Reezekeys

I found this web page that breaks the concepts down, though the exact amounts v.a.v. reporting requirements may not be accurate as it's a few years old: https://www.1040.com/blog/2019/7/12/selling-stuff-online-taxes-for-etsy-ebay-letgo-and-more/

Apple seems to prioritize "user experience" in a general way, so I see it as kind of a vicious circle where innovations or advancements in hardware offer the ability to add features but require new OSes to use those features. Eventually the newer OSes are judged (by Apple) to degrade this "user experience" when run on older hardware, so bingo, they lock you out - regardless of your own "user experience." Some folks are upset, others more or less resigned to it – which is pretty much where I'm at, given the competitive nature of the tech world and the rapidity of advances in things both soft and hardware. When it comes to the major transitions I think Apple has actually been pretty good – Classic, Rosetta and Rosetta 2 being examples of that. They also gave plenty of notice to botjh devs and the general public (with those annoying "this app may not run on future versions of MacOS" alerts) when they went 64-bit only. As far as batteries & ram specifically - if one is unhappy with Apple making these glued or soldered in, well it's not exactly a secret you find out about after you buy, is it? 🙂 There are other computers that let you replace and upgrade these things - buy those instead, if that feature is high on your "must have" list. When it comes to this stuff, I see it as a question of where you want to compromise. I got ten years out of my late-2013 MacBook Pro and might even be using it still, if not for a (presumed) hardware fault I couldn't diagnose – but I figured it was time to go to Apple Silicon and 10 years is a good run imo. My old iPhone SE 2016 is frozen at iOS 15-something and runs my music rig just fine. I'm also OK with doing my own battery replacements, having opened up all my phones and computers, starting with a 1990s Mac 9500 tower (you had to take the logic board out to add ram!).

Or run a full-fledged music rig like I do on my SE2016 (which has the same internals as the 6S). AUM hosting AudioLayer, Korg Module, Synthmaster 2, VB3m, etc. - at a 128 buffer. As I've mentioned a few times here, I've done AWB gigs with the phone alone. I'm not sure I'd want to use it to read any kind of chart though - not with my old eyes, that's for sure! I see 6Ss on Ebay for around US $50. Those, along with the SE2016 are the last iPhones with headphone jacks as well.

Here's my theory and I'm sticking to it: a sampled piano has velocity layers where a given range of velocities can address the same layer. Your keyboard may indeed be "spiking" values but as long as the higher-value velocity is still within the same layer, the difference in sound may not be as pronounced as a modeled piano. Of course I have no idea how many layers the CFX piano uses or whether they simply switch between them or use crossfading, etc. If you put a midi monitor in your chain and make a note of the velocity when you hear a spike, that may help diagnose your issue. One of the settings on my Roland A800 Pro keyboard lets me assign any fixed velocity value to the keys - so I can play a note and slowly dial up the velocity value to listen for when the sound changes. If the Nektar does this, that might be something to do to help you get some answers as well.

Who can prove something like this, or even claim to be able to? He says "keys are like colors and each has a different feeling and sound." I would consider this his opinion even though he didn't preface his statement with "in my opinion." To me it's kinda implied when you make a statement like that. I mean, to call any key "sweet sounding" has to be opinion! I don't have one myself - rather, I think that with a vocal tune the choice of key will (or should) be conditioned on the vocalist's range, and where that fits with the melody and ad libs the vocalist wants to perform in the song. I've watched many of Paul's videos and find them all very enlightening. He is extremely knowledgeable about not only jazz but r&b, funk, disco, pop, etc. He'll tell you who played on the sessions, why they're held in high regard, what other sessions, albums & CDs they're known for, etc. He definitely got my vote when he did a video on an AWB song I currently play bass on with AWB! (Paul, where do I send the check?) 🙂

For the jazzers here - others, well, you've been warned! 🙂 Back in pandemic times I practiced at home a lot and took advantage of a Jamey Aebersold playalong with Adam Nussbaum and Jay Anderson. Here's my attempt at one of the tracks from that CD, a blues with a bridge of ascending II - V progressions. The head is kind of a throwaway, more improvised than not. The piano is my old Native Instruments New York with imo a touch too much ambience but eff it... it doesn't bother me enough to re-render! I did a render with the current NI Steinway - the "Grandeur" - and despite messing with every parameter it offers (and there's much more to adjust than on the New York), I found myself liking the sound of the New York much more. Can't explain why - it's just "cleaner" in a way (that probably makes no sense), and sits in the mix of an energetic jazz trio track like this better.

