J. Dan

Gig went pretty well, though we ended up not playing some songs I spent a lot of time on. Also, started the night with Mr. Crowley, and shortly into my intro they waved me off to stop and informed me that they tune down a 1/2 step. Thank God for transpose per slot in setlist mode on the Kronos. Even after the transpose, there was one more song they did in a different key than I learned but it was 12-bar blues and A instead of G so I just winged it and it was fine.

I have a one-off gig tomorrow which means learning a lot of songs on short notice, most I’ve never played, and some I’ve never even heard/. I’ve been cramming and I feel good about each song before going on to the next, but then going back through the list it’s like “wait, what song is that?” When I hear it, it’s like “oh, OK” and I can play along, but at the gig you just have a list. I’ve been putting notes like keys on the Kronos set list. How do you guys handle these kind of gigs?

No careless whisper, unfortunately. we had 5 gigs but one fell through, so we have 4 so far. I’m a little worried about selling out based on ticket prices at $20 ea for one and $35 ea for another, but we have a couple gigs where we are opening for touring tribute acts doing only one set for a guaranteed minimum, so that’s good. Have 2 practices in the next 2 weeks so we’ll see how things are coming along.

I haven’t gigged with a laptop in a long time so there is a lot out there that I’m not familiar with - others can chime in. Given you have no drummer or bass player, you’ll have to be using a sequence or tracks and what you use and how you use it will depend on your skill level and what resources you have. If I had to do that now, I would do it all in my Kronos in song mode. I don’t think any of your keys have workstation capabilities which brings it to the Mac. I did a duo in the 90s where we sequences all the bass and drums (and some other parts). I used Performer (pre-digital performer) to make the sequences, saved them as SMF’s and used a player on an IBM thinkpad to play the SMF’s. All the sounds still came from my keyboard, at the time a Roland JV-30 utilizing the Roland GS sound set.

Had our 2nd practice tonight - first time with the new guitar player and at his house. A little disappointed we didn’t do any of the George Michael since I worked pretty hard on it and brought my sax for “I’m your man”. I’m coming off of a few days sick with a fever so I had no energy, but everyone seemed happy with me on the Cindy and Madonna stuff. Besides that we did a couple Billy Idol tunes. We have two practices scheduled in Feb - besides the Culture Club and B52’s stuff they now want to add some Duran Duran, which I can do but I let the drummer know that songs like Rio have an arpeggiator and without a click he’ll need to follow iit, to which he said was fine as long as he can hear it.

Most of the sounds are pretty easy to program, it’s just getting all the parts together. So here are the songs we’re doing and my thoughts so far Girls Just Wanna Have Fun - I did this song before but had a sequence take over when I played the solo, so now I’m trying to do them together with no sequence and finding the timing tough. All Through the Night - I broke down and used an aroeggiator for the beginning part - no click, but I can re-trigger on the beat and also have tap-tempo. I let the other parts drop out during the solo so I can use the pitch bend while playing. The Goonies are Alright - struggling a little bit with the timing doing the Marimba-like part with the flutes, but I’m getting there. Time after Time - the easiest of them so far Change of Heart - also pretty easy She Bop - the main riff with the harp-like part is a little tough but I mostly have it. I drop out the other parts to do the whistle solo.

The Cindy Lauper stuff is surprisingly tough! That and the George Michael Wham era stuff - pretty tough! Practice got postponed a week so I have time to work on it some more. So far the first gig is June 29 at a large ballroom with tix $20/head and an expected minimum of 200 sold.

My understanding is that they are basically doing it for free, though we’ve decided that on the higher paying gigs we’ll throw some money at the main dancers. It’s already a 6 piece so there are a lot of divisions going on, and we’ve decided to take half of the first few gigs to put into video which means I may have to do a few shows for $100-$150/man at first.

My understanding is that they are basically doing it for free, though we’ve decided that on the higher paying gigs we’ll throw some money at the main dancers. It’s already a 6 piece so there are a lot of divisions going on, and we’ve decided to take half of the first few gigs to put into video which means I may have to do a few shows for $100-$150/man at first.

