Adan

I was sorry they ditched the 44. My 64 is a bit difficult to move, not so much because of the weight (53 lbs) but also the bulk, and I don't have as much cushion in my spine as I used to back when I was hauling a real rhodes. Can't believe I'm writing this, but I may decide to sell my 64. It's just not getting that much use, and now that we have a piano in the living room, it doesn't even get much playing at home. With the increase in prices on new ones, I think I could almost break even in the used market.

All By Myself feels like it's at the core of the golden age of popular music on AM radio. I sat down and played it this morning, what an exquisitely crafted tune.

This one's more interesting, though I'm still confounded about what we, the viewer, is supposed to take away from it. With enough talent and fresh ideas you can turn a pop hit into a Snarky Puppy fusion thing. But then it's probably no longer a pop hit.

I love this one, because most practicing lawyers understand the bar exam merely filters out some of the idiots but has almost nothing to do with being a good lawyer.

The context is that people believe what they want to believe. I personally believe this forum is a trojan horse for the Australians to take over the USA. It starts innocently enough, with crowd-funded tours by Lachy Doley. Next thing you know we're all eating vegemite and pretending to like it. Nothing you say can make me believe this isn't happening.

Stuff like this is going to be common going forward. More likely unintended consequences than deliberate censorship, but the mechanism is opaque and people will assume the worst. Hearings will be held, apologies offered, correction will be followed by over-correction. The future is grim.

I wrote a lot about the Soul in the first thread devoted to that topic. It would be better to have one Soul thread instead of two, so people wanting to learn about it can find that info in one place.

A lot of what you say here is valid, but GRollins is not a provocateur. A benefit of being on this forum for many years is familiarity with other long time posters. It’s clear some people in this thread just relish a food fight. G is not one of them. For reasons I can’t understand, Beato has become a toxic subject. Easy enough not to click on those threads going forward. It’s hot as though I need these threads to be aware of Beato vids. They’re ubiquitous in my YT feed.

That's not even debatable. It's the dffierence between proficiency and genius. Anyone can become proficient by putting in enough effort. But one can imagine an audience in 1931 getting a kick out of seeing him perform. Never mind the Great Depression!

Unlistenable. I don't know who the narrator is, and don't care to find out, but he reminds me of the people I'd randomly run into living in San Franciso in the 2010's who'd make me think "what the hell happened to this City?" I get that it's early days and this might be a stepping stone to something more interesting. I'll wait. Edit: after thinking about it some more, "unlistenable" is too harsh. "uninteresting" more accurate. Makes me think of when there's a jazz band playing in a dream and in your dream mind you know it's a jazz band, and the music sounds vaguely jazzy, but it's also way off because of course your unconscious mind assembles things weirdly.

I've been trying to figure out why I even care enough to post several times in this thread. I've watched a few of his videos and decided that while interesting, it's just not a good use of my time. So fine, I don't have to watch. I'm certainly not trying to take down Beato, who is one of the better things happening in the overall landscape of musicians trying to make a buck on YouTube. I think it's the same reaction I have whenever the mindless algorithms of social media platforms latch onto something good and blow it out of proportion. It's like our value system gets distorted and I feel the need to counteract that force. I have a similar reaction to Taylor Swift . . . yeah, she's good, but so are a lot of other women singer-songwriters. Yet I'm supposed to buy into the idea that Taylor is a hundred times better than these other very talented people. Let's lower her pedestal a bit and give other pop geniuses a bit more of our attention. These thought processes always lead me back to Voltaire's admonition to "tend to your own garden." Becoming another cranky person screeching into the ceaseless winds of the internet is not going to make me happier. That said, if Beato can interview Taylor, I probably will have to check it out.

That's what I was trying to say, you just said it more better. I'm a little confused by attaching the label "educator" to Beato. He's educated, he has opinions, and he shares them. That's true of a lot of people. I'll save the term "educator" for people who actually work at educational institutions, just because otherwise that term starts to lose meaning. There's an implication being thrown around here that if you don't give Beato every ounce of support that you can, you're disrespecting musical educators. That's a non sequitar. The vast majority of musical educators are not monetizing themselves on YouTube. I'd call Beato a "popularizer," and popularizers certainly serve a purpose as a gateway to serious education. He's doing good stuff. At the same, there's no need to exaggerate his goodliness.

