OB Dave

I think the more fundamental issue with the wristbands is people will just order fake ones off Amazon like they do "service animal" doggie vests. Those little CDC cards are trivially easy to forge and suspect people will be forging those as well. I would be a lot less concerned about this if it were was only their own life they were putting at risk. I'm not opposed to requiring vaccinations to embark on certain activities (if you work in construction your employer probably requires you to be current on tetanus shots), I just don't know how it would be administered.

Quick update: Pfizer #2 on Weds, was pretty tired & achey Thursday, today (Friday) I feel like a million bucks and just got back from a bike ride. Seems fairly consistent with what others report. I would suggest planning on some downtime the day after jab #2.

Second Pfizer shot yesterday. Super tired today, achey joints and a mild headache. Nothing too serious. Spent much of the day napping. Feeling better this evening. So happy to see light at the end of the tunnel. Doing some spring skiing with some friends next week. All vaccinated, sharing an indoor space (gasp!) with no masks! So grateful for modern medicine and everyone who hustled to make all this possible. Playing an actual live, outdoor gig in a few weeks. First once since October.

I remember when they came out thinking it was a genius idea (like the Open Labs NeKo.) What was the issue with Receptors? Buggy? Unable to keep up with the pace of software changes? Entirely reliant on their ability to score agreements with software developers with no motivation to provide them with latest versions or even equivalent versions to what they sell directly to customers. Yes to all of that. And it was a horrible software architecture. It was essentially a PC that ran somebody else's BIOS, which would then boot LILO, then boot Linux, which after it finally booted up would then run Wine (open source Windows emulator), and then their own VST host on top of that, and then would act surprised when 99% of VSTs would not run without being specially modified to run on Receptor. Which there was little incentive for VST authors to do. And because the entire thing depended on Other People's Software, it was bound to 32-bit memory limitations and other constraints. The Receptor held so much promise and so utterly failed to deliver on that promise. VST installation was a huge pain, and in the end I paid Muse "Research" to install Ivory and Akoustik Piano. The samples took a long time to load, so switching patches could be super cumbersome. When it worked it sounded great, but all of those accolades go to the VST developers. Using it in a live situation was a white-knuckle experience. If it crashed it took 2-3 minutes to reboot and reload. I managed to unload mine before it had lost all its resale value. Good effing riddance.

Well I once bought a Muse Receptor, and what a joke that instrument turned out to be.

Instead of using an inverter to convert a battery to 120vac only to step it back down to 12 volts DC, why not completely eliminate the middlemen and just run your whole setup off 12 vdc? Go to Costco and buy a Deep Cycle Marine/RV Battery. Cost you about 90 bucks and you wire it up to power your keyboard and amp directly, assuming those both run off 12 vdc. A battery like that will be rated at about 100 amp-hours.

Dave: I assume you're looking for availability on the California My Turn site? The mile range button appears to be broken, so try searching on zip codes 10-20 miles from where you live. In addition, check to see if Ventura County also maintains a vaccine search page. San Diego County has one, and friends have reported finding appointments there that weren't listed on the California page, and vice versa. I forget which, but one of the pharmacies updates its calendar at midnight, and another at either 8am or 9am. So try doing your searches right at one of those times. The good news is there's no downside to delaying the second vaccine a bit and some preliminary evidence that suggests there may be advantages to doing so. edit: BTW, I got mine done at a County of SD Health and Human Services office, and they schedule both appointments at once. Not sure why any location would handle it different.

One of my favorite singer/songwriters is Tim Bluhm of the Mother Hips. He's a pretty prolific songwriter so he has a bunch of solo albums and other collaborations beyond stuff he's done with the Mother Hips. Just about a year ago, when the lockdown first got super serious, he started doing weekly Facebook streams on Friday evenings. He has mastered the form - audio and video quality are great, he sometimes talks about the genesis of some of the songs, sometimes he has guests, sometimes it's just him solo. It's all free, with a virtual tip jar with Venmo and PayPal. Highly recommended. He seems to have found a way to make it work. Here we are a year later, and it's the one stream I do not miss.

Had my first Pfizer shot a week ago yesterday, St. Paddy's Day. I was advised to slug a lot of water, which I did. Absolutely no side-effects. Even poking around my arm it was hard to find the injection site. It was slightly tender there, otherwise I wouldn't even notice without poking around looking for it. Getting my second on the 7th, and I've scheduled a couple down days afternoon just in case that one gets a reaction. I'm so thankful for all the nurses, doctors, scientists, volunteers, and others who made all of this possible in such a short period of time.

Roland A-30 for sure, and I think the A-33 as well. "Higher quality" is subjective obviously, but I gigged with an A-30 for years. It was powered with six AA batteries and would last a long time on a charge. Had good velocity control for a semi-weighted controller. Pretty basic interface.

