OB Dave

It's gorgeous but I bet the utility bills are brutal.

Hey, I was at this time! I came up from SD and caught the first two games of the Giants series. Wasn't too thrilled with the outcome BUT it was my first time finally making it up to ̶P̶a̶c̶B̶e̶l̶l̶ ̶S̶B̶C̶ ̶A̶T̶&̶T̶ Oracle Park and what a great ballpark. I had heard so many good things about it, but it did not disappoint. Was fun taking CalTrain up from the peninsula too. (I always take the trolley to Petco park).

Oh, I know how it is. I get it. Best wishes to you, Bruce!

I think that descending string line during the chorus is pretty key to the song.

I want to hear Bobby Cressey play at the World Series. ⚾

When using Gorilla glue, only apply the glue to one surface and gently moisten the other surface with water (or saliva). Make a big difference.

This is a good combination. I have an NS2 compact that I bought in 2011 and it continues to serve me well. Odd that somebody commented on poor build quality, that surprised me greatly. I've owned both the NS2 and an Electro 2 and both of them had very good build quality. (Crumar Mojo 61, not so much!) But, the Mojo Hammond completely blows away the Nord for sound quality and expressiveness. I usually bring both but in a pinch for smaller gigs I can get by just fine with the Nord. A huge advantage of the Nord is the large and ever-expanding sound library. There are lots of pianos to choose from, they're all free to download, and you can swap them in and out reasonably easily to audition what works for you. The keyboard action is very much a matter of taste. I've gotten used to the NS2's action. No it's not the same as a weighted keyboard, but the stiffness of the springs makes it entirely workable to get decent dynamics out of it. And it's not a very heavy instrument. It's nice having a nice knobby keyboard. Once you have your patches set up you really don't need to do much menu-diving in realtime. The fixed split points are an oddity. I've managed to make it work, but I don't use all that many splits. On the other hand I find it really useful to have two sound engines going in two different "panels," and using an expression pedal to crossfade between them, or to control the volume of a string pad behind an acoustic piano.

All this Beatles talk and no mention of I Want You? /s 🤣

And here I just made a joke about threadjacking in another topic but... I gotta ask.... do tell!

I keep returning to Alpine Duet, brewed just about 30 miles east of me. It's very well balanced and just about perfect. When I am finally caught, convicted, and executed for first-degree thread-jacking, I would like my last meal to be a Roberto's carne asada burrito and an Alpine Duet.

As an aside, I can very highly recommend Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir. Same guy who wrote The Martian. I really don't want to say all that much about the book - the less you know, the better - but it touches on some of what we're saying here and it's a really fun read. I ended up reading it twice because I devoured it on the first go and a month or so later I wanted to savor it.

As much as it's fun (also terrifying) to think about aliens visiting us, I'm skeptical for many reasons. As Sagan and others have noted, it would require an extremely advanced civilization to overcome time/distance/relativistic speeds to even make it here, and would such a species even find us interesting? Also, I find it telling that we have all this grainy UFO footage from the 1950s, yet now that everyone is walking around with 4K video cameras in their pockets, we should be swimming in 4K video footage of UFOs, Bigfoot, the Yeti, Nessie, and so on. And we're not. It does seem exceedingly unlikely that Earth has the only life in the universe, but it also seems exceedingly unlikely that we'll ever meet an alien civilization.

OK, so I just installed Moises and wow, very impressive. I was very easily able to isolate the drum and bass tracks for Hey A-Pocky Way and Cissy Strut (which few drummers play correctly).

I'm a big fan of the 2015 MBPs. These are the high water mark for Intel Macs for me. They still have lots of ports and the SD Card reader, MagSafe, no butterfly keyboard, and no touch bar. I have a 15 and a 13. Still running Mojave on those because I still have Adobe CS6. My main machine these days is a 16" M1Max MacBook Pro, also with 64GB of RAM but a 2TB SSD. To perfectly honest, I overbought. Most of the time its clamshelled driving two 32" LG monitors. I should have gone with a 14 and maybe less RAM, but oh well. It's heavy but when I do travel that 16" display is pretty gorgeous. I tend to get at least a decade out of my Macs so I'm sure this one will serve me well for a long time. To answer OPs question, I would look into a current Air or MBP with at least 1 TB of SSD. RAM oddly doesn't seem as crucial with these machines, they seem to use it quite efficiently. You might also see what's available at the refurbished Mac page. You can save a few hundred bucks and still get an as-new machine with the full Apple warranty, and eligible for AppleCare+. I would not trust the refurbished machines Amazon sells. https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished/mac

That was the origin of the Rhodes piano, actually.

