Piktor

Hilarious and astute. I was fortunate to teach in a community where parent support was high, so I stuck around...for 32 years (without one window 😬). Parents make a huge difference. Fortunately, I really enjoyed teaching kids of that age, though sometimes work-gig-family balance was a challenge. I wonder how YOU do it. The boy in this video seems to have good instincts for improvisation.

Ah! Thanks David. Good band.

I enjoyed that! Got to love learners. While that was my world for a long time, as a Canadian I had to check to see what the protocols for the American national anthem are. I don’t know why the boy didn’t just grab the cymbal and keep going. That was a nice improvised move, I guess. I loved the kid’s focus before the mishap and the eye contact thing with the bass drum player is awesome. Thanks for starting my day off with a laugh CyberGene.

Thank you ShadowMan. Hey, since this thread re-emerged, I thought that maybe I should reveal what I decided to do with the M101 cabinet. Just to quickly recap, my dad built a great chopped organ cabinet for me in 1975 and the organ guts have resided there ever since. At the time that we did the transplant into the new cabinet I decided to preserve the original 1966 cab, thinking that when I became the young geezer that I am now I would have the original organ restored. (How little we know when we are young.) After some 46 years, I was close to chopping the cab up and offering up the nice pieces to someone who was not as nervous around power tools as I am. ("Count your fingers. Are there still ten?") I got lots of good advice here on our forum last year and I got no takers for the cabinet or the wood. As winter began to tighten its grip and I turned my labors back to indoor matters, I realized that one of my problems in my house was a shortage of shelving in the basement. Though I know that sentiment is illogical, I have to admit that I felt a bit guilty doing this. At least now I have a nice sturdy place to store some tools.

The first recording that I heard from David Sancious was a piece titled Piktor's Metamorphosis. I loved David's approach to music and his creamy Minimoog leads and I like the idea of transformation. The song title comes from a Herman Hesse story, but I was not fancy enough to know that. My wife and friends laughed when I revealed my online name, because it makes me sound like a person who wears a tinfoil hat. Piktor is actually Albanian for "painter" and that feels right to me. Avatar: It comes from a plastic ID card sleeve that I bought in the gift shop in the Tate Modern Art museum in London. I think that it was made for children, but it made me laugh, so I had to have it.

The Minimoog does a particular thing that is beautiful. As part of a transaction for a friend in the late 1970s, I actually owned one for a short two weeks. I have long dreamed of owning one permanently. At current prices I doubt that will ever come to pass, so this new release caught my attention. I listened to some of the Cherry Audio demos that people posted on You Tube and I get the impression that there are a bunch of Youtubers who have no idea what an actual Minimoog does best. The Mini shines as a monophonic lead synth and a synth bass. I am hearing some folks making cheesy poly sounds that seem to have nothing much to do with the Mini's beauty. Have any of you found a great demo that shows this virtual instrument making some of the iconic sounds that we came to love from the seventies? Does anyone have an opinion as to how the CA version compares to Moog's own Minimoog IOS app?

Like Tom, I have always used the foot switch on the combo preamp whenever I used my actual Leslie, but I also made a separate foot switch that stops the rotors too, because the preamp pedal only had chorale and tremolo. I want access to stopped rotors. When I use a Ventilator I use a half moon switch if I am also playing pedals. If I am not playing pedals, I prefer to use the Vent’s remote switch set to momentary switching. I do a lot of bursts of touch and release, because I mostly like the sound of the Leslie ramping up or down and prefer to use prolonged game show speed (an ancient reference) on certain things. I knew a player who had his Leslie momentary foot switch set so that the Leslie defaulted to tremolo when he was not touching the switch. He got chorale only while his foot stayed on the switch. I got to play a set on his rig once and that backwards wiring took some getting used to. (Hey RH, if you’re out there, cheers!)

I can imagine that the source would be a problem. Nevertheless, it looks like a good solution and the wheels appear to be full sized. My MCS2 is getting pretty old, so I was interested to see that there something like the Atemp out there. I think that I have been a bit hard on pitch benders over the years. Thanks for the info!

Hey Greg, nice streamlined rig. I saw your pic and noted that I have used a somewhat similar setup with a SK2 and another sound source instead of the laptop. I have been meaning to ask you about the midi gizmo with the pitch bend and mod wheels. How has it been working for you since you got it and how are you able to access it while you are playing? I see that where you have it placed you would seem to have to do a stretch that old dogs like me might find awkward. (Maybe you do yoga.😊) I have used an old Yamaha MCS for P bend and mod, but I have a couple of options for positioning the unit quite near to the organ.

I actually try to mute the volume for every commercial that comes up on television or YouTube, but I don ‘t always get to the control in time. This one came up and I left the sound on. I chuckled. I taught first ear band students for 33 years and survived, so the joke has some degree of joy and humour for me. It reminds me of kids sight reading some piece that they have never heard before. BTW, you can get first year players to sound much better than the kids in the video.

I give it one star for "enthusiasm".

I usually don’t log in when I check the forum. While I appreciate the added functionality of additional languages, the fact that the language setting defaults to whatever the last language in the list is (was Italian, is now Spanish) means that I have to reset back to English every time I check in. I might be wrong, but I assume that English is the primary language for the majority of members. Could you keep English at the bottom of the list so that it is the default?

Yes. I think that you are looking for edit page D, "Zones". I have used the SK2 to control that same rack unit.