Nope, just face the adapter or (in this instance) cord downward. The two slide switches are next to the midi & usb jacks. Right angle pedal cords or adapters won't cover anything else. BTW I use extension cables for my sustain & expression pedal and they are both TRS. That way I don't have to think about what cable to use in either jack. A TRS extension cable (or presumably a right-angle adapter) will work for a TS connection; not vice-versa however.

Sorry but VTines was unloaded from my iPhone & iPad a long time ago. I use the Scarbee rhodes in Korg Module these days. I take it your audio interface is where the midi from your controller is going? That's strange behavior then. I went back and re-read this thread from the beginning. The earliest posts I made were literally the beginning of my adventure with iOS music-making software. I got a chuckle out of the ignorance I displayed!

I sure think so - since I've been playing the same software piano for 18 years. There's a bunch of them out there, but being software you normally can't try before you buy, and demos are sometimes limited or nonexistant (Pianoteq at least gives you a good demo). A sw piano user will tell you what sampled piano they use - what good does that do you? My piano of choice is the Native Instrument New York, long discontinued and actually not well liked according to posts on some other forums. I could care less. All you can really do is listen to youtube demos - which won't really help with evaluating finger-to-ear connection. And as far as that connection - many of these plugins require you to spend time with their settings to get a piano that responds the way you like. Not to mention having a controller that feels good to you and, most importantly, sends the full 1-127 range of velocities concurrent with your dynamics - what you interpret as ppp to fff in your playing force. Without a controller that puts out the "correct" velocities, it's likely no software piano (or hardware for that matter) will feel good to you. As far as your question about software competing with hardware – absolutely. When software pianos first came out they were imo much better than what you could get in hardware, simply due to the detail you could get with them. Multiple mic positions. Release samples. Pedal and soundboard resonance. How about full-length unlooped samples? Separate per-note samples with multiple velocity layers? I profess ignorance with what hardware pianos bring to the table today but I'll guess they incorporate some, most or maybe even all of these features. The question is, how many of those features do we need? E.g., my usage is 99% playing jazz & funk gigs - I don't need a 9ft Steinway sampled with concert hall ambience. I put a version of my Native Instruments piano on my iPad and iPhone - it's cut down a lot: sampled every minor third instead of each semitone, one less velocity layer, and no resonance or key-up samples. Would I make a record with this piano? No. Do I miss those things on a gig? I have to admit - no, I don't!

Yes, I do use buttons to turn a few instruments on & off. I used to map them to turning the plugin on & off to save CPU but that was on my older laptop. That has the unfortunate effect of cutting off notes if they're sustaining (via my pedal) or just decaying. With my newer M2-powered Mac that's not necessary. I leave the plugins active but thought of a slightly more clever way to turn them on & off - I map the button to a midi message filter to switch between allowing or blocking note-on messages only. Note-offs and sustain pedal messages are always passed. That way I can be holding or sustaining a chord, turn an instrument off (i.e., block note-ons), and all the sounding notes will continue to play until I release them or come off the sustain pedal. Here's my current setup for AWB on my NanoK. I carry this cheat sheet with me because I use the Nano so infrequently (the goal is not to have to use it at all!). Some of the buttons have dual functions - I'm trying to duplicate what I have going on my Roland controller which has more controls!

Korg labels them like this but they are fully configurable in their editor software. You can assign any midi control change number you want, to control anything. On my NK1 I have the transport buttons sending control changes that change my leslie speed, turn on percussion, etc. They're labeled as transport controls but don't transport anything!

On-off parameters are usually mapped to switches - in the NK's case that's the buttons, and the variable parameters can be assigned to either a slider or knob. I might use one channel of the NK for this. The knob can do rate, the slider depth (or vice-versa), and one of the buttons can just turn it on or off. You'll have to look in VTines's manual or online support docs to get exactly what parameters they expose and what the default midi CC numbers they use. Set the Nano's controls to those numbers (and channel), the button to latching, and you should be good.

I've had an original NanoKontrol for years and it's saved my butt a few times when I needed to do a show and for whatever reason my own keyboard wasn't available. I carry a small stick of "artist's putty", a reusable clay-like adhesive that leaves no marks - a few globs on any provided keyboard and I'm ready for action. The original Nano has nine sliders vs the NK2's eight. Their throw is extremely short (this applies to both vintages) so I'm not sure a drawbar jockey would be very happy mapping these to a Hammond VI - but in an emergency it's better than nothing. For myself, I turn on & off different sounds, choose presets, trigger percussion loops, and of course mix everything along with having a master volume slider. Give me a DX7 from 1984 or the cheapest Casio - if it has >=61 keys, a sustain pedal, and outputs midi I'm good to go.