So I had our first practice tonight and although I was worried about it, they seemed pretty happy with me. They were impressed with my sound programming mostly. So we have another practice in 3 weeks and a bit of a change in direction. Instead of the movie theme songs, we’re adding 2 more mini tributes. So it will be 6 tributes, 2 per set. Cindy Lauper, George Michael, Madonna, Billy Idol, Culture Club, and B52’s. Also there will be dancers and dance routines on stage. I actually think the dancers will set us apart.

So I haven’t played in a band for a while. My last regular band was an original progressive metal band but I also filled in with several pop bands. So I just joined a band doing a bunch of 80s mini tributes. We have 2 practices in 2023 before booking 2024. So our first practice is Nov 29 and I have a lot to learn - no sequencing.

It’s difficult given the wide range of music I enjoy. Growing up I loved Rush due to the complexity, thoughtfulness, and overall sound. But then I was into punk rock like Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, etc due to the rawness of it all and probably a sense of rebellion. In the 80’s I liked bands like Duran Duran and Depeche Mode for a combination of production and good song writing. Through the 90’s I liked a conglomeration of my earlier influences in the Pixies, Nine Inch Nails, Chemical Brothers, Garbage. I don’t think they all have a single thing in common. It’s more like each one has enough of one of many criteria - songwriting, musicianship, sound/production, raw energy/message.

The fusion and S3000XL have been in storage for a long time! I’ve been using the Kronos since it came out along with an A70 for a 22nd tier.

If I can remember the login to the server where I hosted the pic, lol.

And let me just say that Joe is such a great guy! It was great sharing family stories and getting closer - this was the 3rd time we had ever met face to face and first time I ever met Lori after hearing about her for years.

It’s been a few years since I’ve been on here. Joe and Lori were in St. Louis today for a Jazz workshop and we were able to meet up - it was good to see him again and he talked me into getting back on here. This place looks a lot different than it did a few years ago!

I'm about done here. I posted something similar on Craig Anderson's page, which i had previously been really enjoying. The cove-19 threads have WAY exceeded any of the pitfalls of politics and religion and I'm done. I may as well just do Facebook because this has become the same damn thing except people use code to try to hide their politics but we now know who is whom. So I'm done.

Yes I posted something when it happened. I struggled with the loss for a few months but eventually got back to normal. It's weird though with so much going on with the virus and losing my job, it snuck up on my when somebody shared the video and tagged me. Just kind of caught me off guard that it's already been a whole year - seems like it just happened.

This place has because me never less shifty than facebook. Goodbye

So my friend passed away July 10 last year. I played with him for the last time at Lake of the Ozarks for the July 4th weekend then he left with his family for the Bahamas and died snorkeling of a heart attack that Wednesday. It was really weird that out of the blue he wanted to play stairway to heaven, and I learned it -though you can hear I screwed up the flutes here and there. But we did it and it was a hit on a Saturday night, and he died Wednesday morning. I can never listen to this song again without thinking of him. https://www.facebook.com/1577289914/videos/10217116255769999/

My earliest magazines were High Fidelity, Popular Hot Rodding, Modern Electronics, Electronic Musician, and Keyboard. Actually, I forgot, also Radio Electronics. My main reason to subscribe to magazines back then was that we sold magazine subscriptions in school for fund raising. Don't know if they still do that, but fundraising got me hooked on magazines just like the "Record and tape club" got me checking of everything that looked interesting to me musically to listen to. The 3rd leg of the stool was the vinyl stores.

