marczellm

You might have just hit the final nail in the coffin in this Clavinet. Either I figure out a workaround without removing the strings or this Clavinet is not getting fixed anytime soon. Problem is I would have to order the $100 Clavigel plus shipping to Hungary before even being able to try it, and that's a bit much for an experiment.

Can you install the Clavigel without removing the strings? The instructional video installs it without the strings on. And I would definitely not want to remove the new strings with the amount of sisyphean work it took to replace them.

I got a call this spring to play some very interesting original music that in my mind called for a Clavinet. I called a friend who I knew has one. He loaned me his but told me it needed to be restringed. He gave me the replacement strings and damper yarn. I said no problem, I have another friend who is crazy enthusiastic about such restoration projects. I'll call him over and have it done in a few nights. He came over, we restringed the thing, it wasn't at all easy and we messed up quite a few things along the way. We couldn't finish before the performance so I just used my Nord. I realized that the yarn the owner gave me was thinner than the original, and no amount of it could provide perfect dampening for the strings. I told him about this and he gave me another roll of yarn, this one much thicker. Fast forward to this week when I finally got Covid, not serious but preventing me from working at the office. I thought I'd finally finish this. I was wrong. This yarn is too thick. It slightly displaces the strings it goes between, so some hammers strike two strings or no strings at all. Now I have this disassembled Clavinet standing in my basement for 7 months. I don't want to screw it back together or even finish tuning it because you have to detune it to re-yarn. It's not my own so it feels wrong to make a decision on behalf of the owner to order the correct type of yarn or just the Clavigel from Vintage Vibe and put that in instead of the yarn. He would probably be troubled by the idea of me spending my money on his instrument even though I personally wouldn't mind the cost. I'll talk to him, this is just me venting, you can ignore me, or you can tell me what you would do in my case. Or tell your own instrument restoration horror stories

Maybe except Thing of Gold.

My live setup does not include a computer. My two or three boards are MIDIed together directly with DIN.

My favourite rehearsal story: During rehearsal break we chat about relationships, and the guitarist, whose day job is software developer, tells some stories about how he likes to go to salsa parties to pick up chicks. Then we start discussing the date of the next rehearsal. He pulls out his phone, opens his calendar on it, looks at the date and says "Jasmine. Who the f**k is Jasmine?" Then he slaps his forehead and says "Oh, I gotta water the flower!" Then he proceeds to tell us how he decided to liven up his place so he went to the florist and bought a jasmine plant. He took care to ask the florist how often it needs to be watered. She said every two weeks. Upon returning home he realized he didn't ask her when she last watered it! So he returned to the shop, asked the florist when exactly she has watered it, and added a recurring event in his calendar from that date on titled "Jasmine". And then in two weeks he forgot about it and thought it was a date!

I second the notion that the factory presets can be much much improved. I think the KB3 is one of the best options for layering or use "inside" some arrangement, but I would probably never use it on its own for some organ centruc ELP etc. sort of music.

He has better ears than me, and when at rehearsal he set the global tuning to -6ct, he said everything fell into place. When I looked in the editor - although that is quite easy to get lost in - the tuning for those layers was at 0.

Jim, thanks for the tips. I'm pretty sure it's none of those. Other sounds e. g. synths are free of the issue. I've now edited the piano patch I'm using and it said that the temperament is set to 'NONE' - however, setting it to Equal did not fix the issue. (If that feature in the editor works at all.) I'm most baffled by the fact that some, but not all of the factory pianos are also affected.

The other keyboardist in the church band notified me that during the last rehearsal they thought the Kurzweil SP6 was out of tune! Using a guitar tuner they figured out that A=440 only if he sets a global -6cents tuning. Bringing the instrument home I installed some tuner app and it shows that A4 is indeed roughly +6cent off, while A3 ~ +4.5cent, A2 ~ +4cent, A5 ~ +10cent etc. This is true for some, but not all of the factory and the Dave Weiser piano patches too, while checking a few synth and other sounds shows that those are 100% pitch perfect. Now I know that stretch tuning exists, but that too is supposed to be exactly 440Hz at A4! What is going on?

There are these two Hungarian pianists, Balázs Havasi and Peter Bence whose music I find superficial too. I don't like this music, but my problem is not when other people do. What is highly annoying about all three of them is the fact that their listeners are often led to believe, sometimes by the artist's own marketing blurbs, that these guys are the modern day equivalent of a Bach or Liszt, that they are the greatest most innovative composers or pianists of our time, which they clearly aren't. They are free to make whatever music they want and make as much money as they can but they shouldn't lie about or misrepresent what it is or isn't.

The well known Hungarian rock band "Karthago" had a teen die at a concert in 1981. They wrote their best song "Requiem" in memory of him.

I used the separate output for bass.

If a bit dated sounds don't bother you, the Roland cloud / Zen-Core has the full XV series sample set AFAIK.

I don't do (or know much about) recording, but when I do record something it depends. We've just recorded some instrumental worship music covers with members of the church band where the melody is played by violin. This is the violinist's project and his vehicle, drum sound is not that crucial so we've gone with electronic drums, but miking the acoustic guitar because everybody here agrees on the line out on an acoustic sounding way inferior. My solo project that is coming out this fall, I was purist about several things, so we miked the drums, we went to a studio that has a real acoustic piano and Rhodes. But the electric guitars were recorded direct so that we could experiment with software amp simulators later to get the sounds.

I believe even though the real time controllable parameters of the current sound might be documented in the MIDI implementation chart of the instrument, the commands to read out / write back a sound / a bunch of sounds might be undocumented (if they even exist, given that there's no official librarian). This might render your project impossible, or maybe you're in for some nasty trial and error based reverse engineering.

Just make sure you get no calls and audible notifications during the gig.

For me, it's genre based. When I play jazz, in a duo with a singer, or worship music, I sit. When I play something that people can dance to, pop, jazz-funk etc. I stand. My keyboard stand is usable for both configurations.

Clavinets beg to differ :)

Earth Song or Man In The Mirror by Michael Jackson.

I find it supremely weird to have this described as an alternative to Kronos. Does the built in plugins feature a B3 emulation, 3 different VA synths, a physical modeler and 16 part multitimbrality using whatever virtual instruments of your liking?

Yes

When I started out, every single keyboardist friend or teacher of mine told me repeatedly to avoid the manufacturer branded gig bags, be it Nord, Roland or whatever and use one dedicated bag maker that you trust. In Hungary that is a local company named Veiger. Their bag for my Nord has half the price and double or triple the life expectancy.

Someone must have been creating and uploading karaoke versions from midi files en masse, because some clearly unintended ones have slipped through the cracks. Look:

Two of the reasons our church band bought the SP6 are programmability and organ sim. If ATST cuts back on that, I'm not in the target audience any more.