Midi. My laptop is behind me and I have no need to look at it or touch it while I play. That would be a distraction. When I’m playing my keyboard that’s all I want to deal with. Any moves I need to do as far as controlling my setup using my controller’s faders, buttons & pads are now intuitive. IOW I can concentrate on the notes - not what’s making the notes.

I was looking at the Zoom U-24 a while back when I thought I needed more than one stereo output from my iPhone for some percussion loops and click. I just went to the Zoom site and it looks like they have a new series of interfaces geared towards podcasters or streamers. There's a no-frills 2-in, 4-out model called the AMS-24 for $120. The downside is that one of the stereo outputs is a headphone minijack. I solved my issue by not buying an interface! I put AUM and the percussion loops on my iPhone and trigger them using bluetooth from my iPad!

I couldn't agree more. The harmonic, melodic and rhythmic advancements brought by the beboppers formed the basis for pretty much all the jazz that's followed - at least, jazz based on blues and swing. You can even hear some of those characteristics in Cecil Taylor's early music. Herbie, Chick, McCoy, Keith, Bill Evans... all of their music has characteristics whose basis can be found in bebop - they just took those concepts, expanded on them and came up with new concepts - what great jazz players do! I'm not here to tell others what they should like, how they should play or what concepts they should study to be better players - I have enough problems doing that with myself! 🙂 I'll take your word that other pianists have found value in Barry's teachings. If they think it works for them, end of story. I'll only add that I do not share Barry's opinion on jazz after 1960 - and I suspect many other pianists may not either. To each their own.

I studied block chords with John Mehegan, and listened to a lot of Red Garland. If my jazz history is correct, it was Milt Buckner that pioneered this style.

Since I'm totally ignorant of Barry's teachings, I'm curious - is his stuff geared specifically to playing bebop piano? Or could his concepts be applied by those looking to play more in the Chick/Herbie/McCoy vein? I say this because - and here comes another opinion 🙂 - I see very little utility in learning to play, or concentrating on playing, bebop. It's history, made 80 years ago now. Learn about it, listen to it, understand its significance and impact - yes, yes and yes. Try to go out there and do gigs or make any kind of living doing it - well, good luck. I say this as someone who did listen to a lot of bebop, play (and continue to play) standards the bebop guys played, and very much enjoy playing it occasionally - but I could never have it be the sole focus, or even the major focus of my playing. There's been a lot of development in jazz since the 1940s, and unless you're dedicating yourself to being a "preservasionist" (like Dick Hyman), I can't see anyone, especially younger folks, concentrating solely on developing bebop piano chops. It makes no sense to me.

My impression is that Barry, like Lennie Tristano, has become sort of a cult figure in jazz education, famous for his weekly clinics expounding his concepts with a roomful of students. Curiously (to me), I don't think he had an official teaching position at any academic institution - where I assume his status and life experience would have easily gotten him a position. Or am I wrong?

I've never made it more than 5 minutes into any video dealing with Barry's concepts. I did watch some of that "sixths on the fifth" video - and tuned out pretty quickly, sorry. Lets see... on a C7 I should play a a Gmin6? You mean the notes G, Bb, D, and E? Maybe I'm special because I somehow stumbled on this same voicing for a C7 chord, without knowing anything about any "concept." I call it a C13 though - doesn't everybody else? Personally, I like the sound with the E on the bottom and I also leave out the fifth - but that's my own take. Of course, change the root note to a G and you have a Gmin6, so sure, Barry's concept "works", it just seems like overthinking things to an unnecessary degree. I have to assume there's more to his concept(s) and of course I would not dismiss anyone's opinion of his teachings if they believed it helped them. I guess I'm just an old dog who learned more traditional jazz theory, then followed Bird's advice in his famous quote - "forget all that bullshit and just play." (I still have trouble with the "just play" part! 🙂 ) I consider Barry Harris a giant of bebop piano. When I first started getting into jazz, one of the first albums I bought was this one which featured him, and I wore it out. It's all on youtube (and includes a rhythm changes tune at over 350 bpm!).

I think I enjoy LH bass gigs because I do so few of them! It's a cool feeling to be the "provider of the bottom", but my right hand takes a hit. Not only with soloing (I tell everyone on a LH bass gig I will be playing short or NO solos on tunes!), but also just filling in with chord voicings that I normally use two hands for. After a while I get tired of the harmonic emptyness, while feeling pressure to provide as much as I can. But as I said, in small doses I can really enjoy doing a LH bass gig. A few years ago I even had to do a some AWB gigs playing LH bass when our regular bass player had a medical emergency and couldn't make the gigs. That was pretty surreal!