Who said it's proven to be airborne? This is what keeps driving me nuts. Somebody will point to some study that MAY SUGGEST (and is later proven wrong) and all of a sudden it's a proven fact. Remember the studies that said it could live on surfaces for days? Of course they never said under what conditions or if it was enough loading to be possible to spread. Then later they find that it's hardly ever spread by surfaces and doesn't last long, But that didn't stop people from jumping on the suggestion and automatically assuming it was absolutely a fact and forcing everybody else in the world to comply to the conditions that particular "fact" imposed. There are times when masks make perfect sense, and I wear them in those cases. I'm still questioning the effectiveness of a plain cloth mask vs an N95, but whatever. Wearing a mask doesn't mean you can be stupid and not cover your nose with it, or hand your phone back and forth with the person at the ATT store, all the while adjusting your mask and rubbing your nose. On the other hand, if you want me to put on a mask as soon as I step out my front door, forget about it. I'm not going to walk around with a germ incubator on my face outdoors when I'm not around any other people, especially when I'm 99.999999% sure I'm not infected. I'm also pretty sure that people who are asymptomatic and infected, mask or no mask, have an extremely low chance of spreading it unless you're doing something stupid like sneezing and coughing directly on another person. Yeah, "Some studies have shown" and the cue the grocery store graphic - except those never point to an ACTUAL case of an ACTUAL infection starting that way, and in every case that I've questioned these things, they've come back and said it doesn't spread that way. Why? Because I'm going off what they've always said about viral spread as opposed to the random hysteria of the last few months. Some people just seem to gravitate to whatever the worst is somebody, somewhere, suggests and just automatically accept it blindly as the absolute truth, and then stick with it even if it's proven wrong.

As I've been going through this tedious process and moving things around and around, I've come to the conclusion that duplicates are unavoidable. Examples: I have a collection of raw wav's from a band rehearsal saved in a folder of band rehearsals by date. When I load them into my DAW and create a project to do a mix down and send out, it creates a folder for the project where it duplicates the wav's in the project folder. Technically, once it's there I could delete the originals, but that's not where I would necessarily look for them, yet if I only keep the original, the project file would't work because the links would be broken. More so with my Web projects whether MS Visual Studio or Adobe Dreamweaver, or just backing up a web server. If I wanted to re-deploy a web site I backed up, file structure matters. So I can't just have pictures in a picture library, and mp3's in an audio library, I have to have the site saved with files in folders referenced to the root, or else it's a bunch of work to reconstruct the whole thing. Photos. Wow. That in and of itself is a chore and I may consider posting something just about this on the photography forum because I wonder what our brethren like KenElevenShadows do with all the pictures they take. For myself, I'm thinking major folders of Band, Kids, Work, Social, Misc. Within band would have a folder for each band I've been in, within each of those would have Live vs Session (unless somebody has a better name - meaning pics we posed for). The same can fall into the audio category for bands. But then it gets confusing between what is or is not in my iTunes library and I tried to backup iTunes from my macbook maintaining file structure in case I had to recover but honestly, I have no idea how it works to recover a total loss in iTunes so I don't even know if what I'm doing is worth anything. I have a ton of other audio including obviously sessions, mix downs, individual tracks, etc...I have to find a way to store that in a meaningful way. I think you guys are hung up on some software backup solution. I'm not asking for that. I'lm trying to figure out a logical way to organize all my files from multiple sources.

There's also the question of viral loading. When the virus is exhaled into the air it disperses and dies off - especially outdoor when exposed to UV light. If you wear a mask, you're trapping it in the mask where it continues to build up over time. You touch your face on average about 15 times an hour. If a restaurant worker wears a mask for an 8 hour shift, adjusts his mask, then handles your food, is that better or worse than it just dispersing? Of course the answer in that scenario would be gloves, and to change the gloves between every interaction with a different person, or hand sanitizer between contact with each person. Everybody's focussed on mask everywhere all the time, just do it or you're killing grandma vs no mask ever, screw you. I'll say what I've been saying over and over for months - just use a little common sense. Yes it's a new strain, but it transmits just like every other corona virus we've encountered.

If it's in fact airborne then all these cloth masks are doing NOTHING. The idea of the masks were to stop droplets. They do nothing for an airborne virus. Nothing.