I mean... that makes sense to me. Taking it down to my bush-league level, if the band is covering something off Exile on Main St, there's lots of things you *could* do, but in my mind the only correct answer is to try to at least cop the vibe of what Nicky Hopkins was doing. What he played was so perfect for those tunes it seems almost blasphemous to stray too far from that. I'll offer a counter-example: a few years ago I went to go see the Last Waltz at New Orleans Jazz Fest. Don Was was the music director and had assembled an absolutely monstrous rotating cast of musicians. This particular night they had Michael McDonald and John Medeski on keyboards. Not gonna lie, I never would have considered myself Michael McDonald fan before but I just know him from his more poppy stuff. He absolutely crushed it. Played beautifully, sang beautifully, he was great. Came away with a much greater appreciation for his talent. John Medeski, on the other hand, reverted to that godawful weeee! errrrrr! gaaaaaaa! screechy bullshit he always does. I will never understand what his deal is. Guy has enormous chops and, in my opinion, just horrific taste. And so it happened - everyone else was there to honor that great body of music, but no, Medeski has to go pee higher on the tree than everyone else and defile the music with his ridiculous atonal bullshit. Save that crap for your own show, buddy. I found it incredibly disrespectful.

I'm OB Dave and I approve of this message. (Actually I had no idea he even had one till somebody forwarded me this video. Pretty cool tho!)

The direct box allows the sound man to take your instrument signal directly to the sound board. There's a bunch more technical details that I'll spare you, but that's the gist of it. So instead of plugging your instrument directly into your amp, you plug you instrument into the DI box, and then plug the DI box into your amp. Your signal goes right through. And the sound man also connects a line to the DI box. So you have a copy of your signal, and the sound man has a copy too. edit: that's weird, MMM replied yesterday but the forum did not show me his reply until after I'd written mine. Some sort of a weird caching issue. Anyway, I'ma leave my ELI5 explanation up too.

I don't know if this plays into the discussion at all, but keep in mind that all of these companies - Reverb, eBay, Amazon, etc - have negotiated their own shipping rates with the various carriers. If you use the shipping offered by the service, you pay a much lower rate than retail. So maybe there was a snafu somewhere in that system for this transaction? As an aside, notifying law enforcement over a $20 misunderstanding is amusing. My guess is it will play out something like this:

Interesting. For me NAMM is all about face time. A curated virtual event just doesn't hold much interest for me.

Many years ago when I had a Receptor, I had Synthogy Ivory and NI Akoustik Piano loaded on it. I forget which of those two it was, but one of them had a "stereo width" control, and I imagine that's how they accomplished this - by varying the mix of M with M+S and M-S. Even worth than piano is strings summed badly to mono. Ugh.

This topic comes up from time to time. The solution for creating the samples is pretty straightforward - mic the piano in M-S, and not only will it sum to mono cleanly, you can dial in any stereo image 'width' you like. I am surprised more manufacturers don"t do this.

I've got some really sad news to report. Legendary Oakland Hammond tech Bob Schleicher has passed away. I never met him in person but talked to him on the phone many times. I suck at tube amp repair, so he'd walk me through some simple things to check for before boxing up a Leslie amp and sending it in. I eventually did have him rebuild three 147 amps for me and I still have a couple of his first-generation solid state Leslie relays and they still work some ~30+ years later. People in the bay area have stories about him coming out to a gig, no matter when or where to do a repair on the spot. He truly was one of a kind. Rest in peace, Bob, you were the best.

Even in stop mode, the Leslie sim colors the sound. Turning off the cabinet emulation is the better way, and you still can use the drive control. I can't explain why the manual says otherwise, but perhaps there was a software change made somewhere along the way.

Yes, it is. I play my Mojo 61 through a real Leslie so I have the rotary effect turned off but I can use the drive level to get a little more crunch at lower volume, and it also squashes the percussion in a pleasing way.

Fun Frakes Fact: When Phish was in LA recording Hoist (1994), they learned that producer Paul Fox lived next to Jonathan Frakes, whose mailbox is cow-shaped and you reach into the cow's nether regions to retrieve your mail. Much amusement. Anyway, they had Frakes come in and record some trombone parts which were unusable. To be fair, they also had the Tower of Power horns on that album so, yeah, hard to compete with that. The album does include a brief, noisy pastiche on the album that made use of Frake's trombone part. The track is called Riker's Mailbox.

How spectacular could these gardens possibly be? click. Holy crap! Yeah, I think spectacular might be under-selling it a bit. Anyway, shame it won't be in the family much longer. That looks like a really special spot. As for Thanksgiving, we're gonna pull the plug on both Thanksgiving and Christmas this year. Not worth the risk. Both of my brothers have teens and young adults that come and go constantly and.. yeah... F that noise. In lieu of Christmas presents I think we should all donate to our local food banks instead. As stated earlier: we're so close to the finish line, let's not blow it now. And in the meantime, numbers are spiking like crazy here in the US.

Everything you describe sounds correct to me. When in organ mode, the Mojo will send Leslie speed change commands, whether issued by the pedal or the control panel as MIDI CC 1. When playing one of the piano voices, the pedal will send MIDI CC 64, which is sustain. When you say Logic is "not seeing" the Leslie commands, are you recording raw MIDI tracks? Or are you trying to control Logic's build in Hammond emulation? Because if its the latter, there's your problem right there. Logic's B3 emulation uses a different CC (I'd have to look it up) and you'd need to remap it to work with the Mojo.

I had heard good things about Anderson Musical Instrument Insurance and bought a policy from them about three years ago. I think their focus is on gigging instruments, but they may have a studio policy as well. Might be worth checking into. I've never had to make a claim, so I have no experience how they are with that.

I love posts like this! Good work, and congrats on your debug & rework. This is pretty ambitious for a first go at SMT. I was really hoping, though, that you were gonna say you found a drop-in replacement for the crappy TRS/XLR connectors that QRS used on the early K-series. A problem they never came clean about until after my K10s were out of warranty.