Another annoying thing about social media is, for reasons I truly don't comprehend, it seems to force people into binary positions. So, either you think Beato is the greatest thing that ever happened to music, or you're a "hater." I mean, really? So all this time spent listening and reading just erases our brains ability to tolerate ambiguity and nuance? Jerry Seinfeld has a bit about this in his new Netflix special, where he talks about everything is either "great" or it "sucks." Seinfeld, by the way, is still great.

I'm with you on being gobsmacked by the absurdity of this. If the act of interviewing a musician is itself a step removed from the reality of making music, how many steps removed are we now, with the interviewer reacting to a news article about himself. I didn't watch it, so maybe Beato drops some profundities that make me sound like an idiot, but I'm betting my own discretionary free time that he didn't. To be clear, it isn't Beato that's absurd. Beato is a good interviewer and a good human being. He's just riding this wave of popularity and why shouldn't he. The absurdity is in how social media works, with the # of views interpreted as indicative of quality is some sort of objective manner. So Beato isn't just a good interviewer, he's 100 times better than anyone else. Resistance is futile. All I can do is decide how to spend my own time.

There's a world of difference between the action on the Legend and the Legend Soul.

Even if you accept the (absurd) premise that music is a competition, any discussion that compares Nicky Hopkins and Greg Phillinganes is too broad to be useful. Hopkins was a piano player who people would hire to sound like Nicky Hopkins. Phllinganes a multi-keyboardist would could (can) play anything with anybody. One, a distinctive and bespoke musical personality, the other a monster player of unrivaled talent and versatility. Fortunately, there is no need to decide which is "better." I get it, though. A "greatest" discussion is just an excuse to shoot the shit on a topic we love. Nobody gets hurt, and maybe a few of us get inspired to listen to someone new or relisten to an old favorite. To me, Hopkins has one of the most distinctive piano "voices" in the history of pop music. Hopkins always emphasized soulfulness over technical fireworks. He and Brian Auger (rock? greatest? who cares . . .) have been my north stars for decades and still are.

The Valente was a stab at a wurly-like electromechanical that originally sold for $3,000 and now is listed for $3,500 on the Valente website (out of stock!). As far as I can tell, it didn't catch on. Also, though it sounds more like a wurly than it does anything else, it doesn't sound much like a wurly. But the price is a data point that illustrates an affordable electromechanical instrument can be produced. Someone could disagree on the grounds that, a) the wurly mechanism is more complicated and therefore has to be more expensive, and b) Valente is not an example of a business model that actually worked. Fair enough. But it would be great to a company with more resources not just try to replicate the wurly but rather think outside the box and produce a new electromechanical keyboard that has its own unique dynamic and inspiring feel under the fingers. That is, after all, the spirit in which the rhodes and wurly were invented.

Such a great tune in so many ways. Why do I keep forgettin’ about it?

I'm having trouble coming to terms with the fact that I'm contributing to a thread about the deletion of a thread about an interview of a musician. Where, exactly, did my life go so off the rails?

Rick Beato: the greatest musician interviewer of our generation?

I can only talk on this subject while cradling a double album jacket with pungent little green leaves spread over it. And I haven't done that since 1989.

If the feel of multi-contacts is important, also consider the Viscount Soul. I haven't played an XK5 so can't compare it to the Soul, but I can compare the Soul to a real Hammond: it's a pretty good approximation of the multi-contact feel.

Didn't know about Rai until right now. This is a real Keyboard Corner moment . . . the reason I hang out here!

It is brilliant stuff. I've watched every video from Louis Cole and knower. But usually only once. Almost paradoxically, I find it inspiring and yet have no desire to put it in my playlist. Like a lot of visual art that I enjoy in a museum but would never put on my wall at home.

It's solid keyboard-driven pop. I'd love to see what Jordan Rudess could do with it.