Really varies a lot from person to person. I've used it occasionally for about 10-15 years. I really only had a bad experience with Ambien-CR which is the controlled release stuff. Left me with a strange hangover in the morning. The generic Zolpidem tabs come in 5mg and 10mg and after some experimentation I've determined that 5mg is enough for me almost all the time. For context, it takes me about a year to go through a bottle of 20 5mg tabs. When I do have trouble sleeping, I'll get up, take 5mg, read for a bit, and then turn the light off. On very rare occasions if after an hour or so nothing happens I'll get up and take another 5mg. I have had no issues with sleepwalking, sleep eating or another of the other weird things that can happen. But really it varies. If another person shares your bed, communicate with them if you're gonna give the stuff a go.

Apropos of all the talk about excessive volume.... I got my hearing checked on Tuesday. I have noticed that since quitting playing music regularly my tinnitus seems to have gotten better. Test consisted of three phases - listening for tones in each ear independently at half-octave intervals from 250 Hz to 8 kHz; listening to speech and repeating back what was heard; and a Hearing In Noise Test (HINT) where the speech comprehension test is accompanied with an increasing level of cocktail-party background noise. I actually did pretty well. I have some hearing loss at 4 kHz. My left ear is still within normal range, right ear is slightly below normal. Speech comprehension was scored at 100%

Wow, those are great. Please let us know if they work out for you!

I was losing the plastic feet on on mine and I ended up replacing them with my balls. Wait, let me try that again. There is a fantastic hardware store here in San Diego (Marshall's Industrial Hardware off Miramar, for ppl in the area) and they have every kind of fastener imaginable there. I brought one of my K&M feet there, sized it up to determine the thread size and pitch (my apologies, I no longer remember what they were, other than that they were metric). They also have little drawers of weird parts, including this black, solid plastic sphere about the size of a ping pong ball, that has a threaded metric stem. So I threw out the remaining K&M feet and have been going balls out ever since. They work great, and I've yet to encounter a stage so uneven that I couldn't get the wobble out of my stand. If you don't have a fancy hardware store near you, you might at least figure out what the thread pitch is [or maybe somebody here will post it] and see if something like this is available online at McMaster-Carr, Grainger, etc.

Many large venues run the house in mono. A stereo keyboard signals summed to mono will sound terrible due to phase cancellation. A large venue will usually have their own DI boxes, but I always carry my own anyway.

This is reminiscent of the "Leaving the Band" thread from a couple years ago. I had a standing gig that I quit in October of 2019. Averaged 5+ times per month for years and the pay was good. It was fun until it wasn't and eventually I left, then Covid came and gigs dried up anyway. I still sub in occasionally for my replacement. Subbing in every now and then is fun but to be honest I thought I was going to miss playing regularly more than I actually do. So, I'm fine with it. Played in bands for 30+ years and I think the itch has been scratched. At least for now. If my my opinion changes and the right opportunity comes along, I'm open to seeing where that leads. But I'm good for now.

When we used to cover Soul Man, that "plink!" was the highlight for me. I would consider most of these "solos" to be "breaks" but what the heck, it's all in fun anyway. Which brings me to my current favorite. We're covering this tune in a new project and the Joe Sample Wurli breaks are just too damn tasty.

First keyboard I ever bought new! Mine was an 88-key SG-1D. Had a hard case made for it and gigged with it for years. Definitely a great piano in its day, and remarkably it used 12-bit samples. ROM was still expensive back in those days. Heavy as hell, leaden action. The other 3 voices were not great. I had a couple of the plug sound cards too, and they were even less great.

I used to have a MicroKorg and I made a simple shelf out of plywood, with wood moulding around the edges to hold it in place. I screwed a microphone flange on the bottom in the center. So I could just stick the board on a mic stand, put the MicroKorg on top et voila! Cheap and easy stand for it and it worked pretty well. Sorry for the terrible photo from the edge of a wide-angle shot, but this is the only one I have handy.