Definitely no need for an audio interface on a Mac if you don't need to input anything and just want stereo output. The headphone out is fine. As to installing, my experience is mostly with NI and there are definitely a few steps to go through – like first downloading and running Native Access, entering the serial #, then downloading & installing the actual instrument files; pretty straightforward actually. For some sample-based products, you may want to move the samples to an external drive (if the installer doesn't allow you to do it during the initial install). I found the instructions NI gives you pretty clear - but there's really no standardized or common practices that we can rely on all music software devs to follow. I've never used Ravenscroft on a Mac so have no idea what if any hoops there are to jump through to get that particular piano installed. You also need to know how to set up the computer's audio system correctly for playing a VI. NI lets you adjust the buffer size pretty easily but you still need to know what "buffer size" means in the virtual instrument world, why it's an important setting, how it relates to your computer's processing power, and how to adjust it – as in where that setting is located! Sometimes it's not very obvious. I'll go out on a limb and guess that most of this info is readily available with a little searching - provided you know the terminology to search on!

I also play both. I'm self-taught on bass (not sure what I've "learned" though 🙂 ). Many years ago I hooked up a gig in ST. Croix, USVI and because the bread was almost nonexistant (it was more of a "free vacation" where we didn't need to pay airfare or hotel) I decided to play left-hand bass instead of hiring a bass player. There's nothing like playing 5 sets a night, 6 nights a week, for three weeks to get your LH bass chops in shape (or get sent home early, but that didn't happen!). I've also owned an old P-Bass since my early 20s, but only did a small number of gigs on it. Ten years ago when I got the call to join AWB I hadn't touched this bass in almost 20 years! I asked if I could play key bass instead - not a chance! Those guys are old school. I play 2 to 4 songs per show on bass when Alan Gorrie switches to guitar. It's a ton of fun playing some of the most iconic bass lines in funk with these guys. I still pinch myself!

I've always had a nerd side and was into sampling tech early on when I got an Ensoniq Mirage and its "advanced sampling filter." Since I'm mostly a jazz piano player I was intrigued by the possibility of a high-quality piano I could bring to my gigs. By the late 1990s the best I could do was the "Session" piano on my Roland XP50 workstation. Then I heard about this new software product, Gigasampler - the first app to implement disk streaming to play back multisamples (there were hard disk audio recording apps like Sound Tools but that's a different category). Unfortunately for me, this program was Windows-only and it was a few more years before disk streaming sample playback came to the Mac. I had experimented with a laptop rig when I got my 500Mhz Titanium Powebook G4 in 2001, with a program called "Unity" by a long-gone company named Bitzhead. This app didn't stream from disk however - it loaded all samples into ram, and their piano wasn't much better than what would be in today's cheapest Sound Canvases or equivalents - probably worse. When I got my second laptop in 2006 is when I got serious and started using the Plogue Bidule program with Native Instrument's "Akoustik Piano" plugin - and I've stayed with their Steinway piano ever since. To have a super-light controller and laptop to carry to gigs, with a decent stereo PPA system, playing unlooped stereo samples that included release, sustain pedal resonance and mechanical noise samples is what made me happy then and continues to make me happy today - except now I have those samples in an iPhone & iPad as well.

With all respect... you keep telling us you're "not a computer guy", "completely non-technical", etc. So, my advice would be to give up on this quest. There certainly are digital pianos out there that sound excellent and won't break the bank. You had issues with the FP10, OK well that's Roland's bottom-of-the-line piano; there are better ones. Find a music store with a few other pianos, get a decent set of headphones, and spend some time playing a few of them (yes I know that's easier said than done these days, but the alternative is buying then returning units until you're happy, which has its own set of hassles). I have a wonderful acoustic piano on my eight-year-old iPhone - but it took some doing. I've also been using a laptop-based music rig for the last 22 years, full-time for the last 16 years. Forums like this are a great way to learn and share knowledge about making these systems work but I've found there's a limit when trying to help someone who's (by their own admission) music-computer-illiterate. There are many "moving parts" in a computer-based music rig - the operating system, the software itself and how the samples are managed, midi routing, audio settings for best latency, etc. Even computer "experts" can get confused and frustrated if they're not familiar with how virtual instruments on computers work. A digital piano incorporates all these moving parts in one box; turn it on and you're good to go. That's what you should do, imo. BTW, regarding your complaint about the $4000 pricetag of the Montage - that's a completely different category of instrument from a digital piano; a full-featured "workstation" synth keyboard with thousands of sounds. Apples and oranges.