SMcD
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Posts posted by SMcD
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if (kurzweil_mentioned)
then (recommend @Dave Weiser's custom sounds)
In all seriousness - they use the same samples, but you might be surprised by how much you can get out of them, properly tweaked.
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The AI point is a fair one. AI "art" is anything but.
That said...Beato strikes me as a bit of a get-off-my-lawn-er about music. Fact is that, in every era, "good" music (for lack of a less subjective term) has always been made, and has always been available to those who seek it out.
On the flipside, schlocky pop has always sold well. Listen to this shit and tell me it wasn't "easy to make".
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Watched this doc last night and absolutely loved it. It was interesting, and more than a bit affirming, to see how pervasive imposter syndrome is even amongst such heavy-hitters of pop.
I shared the annoyance of some other folks that the guys who played the instruments weren't even mentioned. Even a minute on that would've sufficed.
I got a few laughs out of the whole "what if we tried to sing in Swahili" section. I'm morbidly curious as to what, exactly, Waylon meant about "good old boys not singing Swahili". Potentially-troubling-politics notwithstanding, if I was in a sweltering room at midnight trying to record tricky vocals and somebody derailed the proceedings to try it in a wholly different language, I might be inclined to leave for their own safety. Love that this went on for several minutes until someone informed Stevie that they don't actually speak Swahili in Ethiopia, only for Michael Jackson to make up some syllables that sounded sufficiently "cultural" to the room full of American millionaires.
I got a big laugh out of Paul Simon's John Denver joke too, but then I learned the following:
QuoteIn 1985, Denver asked to participate in the singing of "We Are the World" but was rejected, despite his obvious genuine commitment to charity work, and musical talent. According to Ken Kragen (who helped to produce the song), Denver was snubbed because many people felt his image would hurt the credibility of the song as a pop-rock anthem. "I didn't agree with this assessment," Kragen said, but he reluctantly turned Denver down anyway.[37] Denver later wrote in his 1994 autobiography "Take Me Home" about the rejection; "It broke my heart not to be included"
In this context, the joke just feels mean. They did John dirty, imo.
Oh, and it's a testament to Willie Nelson's professionalism - or perhaps his tolerance - that while Al Jarreau got himself problem-drunk, Willie held steady despite definitely toking up every single time they took a break.
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I'll be the one to give the obligatory shoutout to @Dave Weiser and his custom Kurzweil sound set. Before you make a final. call on the PC4, see if his sounds light a bit of a fire for you. They certainly did for me.
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Wrong thread. That's what I get for having too many tabs open at once.
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On 5/3/2024 at 7:17 PM, CEB said:
This is my “I’m retired from gigging but playing some summer Blues jobs. This is first time I have taken the Kurzweil to a job.
Nothing fancy.
Heh, we've got the exact same boards. I prefer to have mine L-shaped when there's enough space onstage, but I'm rocking the PC4/SKX combo too.
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44 minutes ago, mate stubb said:
The stock stand has the crossbar at the top, but I relocated it downward about 6-8 inches.
Ah, nice. Guessing you drilled a coupla holes further down then?
20 minutes ago, AnotherScott said:You could put small risers under the Hammond, as basically illustrated here for a different purpose...
I'll keep this idea in mind, although it's not ideal since the lowest height on the stand is already pretty much ideal for me.
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On 9/7/2022 at 10:29 AM, mate stubb said:
Here's my mods.
- Custom wood 2nd tier pieces with swivel arms and trolleys to allow top board to slide over bottom board controls.
- Elongated center brace which splits in the middle and allows a wider stance.
Is it the perspective of this pic that's tripping me up, or do you have the Nord sitting well above the crossbar?
I recently bought this stand and I love it, but the crossbar is at exactly the wrong height so that it's in the way of the cable inputs on my Hammond SKX. If you've discovered a way to give the bottom keyboard a bit more vertical clearance, I'd love to know.
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Imo, it's a lot easier to think of it as biii-VII from the raised fourth degree of the relative major.
