OB Dave

Are the notes that cut out on the upper manual the same notes that you're playing in the lower manual? Try this: hold a chord in the upper manual and slowly play a scale which passes through those notes in the lower manual. Does the upper manual note release when you release the same note in the lower manual? If so: it sounds like both upper and lower manuals are set to the same MIDI channel. Either that, or the Kawai is actually sending MIDI on the Crumar's upper MIDI channel and not the lower manual. Or maybe both manuals somehow got set to Channel 2? But from your description, it kinda sounds like the MIDI message to release the note in the lower is also releasing the upper, and a MIDI channel collision seems like the most likely explanation. I don't have my Mojo 61 set up right now, but I am guessing you can set the MIDI channels for upper and lower using the Wifi web interface thing. Set them to different MIDI channels, and set the Kawai to use whatever channel you set for lower manual.

Thank you for sharing that. I've basically lived in So Cal for almost all my life, and my first trip to NYC was about a year before the attacks. Why had I waited so long? New York is an amazing place, really like no other. The second visit was about a year after the attacks. They had finally cleared away most of the rubble and there was just a big pit where the towers were. One night we were in a restaurant talking, and apparently it was pretty obviously tourist-talk because a guy at the next table overheard us and turned around and said "Thank you for coming back to New York. Thank you for not forgetting about us." And that hit me hard - how could anyone possibly forget about New York City? And I wondered what his life must have been like. What he'd lost, what had changed for him, how he's holding up. So your story brings some of that to me. Circumstances may differ, but in the end we're all in this together.

Good move. I likely would have skipped it this year. Added plus: it won't be in the middle of ski season.

I mean, that is one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is: if it becomes standardized, it becomes the standard. And I don't want to see the use of these things proliferate.

Thanks, I hate it. I fully understand the need for an easily-sourced, low-profile connector, but TRS connectors - especially 2.5mm - are the spawn of Satan. This is an enormous failing on the part of the MMA and all around a generally terrible idea. Or would you like to know how I really feel?

Sir, this is a keyboard forum, not a guitar or drum forum.

Yeah, so I saw.

Apparently the Scherzer deal still isn't inked. It's been "very close to a deal" since last night. Dunno what the holdup is but as of this writing there's less than two hours to go.

A horn player calls Buddy Rich's house, asks to speak with Buddy. His wife answered the phone and said "I'm sorry, but Buddy passed away last week." Calls back the next day, asks for Buddy. "I'm sorry, but Buddy died last week." Every day he does this, day after day, and eventually Buddy's wife recognizes it's the same caller. He calls again, ask for Buddy, and she said "I've told you at least a dozen times now, Buddy Rich is dead, why do you keep calling?" The horn player says "I know, I just like hearing it."

This is correct. This certification process is expensive and most be done according to the standards of every country you wish to export to. Europe is harmonized, but I'm not sure if the UK is part of that. In addition, in the Americas we run on 120V 60 Hz, Europe is 230V 50 Hz, Japan is (I think) 100V 50Hz, and so on. Oh and everyone uses different plugs. A reliable power supply is deceptively difficult to design well, and it's extremely cumbersome for small manufacturers to design ones for every market, and do all the certification testing for those markets. Wall-warts are made by companies who specialize in this, and as a manufacturer, so long as you supply a wall-wart that's certified in the market you're selling in, you don't need to worry about doing any safety testing, it's already been done for you. For rack mounted gear, the Furman Pluglock is your friend. I agree that those barrels connecters are a scourge on humanity tho.

You're only as good as your last gig. I occasionally take solace in the following: "All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it's like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you're making stuff, what you're making isn't so good. It"s not that great. It"s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it"s not that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you're making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit. Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn't as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that. And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you're going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you're going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you're making will be as good as your ambitions. I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I"ve ever met. It takes awhile. It"s gonna take you a while. It"s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that." -- Ira Glass, on the creative process

He was already huge when he did the Super Bowl performance in the rain, but that blew me away. Blew a lot of people away.

