Josh Paxton

I currently own only one analog synth: a Moog Subsequent 37, which is great. If I were to get one more and money were no object, the OB-X8 would pretty much make all my youthful synth dreams come true.

Having spent significant time trying to cop both, and having way more success with the former than the latter, I concur. BTW, I forget where, but I'm pretty sure I also heard Grusin playing something that showed a credible Henry Butler influence at some point.

In the early '90s, when I was first studying both jazz and computers, I wondered if any given musician's improvisational style could be boiled down to what note they were likely to play next given the notes they'd just played, the harmonic structure of the tune, tempo, length of the improvisation so far, etc. I guess we're all about to find out. Honestly I don't think it will be very long at all until we can tell a chatbot "Create a 4.6-minute video of the Oscar Peterson trio with Ray Brown and Ed Thigpen in 1964, playing a swing version of the Prince song 'Kiss' at 200bpm. The environment is a crowded jazz club in Copenhagen. Black and white film footage shot from four cameras", and the result will be effectively indistinguishable to anyone apart from serious, hardcore Peterson scholars, and serious, hardcore film scholars.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: if every '90s jam band had been required to thoroughly check out TOP before playing their first gig, we as a society could have skipped over a whole lot of unnecessary silliness. Also, Chester is a more patient and forward-thinking player than I will ever be.

He played "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" at different tempos, but this "grown folks' tempo" is my favorite.

Also, I have a love/hate relationship with the "Ray" movie, and the hate portion is entirely due to the piano playing. At first I was prepared to forgive the inaccurate playing in it like I do with every movie. But then shortly before it came out, I read 3 or 4 different interview with Jamie Foxx, and in all of them he made a very big deal out of the fact that he had learned all the piano parts, so that when pianists saw his hands onscreen, they'd be playing the right notes. So that was one of the things I was looking forward to about the movie. Then I saw it, and the opening shot – the very first thing you see – shows his hands on the keys playing the opening riff to "What'd I Say" – which is a pretty damn easy riff to hear and to play. And instead of the actual notes – E-B-B-D-E – you saw Jamie's hands playing E-A-A-B-C#. I was embarrassed for him, and that feeling never let up. What's more, I later learned that if I had been living in New Orleans while the movie was being filmed there, through people I knew and connections I had, I probably could have gotten the gig as the piano coach he clearly needed. Not that I'm bitter.

I have a bit of experience as a "piano hand double" in film and TV – one of each. For the film, part of my duties included coaching the actor I was doubling for on how to hold himself and move in the shots where he was pretending to play, but his hands weren't visible. He had never played piano, and possibly no instrument at all (I no longer recall). I mean, he couldn't even play "Hot Cross Buns" with one finger. So getting him to even hold himself and move his body in a halfway convincing manner turned out to be a bit of a challenge, but he eventually got it well enough. My first tactic was to suggest that he just hit random keys without worrying about what it sounded like, but that made him too self-conscious since it sounded completely chaotic. They ended up having the piano tech mute the strings of the piano as much as possible, so it sounded like just a series of dull thuds. That worked well enough to do the job. The TV show was an episode of "NCIS: New Orleans," which I still haven't seen. But the film was a 2022 thriller with Ben Affleck called "Deep Water," which turned out to be, IMO, a rather awful movie. (Quick plot summary: terrible people behaving terribly. More thorough summary: terrible but attractive people behaving terribly while being attractive.) And I'm reasonably sure I would have felt that way about it even if they had included my name in the credits, which they did not. Apparently the piano hand double is not as important as the snail wrangler, whose name they did include, Yes, I'm serious.

I watched it last night, and apart from the singers, I was left wondering what musicians played on the track. So I looked it up. Answer: J.R. Robinson on drums, and if memory serves, roughly 6 or 7 keyboardists, including Louis Johnson on synth bass. You know, just in case you forgot it was 1985... The thing I'm most intrigued by was the passing reference to Ray Charles recording his own "gospel" version of the song. Now THAT is something I'd like to hear, if it's out there to be found. The whole thing reminded me of this exchange between my 14-year-old self and my mom, as the song played on the radio one evening... ME: Who's the guy at the end of this who sounds like Eddie Murphy doing Buckwheat? MY MOM: What do you mean? ME: Near the end of the song, it sounds like Eddie Murphy singing like Buckwheat, but I don't think it is. MOM: I don't know what you're talking about. ME: I'll show you when it comes up... Here it is. VOICE IN THE SONG, SOUNDING LIKE EDDIE MURPHY AS BUCKWHEAT: Dere's a toice we ma-kin', we tay-vin' ahh own libes. It too we make a bi-tuh day, dus' oo an' mee! MOM: That's Bob Dylan! ME: Oh. Really? MOM: Yes! He doesn't sound anything like Buckwheat! ME: Umm, yeah, he really does. Mom was offended. And while I obviously have far more awareness of and respect for Bob Dylan now than I did then, I nonetheless stand by my assessment.

Oh, and my biggest unanswered question: why bring up Stanley Clarke and then give everyone a solo but him, including the other bass player??