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Thanks for the ideas and input, folks!
UE claims that they can improve the stereo imaging from the IEM by adjusting the fit, so first order of business is to ship it back and let them try. I wonder if it'd suffice to change the angle of one of the holes a bit? Say, have the right channel bounce off the inside of my ear canal at a different angle so it doesn't interact with the left channel as directly. We'll have to wait and see.
Failing that, I'll start playing with delay and reverb. Of course, the "delay one channel by 3ms" approach bypasses the need for stereo playback entirely (i.e. it would also work when electronically summing to mono).
[One does wonder why they'd charge full price for a "single-sided stereo monitor" if the effect is doomed by physics to be virtually identical to mono. I can't think of any situation where you wouldn't be able to sum at the source, so what's the point of offering separated channels in one unit if there's no real difference?]
20 hours ago, John Tweed said:I have experimented with something similar in order to be able to use stereo (piano) samples in mono. Image you are at your slab piano with speakers, so your ears are equidistant from the speakers. Using a stereo piano sound play middle C - sounds nice. Now you move to the right hand end of the piano, head down, so the left speaker is directly aligned with the right, and you play the note again - still sounds good. Now the speakers are no longer equidistant, but they are coming from the same direction. Now you take the right channel directly into a mono system, apply a short delay (approx. 3ms to roughly equal the distance between the speakers) to the left signal, and then merge them. Now you are hearing a mono signal that sounds as good as the “mono” you simulated by positioning yourself with the speakers in alignment.
I did manage to set up my CP4 in this way - it worked, at least it gave rise to some interesting sounds as the delay was changed. It did not end up being something that I used as the CP4 has plenty of mono pianos already. I have been meaning to go back and experiment a bit more with it, in readiness for the next piano stereo to mono thread.
In your experience, was the effect more or less uniform across the range of the piano? In other words: it works well for middle C; does it work as well for the C three octaves down? Three octaves up?
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Isn't this what a DI box does?
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Not a bad idea, but I do wonder if a small delay on one channel would introduce phase cancellations at some frequencies while mitigating others. Is the "room effect" as simple as a delay between channels, or would other factors be necessary to simulate the walls and such?
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Thanks!
Ideally I'd love a hardware solution that's easy to use when gigging. Bonus if I can rig headphones into it for listening to music as well.
Unfortunately, a Google search for "room simulation pedal" or "room modelling pedal" mostly gives amp sims. As you can imagine, neutrality is a must given that we're dealing with DP's.
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I wonder if it would suffice to apply some subtle, fast, small-room reverb to one of the DP channels (or separately to each of them), and maybe a tiny amount of phase shifting on one of the channels.
On the other hand, if it was that simple, wouldn't everyone do it?
EDIT: the more I think about this, the more baffled I am that the onboard reverb in a DP doesn't usually prevent phase cancellation. When applied subtly to a stereo patch, shouldn't that act as the kind of "room simulation" I'm talking about here? What's missing compared to a real room?
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Yet another thread in what's turning out to be a SMcD Series.
Long story short: I permanently lost the use of my left ear in late 2020, which forced me to learn the hard way about all of the problems that arise when summing stereo sounds into mono. Of course, all of it - mixes changing on recorded music, DP patches sounding lifeless, etc. - is worst through headphone(s), when L + R channels are summed electronically at the source.
However, I've found that it's never a problem for me with external stereo speakers. Even when they're fairly close together (like in my Traynor K4), the fullness of stereo sounds lands in my good ear without anything being noticeably lost or cancelled. As I understand it, this is because of complex physical interactions happening in the matter between the speakers and my ear. The sound waves bounce in unpredictable ways off speaker cases, walls, my head, etc. - so the final sound that arrives at my ear includes both channels, but with enough "room randomness" to smooth out any potential for egregious phase cancellation.