I've owned three Mark Is and none of them played all that well. My most recent one, I did the bump mod on, and that helped a little, but still not great. The best one I've ever played was Chick Corea's Mark V which we had in the Gulbransen shop for a few days, getting the MIDI strip upgraded. Jim Wilson had gone through that piano and it played like butter, utterly amazing.

I wish them the best of luck. Considering how the previous CEO had a truly remarkable capacity to antagonize suppliers, vendors, customers, and the fan base, I don't see how the new management could do things any worse.

Should be, if it's a pure sine wave converter. Those are considerably more expensive than a modified sine wave converter, which will have all sorts of harmonics which could well couple into the audio output, or more likely interact with a keyboard's switching mode power supply and create all sorts of noisy havoc.

When I had my Rhodes I used to play it through a Mesa Boogie Mark I Reissue. The clean channel is quite similar to a Fender Twin but the Boogie has a single 12" speaker and weighs at least 20 lbs less.

The Padres are resurgent this week! Last night's finish was another crazy one. Infield utility Ha-Seong Kim came into the game after all-around rockstar Short Stop Fernando Tatis Jr. had to leave due to injury. Kim's been a beast on defense playing 2B, SS, and 3B but he's struggled at the plate. He was a reliable ~0.300 hitter in the KBO with a ~ 0.400 OBP but hasn't acclimated yet to MLB pitching, or the weird new ball, and maybe just general culture shock. Game is tied up, bottom of the 8th, comes to the plate, and crushes a two-run go-ahead home run into the upper deck of the Western Metals building. The roar from the stadium was audible miles away across the bay in Coronado. A few minutes later, top of the 9th, 1 out and 1 on, a shot gets drilled right to short stop. Kim makes the double-play that ended the game.

Hahaha, somehow I missed that thread. We can let this one die then.

Who are you cheering for? How's your team doing? The Padres have been really fun these past couple seasons. Started the year off with a bang, had two awful road trips and went into a bit of a funk. Now they're home for a little while and won the last two games which is doing wonders for team morale. I usually go to a couple games every season but I bought a 20-game pack this year (which is really only 12 games since California just opened back up). First game I attended was Thursday which ended with a walk-off home run against the Red. Apparently the roar from the stadium was audible for miles. The Angels' Shohei Ohtani has been fun to watch, and thankfully we haven't had to face him yet this season. And if there's any Mets fans out there, I am in absolute awe of Jacob de Grom. I hope his shoulder gets better soon. I'm also glad we won't have to face him again in the regular season. Oooof.

Just to clarify - the specs do not have to be the identical. You want the voltage, the connector, and the connector's polarity to be the same. The rated power can be higher, if that's what's available. There's no harm in replacing a 500 mA rated wall wart with one that rated at 750 mA, or 1A, etc.

My 2015 MBP is holding up fine (2TB OWC SSD, 16 GB RAM) so I can hold off for awhile. Two USB-C ports is pretty stingy. The rumor is the M2 version will bring back magsafe, the SD slot, have more ports, and support more RAM. To me that's well worth waiting for.

I would check the alignment of the motor stack before I suspected the bearings. Those bearings are massively over-spec'd and probably will last another 500 years.

I strongly suspect that the temperature requirements for the Pfizer vaccine don't need to be as stringent as they are. Keep in mind, all of these companies were in a race against the clock, and the FDA process is long and cumbersome and they wanted to maximize their likelihood of success on the first attempt. It's quite likely that lower dosages would have been equally effective, and that the storage requirements didn't need to be as stringent, and so on/ But since that's what they went through FDA trials with, that's what they need to use in deployment. For the time being, anyway. The mRNA technology is pretty impressive and it could be as revolutionary as the Salk vaccine was.

Something else to keep in mind: the VST format is very Windows-centric. It's basically a .DLL with extensions, which is why you don't see VSTs supported in non-Windows environments. In order for there to be a hardware-agnostic universal sound engine platform, somebody would need to come up with a hosting environment that isn't tied to a specific operating system. Which I think it totally doable. The hard part would be convincing enough publishers to sign on to it, and it would need some sort of DRM so that publishers could be confident they weren't going to get ripped off.

So you're saying it changes the game?