My own thought on this... Most pleasant surprise: Lita Ford. What she played was spot-on perfect for that moment in that context from that performer. Person whose overall demeanor most screams "I owed someone a favor and/or was blackmailed into being here": John Entwistle. Most perfect encapsulation of the player's personality: Joe Walsh, making his spot as ridiculous as the situation warranted by just doing one giant slide, in a musical articulation of "Fuck it, let's just get this silliness over with." Overall MVP: shoulder pads.

Your sig line is especially relevant here. "It needs a Hammond. And another Hammond. And a shitty Hammond patch on a keytar."

I don't think I've seen this posted here before. While it's only tangentially related to our interests, it warrants discussion simply for the powerhouse keyboard section consisting of Gregg Allman on B3, James Ingram on [checks notes] another B3, and [checks notes again, does a double take, looks one more time just to be sure, checks for signs of a stroke, then hesitantly continues] Donnie Osmond on keytar, set to a shitty B3 patch. There is much to unpack here.

Not only that, but they're camouflaged well enough that I didn't even think they were there. Whoops!

I was introduced to his genius in the 8th grade, when my school chorus started learning "The Twelve Days After Christmas" for our Christmas concert. We loved it. Then like two days before the concert, we were told that we had to scrap the song because some uptight parent had complained. Adding insult to injury, it was replaced with the original, stodgy, insipid, inhumanely tedious "Twelve Days of Christmas." I never found out who that uptight, meddling, puritanical busybody parent was, which is probably for the best. Some day I may find it in my heart to forgive them. Today is not that day. RIP, PDQ.

Count me among those for whom the size and weight are instant deal-breakers. The new sounds and new bells and whistles seem nice, and if I were looking for a DP strictly for home studio use, I might be tempted. But as a gigging board it's a non-starter. Also, I wonder how many of the synth sounds will really be useful on a board with no pitch/mod wheels or aftertouch? The thing I'm most curious about is whether the "Nutube analog tone" will give it the same flavor that the tube in the SV series provided, which is the thing that's kept so many of us going back to those boards.

The one time I attended and performed there, I found out after the fact that he had been checking out my performance. I'm really glad I didn't know that at the time, or else I absolutely would have choked.

So it's a cheap controller connected to the guts of a Reface, with a handmade shell that required an ungodly amount of time and effort? Whatever floats his boat, I guess...

When I was learning Chick Corea's "Got a Match" just a few years ago, there was one passage where I was having trouble finding a fingering I liked. So I thought I'd see if I could find video of Chick playing it to see how he tackled it. That was when I learned the secret: Chick only ever played the tune on a KX5, and the mini keys made that particular passage way easier to reach. I ended up using his fingering and eventually got used to the stretch, but it took some time.

The "Flashlight" synth bass. 'Nuff said.

When I did this in my cover band days, I too used the same sound for the intro riff and the pads under the verse, split with a whistle-y square wave sound for the solo. I played the solo line with my left hand, while keeping the main lick going with my right. Initially I had the whistle sound on the high end and would reach over, simply because the pitch ranges made it easier to set up that way. Eventually I stopped being lazy and set up a split with that sound on the bottom, which made that part simpler to execute... but then I realized I didn't like it as much. Reaching over with the left hand was a Stupid Keyboardist Trick that non-players found impressive, so I went back to doing it that way. Also, after my band had been playing the song for a few months and the arrangement had started to "evolve," I had to have the following conversation with the band leader/guitarist... Me: Hey, I was wondering if we could go back to playing the old version of "Separate Ways." Him: What do you mean? What old version? Me: The version where the guitar doesn't wheedle all over the keyboard solo. Him: There's a keyboard solo? Me: Yeah. The part after the guitar solo, where it repeats the intro riff and then there's that little keyboard melody. Him: Oh. I never really thought about that, but okay. Oh, and for the record... I have played the song at that location – Mardi Gras World in New Orleans, where they store the floats when they're not in use. Did I mount a keyboard to the wall just for the occasion? No. Did I give it serious consideration? Absolutely.

And let me guess: he used that entire refrigerator full of gear to play a pad sound?

Thank goodness they've finally added that acoustic bass/trombone layer that players have been clamoring for.

Ah, googling that phrase brings up a bunch of resources, thanks!

Wow, you're right. That's a perfectly obvious feature that I managed to miss entirely. Thanks for pointing it out.

I've been messing around with a scale you can use over a dominant 7 chord, and since I'm sure I'm nowhere near the first person to mess around with it, I was wondering if it had an established name. It's an altered scale, but with the addition of a natural 6. So over a C7 it would be: C, C#, D#, E, F#, G#, A, Bb. If you take the shape formed by starting on any note, skipping two, playing the next one, skipping two more, and playing the next one, you get the following upper structure triads: By shifting around between those upper structures, you can get some pretty nice, juicy sounds. I actually derived the scale by deconstructing a Bill Evans lick where, over that C7 shell voicing, he played G#, A, F#, and G# triads before resolving to Fm. It occurs to me that it's closely related to what's commonly called the "Barry Harris 6 diminished scale," i.e. a major scale with the addition of a flat 6. This is the same idea, applied to a melodic minor scale and moved up a half step. That is, this scale is a C# melodic minor scale, but with the addition of a flat 6 (the A natural). I'm only passingly familiar with Barry's approaches to the 6 diminished scale, so I don't know if he dealt with this idea. If anyone does know, I'd be interested to find out. Or, for that matter, if it's been talked about in other places.