Ulp! Oh dear. I was amused and surprised by similar Fripp videos posted into the pandemic. Today I am torn between my advocacy for people who declare "I will not defined by my [choose a label - age, gender, orientation, etc] and my upbringing in a household where the child abuse (entirely my opinion) of a religious indoctrination left me uncomfortable with such obvious displays of "show 'em if you got 'em". Mostly, I want to say "Rock on fellow geezers", but....(clears throat, wipes sweaty brow) ...Ah, no one should care what anyone else thinks. Enjoy, or avoid. After the past couple of days of angst and watching my "leader" give in to terrorist demands, I am grateful to see people who can feel and generate happiness without causing harm to anyone else. Thanks for sharing this vid of people experiencing joy Dr Nursers.

Check out You Tube vids of Swatkins.

Nice try, but the reversed poster bugs me more. The wind players are off. Like piano, there are no left handed trombones and saxophones. Looking at the tenor player's hands this way makes me uncomfortable. The artist had even taken the trouble to get the trombone player's left hand position right, so his rendering of the piano must have been a design/composition decision. I agree with Eric. On the positive side, I think that JB's hand on the piano is making the sign language shape of "I love you."🙂

The second teaser shows the Hammond found a way to add pitch bend and mod wheels. Whoo Hoo! Edit: Oops, sorry Morrissey. You were updating me as I was posting. Thanks.

Happy to see the return and the new look. Thank you for all the work.

I have no negative feelings towards Hammond (I have an SK2), but as far as I'm concerned, there is no point in putting a mono synth on this thing if you don't find a way to add pitch and mod wheels too. I cover that omission with an old Yamaha mcs2, but I would prefer not having to go that route.

I used to feel gear lust every time I opened each new issue of Keyboard Magazine. That feeling has waned. I bought a number of items just before I retired and if I can"t make some music with all the crap that I have accumulated over the decades, that would mean that there isn"t much music in me. It can take me years to personalize the synths that I already own (not a whole big bunch) and I still have a ways to go. I find that when I have too many choices available, I am tempted to spend too much time sifting through all of the available choices/parameters and not enough time doing some of the work that might be more important. â¦Having said all that however, I do have a lust for some orchestral library stuff. ð

Five? But my favourite food comes in groups of sixâ¦.

Yes! I think that personal satisfaction has been my big driver at this point. I try making music that I want to hear in order to scratch some sort of itch. Sometimes the itch is just a desire to try my hand at a particular approach or style, but often the itch is there because I have trouble finding someone else"s music that does a particular thing that I want to hear. As far as determining whether anyone else likes it, I just might not ask for their thoughts. Maybe that way I can pretend that they actually listened to my music and just maybe they liked it. ð If the goal was to produce something marketable/popular, of course I would take a different approach. I don"t try to put anyone off, but I do not want to make music that I personally find boring. After spending decades supporting other people"s vision or playing for other people"s enjoyment, now I hope to just represent my own musical thoughts as well and as honestly as I can. Captivating a live or devoted audience is a great and rare skill, but that is not the motivator for me at this point. Of course, just like the guy who buys lottery tickets without expecting to win, a man can always dream, right?

This. I admire anyone who wills a career in making music into being. For most, it seems not to be an easy life. Now in my sixties, I have seen a number of people in my music circle who could not even afford to pay for regular dental maintenance. Lord help them if they should run into more serious health problems, And that was before the virus. Many of us made the choice to pursue our art in what ever ways that we could by taking the day jobs. Social media, exposure, wide or even narrow recognition be damned. Obscurity and meaninglessness may seem like nightmares, but if you are compelled to make art (whatever that means to you), you must do that. Charles Ives had to toil in the evenings after work. Messiaen composed and debuted Quartet For the End of Time under the worst conditions. If even one person appreciates something that you create that has meaning to you, that has to count for something. Whatever I work on, I start with the knowledge that most people do not (a) have patience to sit through it and (b) do not like unfamiliar music by unknown "artiststs". Oh, and there IS that fantasy that in 50,000 years aliens will unearth something that I did and proclaim me to be a genius. ð

This is not at all fancy, but along the walls in my upstairs office/studio space I have run lengths of plastic corrugated hose to tie audio and midi cables together semipermanently. I used something like sump pump discharge hose that I slit lengthwise. Label the end of each cord if you are likely to reconfigure or move pieces at times, so that you aren"t having to trace line sources, etc. I added an extra pair of lines for miscellaneous pieces that I occasionally bring up from the main rehearsal space (if I can still call it that) downstairs. Adding bookshelves full of books to a listening space has often been recommended. I positioned one so that studio monitors face it and that seems to help. **** I wonder if any of you have tried using mass loaded vinyl as sound proofing material. It is supposed to be very efficient at dissipating energy of sound waves.

I don"t have a calculated stage persona, at least not one that relies on anything that I wear. Since it was my comment that you quoted, I should clarify that I think that there are many people who actually pull off certain looks while there are some people who just seem to be wearing costumes. That"s probably just my perception. I have played with some blues guys who had a manner of dress that authentically matched their actual personalities. It was not a persona. Some other guys? Not so much. Again, maybe that"s just my perception. As a guy who lost most of his hair before he was thirty, I was shaving my head before it became a thing. To me caps are comfortable and as necessary as a pair of shoes, but I don"t wear them indoors or on stage. I wear caps, but brimmed hats seem to wear ME. For people like me (nerd?), that item says 'costume'.