In other words, letting sound waves combine "in the air" produces better results than combining them electronically. With that in mind, I ordered a custom fit "single-sided stereo" IEM from Ultimate Ears. The L + R channels each have separate armatures, all crammed into one earpiece. The hope was that this would be enough physical separation for some "room randomness" to be introduced in my ear canal: an internal, scaled-down version of the phenomenon I experience with my K4.
Unfortunately, this did not turn out to be the case. Out-of-phase signals aren't totally cancelled as they would be with electronic summation, but they end up being so faint that the difference from mono sound is ultimately negligible. Sensaphonics has a similar product that promises compromise-free stereo, but I fear that the physics just aren't on my side. No matter which product I go with, it's a tiny physical separation between channels and a relatively small amount of matter between the source and my eardrum. Maybe there's just no way to introduce enough "randomness" to the sound waves with that setup.
But...the fact remains that I can hear a reasonable stereo image externally, in a room, with my K4. And it has me wondering if the "room" can be simulated.
I'm talking about some intermediate step(s) in a signal path that would introduce a significant degree of phase randomization, maybe a tiny bit of reverberation...whatever's going on between my K4, my walls, and me. You'd put one side of a stereo DP input through that (I think it'd suffice to do only one and leave the other side pure), then route the outputs as normal. What comes out of my single-sided stereo IEM would be both DP channels, but with enough simulated room randomness to keep the full image.
Does such a product exist? Could it be approximated with some combination of effects? What would be involved in the kind of "room simulation" I'm describing here?
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Update/thread necromancy:
Shortly after discovering the Sensaphonics 221, I discovered that Ultimate Ears makes a similar product (i.e. a single, custom-molded IEM with separate armatures for left & right channels). I emailed both to ask some questions. Sensaphonics didn't reply, UE did. After some back-and-forth, I ended up being reasonably satisfied that the UE offering would deliver a well-preserved stereo image to my good ear, and I made the order.
It arrived about three weeks ago and...I was disappointed (read: devastated). I used some internet test audio to verify that out-of-phase signals (i.e. things that disappear when electronically summed to mono) do come through with the earbud. However, they are extremely faint relative to in-phase sounds. As such, in practical applications (listening to music or playing a stereo DP patch), there is no discernable difference between mono and stereo with this thing.
The stereo mix of "Sympathy for the Devil" is my go-to test for these things - the piano should be incredibly prominent when the source device is in stereo, and this is obvious with external speakers. The Ultimate Ears IEM failed this test: the piano is phase-cancelled into near-silence, regardless of the audio mode on the source device. And it makes no difference to the age-old problem of "boxy mono summation" when playing a DP, either.
I'm wondering if they made the "holes" too close together, so that the audio from the left and right channels is summing in the air before hitting my eardrum. Perhaps a few extra millimeters of space, or slightly different angles, would maintain enough channel separation to keep a fuller stereo image (the fact that I can hear the stereo difference through my Traynor K4 suggests that it should be possible to funnel some combination of channels into my ear canal in approximately the right way).
Alternatively, the fit may be off. Getting the impression was more uncomfortable than I expected, so the IEM may have ended up being too "big". The seal is good, but it does seem to sit further out than the ones in the stock photos, and trying to push it in further causes discomfort.
I'm waiting for customer service at UE to get back to me on these issues. Hopefully I can bounce it back to the lab and they can sort it out (I'm approaching the end of the 30-day return period). Failing that, maybe I'll get on the phone with Sensaphonics.
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What is the advantage that a DI box has over, say, just turning down the volume on either the keyboard or the mixer?
My Soundcraft 12FX has line-level TRS inputs; I would think that'd be pretty common on most mixers.
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Reese Wynans would like a word.
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What is the deal with airline food, anyway?
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The ability to move one's left hand back and forth between significant distances at that speed and make sure it lands on the right keys every time has always been awe-inspiring, and somewhat baffling, to me.
Secret of Life - What is Larry Goldings playing here?
in The Keyboard Corner
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Everyone hears an Eb triad, but am I hallucinating a D on top? Like, I'm hearing a whole-step C-D movement in the top voices, but it could be my brain mixing up an overtone or something.