13 songs, I just create a new Concert for each of the sets (from a template file) and then pull in the 13 patches for each set from the four concerts above. It's a slightly more arduous setup process than what I had on Camelot Pro, but not too bad. And I haven't had any memory issues on a 16GB machine. Also, I'll add that my use of aliases ended up being pretty limited. Mostly within a single patch that happened to use the EXACT same instrument and settings but on different key ranges. When I tried to use aliases across patches (i.e. songs for me), there was almost always some difference in the setting for the patch for the two songs that made aliases unusable. This is because most of my use of Mainstage/plugins is for non bread and butter sounds. As mentioned earlier, I try to cover as much of the basic stuff on CK88 as possible so that if there is a Mac/Mainstage problem, I can do 75% of our songs without it. But that's probably more unique to my use case (traditional performance with set lists) than it is for other paradigms (worship service, musical theater). I have not checked out the other programs mentioned above on a Mac. I didn't mention one of the other factors in my decision to go from iPad to Mac, which was simply that I'm trying to reduce the number of tools I'm using and become more adept at those tools. Since I use Logic for sequencing, the MainStage paradigm fits with that philosophy. Approaching retirement age and the value of my time has become increasingly my focus 😀 Want to spend as much time actually making music rather than learning tech tools (this sounds easy, but I'm an engineer by profession and get sucked into these things if I'm not careful.)

I loved that one when I was gigging a stage 3. Only used it for a few songs where I didn’t want a grand (e.g. Fiona Apple’s Valentine). but the vibe was great.