Iconoclast

My Nord stays heavy in the mix primarily because the Organ. It's the easiest to adjust on the fly. If I have min time to prepare for a gig I can get twice as much done with the Nord and Mainstage as I can with anything else. Yes, it's limited, and I'm not in love with any of the effects, but it's dead easy to get something that the rest of the band will like.

I have 4 different keyboards with TP40's and they all feel a bit different. The Kurzweil is the lightest, Nord Stage second most and the SL88 grand is by far the heaviest, like way heavier. Perhaps by coincidence that is also the order that I bought them in and there's some break in? No way to measure it, but in my mind, I think the Nord has actually loosened up a bit and it is probably my most played keyboard.

Sometimes a man's just gotta know his limitations...

I think the Deluxe is bigger just because they wanted to fit the equipment shelf in there and it took another octave of keys to do it? Poly AT on the little one! Hydra is such a great little instrument and for what you get it's really not that expensive. In my studio it suffers from being right next to an OB-6, but it's ridiculous amount modulation capes, poly AT and ribbon keep it in the mix.

I bought a patch set from him for my OB-6 and it's awesome. Got some really usable stuff in it.

At least I get a massive solo for as many bars as I can keep the BL's attention in Cocaine. He does kind of a psychedelic guitar solo so I do an Organ through a whah pedal kinda thing that you can only get away with in this kind of song. The chord structure is so simple you can get away with a whole lot of interesting notes soloing over it. I can't even stand listening to Closing Time, let alone playing it.

Sounds awesome! What a find. It does have a nasty little character to it! Fits your playing style nicely. I currently have a free Ludwig drumset in my studio that was a garage giveaway. Had to have some work done to it because it's actually older than me, but it plays and sounds great. Clearcoat is cracked but the guy who re-furbished it said it would go down in value if I fixed some of the cosmetic stuff that was from straight up aging.

Wicked Game: Chris Isaak. Same 3 chords, same order, entire song. I do like 3 or 4 patch changes just to give each verse a slightly different flavor. Covered in Rain: John Mayer...or actually most of John Mayer's catalog. Bore's the livin crap out of me.

I'm kind of a tweener, not a full timer but I do a couple drive/fly gigs a season. I've had maybe 25% of my gigs cancel for the fall-winter (which is the biggest here in the sunbelt). Lost a string of them because of a Covid Liability clause that the venue wanted that the band leader wasn't going to sign. Also, with a lot of these gigs being in older communities there's a lot of people more susceptible, but also I would think, more people vaccinated? I thought I was over booked for the season, as my day-job has picked up to record levels, but evidently it's all going to work out.

Sequential snuck a firmware update in on me. Finally got it loaded in the machine. The OB now has a vintage mode similar to the Prophet 5 slop control. Definitely brings the thing alive, especially on unison patches and basses. Also can accept MPE for per voice modulations including poly AT if you have a compatible controller. Also has improved AT curves. The on/off nature of the OB-6's keyboard was one of the very few complaints I had about this instrument, so hopefully this fixes that!

MSY (New Orleans) has some pretty good music, although not as consistent as Nashville, but when they have it it's top notch. Portland has frequent musicians but I've rarely seen any that compelling. DAL (Dallas Love) has an actual stage in the food court but I haven't seen an act there since the pandemic. AUS...you would think would be great, and they have a stage with a house drumset, but I've rarely seen band there.

My short arturia review, as a Mainstage user who has almost everything they make. Pigments should cover any virtual analog needs you have and a lot more. I find it easy but on the verge of having too much "stuff". If I need something simple and fast I frequently go to retro-synth. Arturia's DX7 has the other synth stuff you can't do with Pigments. I also couldn't survive without their Solina emulation. Some of the newer Arturia stuff is really cool, but you can probably cover it with the stuff mentioned above. That being said, I love playing with their OBXa and the new Jupiter/Juno models. There's something about these new instruments from them that just sound more real and alive, like they've really gotten closer to nailing the imperfections. I don't find their pianos to be that great unless you're going for a unique and not authentic sound. Like something intentionally lo-fi. The Arturia EPs are on par with the Mainstage stuff...probably better, but nothing near Keyscape quality. They have other things like the synclavier and Fairlight that have an amazing set of presets, but I basically can't invest the time to learn how to program those things. But you can lose a whole evening just going through those presets. I think that for what you get, that stuff is cheap, so as a general rule, when they have a 50% off, I load up. I didn't have some of the standalone efffects so I bought those.

I believe that Canada Jam was the largest crowd they ever played for. Headlined a stadium festival with 85,000 I think.

Then of course there's this ripper, recorded entirely live on TV. I've heard a ton of live versions of this song and I don't think they ever played it slow... [video:youtube]

I played in a Kansas tribute for years so I'm very familiar with all his stuff. Very original, not afraid to take chances. Played some amazing solos. Had a great singing voice too. He was the secret sauce that Kerry used to make Kansas what it really was in those first 5 or 6 albums. Don't know that we'll see anyone like him in music anytime soon. Robbie's Solo starts at 3:15 [video:youtube]

A surprising number of non-12 bar songs although there were several. The BL has no problem changing key to fit his voice so there were a lot of them in G, A or B. That made it a lot easier.

For gigs like this, where there's a lot of unknowns, I think a Nord Stage is a great keyboard. Much easier to program on the fly than just about anything else I've owned. I have DBS-1 drawbars on the Nord so it makes the organ even easier to dial in on the fly.

Condolences. I wish I could offer more.

And by some miracle it went well. background: One of my too-many acts is backing up an Eric Clapton trib. The band leader of that show has an alter-ego blues band that he does with other musicians. He calls me to sub a couple of months ago and I agree because at the time I was out of work. He sends me the setlist and I realize I know very few of the songs. Yikes. My real background is prog/classic rock and I play guitar a lot in the same genre. OK, it's blues, how hard can it be? Then he calls me a couple weeks ago and says he's going to be out of town until gig day and we won't have a rehearsal. yikes again. Then I get called back to work and like everyone else in the world I'm suddenly busier than hell with my day job the last month. So I've spent every spare hour rehearsing songs, some with charts, some without, until my thumbs were sore. I mean really sore. On gig day, everything went pretty smooth. I really only got lost a couple of times and it wasn't anywhere where I was out front or naked, so I could just lay back. I brought the Nord Stage so I could reprogram on the fly if my patches sounded crappy in the room. Most of my stuff sounded right except for the pianos which needed tweaking for the space. I was kind of shocked how well it went, having never actually subbed a gig that I didn't already know pretty much all the music. After a couple of songs the BL kept nodding over to me to take solos...so I think that's a winning cue? Honestly took a bunch in places I didn't expect, which of course never happens in a classic/prog rock kind of show where everything is more composed. One thing that really helped was the BL puts everything in pretty much the same keys for his vocals, so even though I had to transpose a lot to practice with the recordings, it put everything in the same modes and was really a great learning process to have all those songs in similar keys. End of the night, tip jar full, some bar patron paid off our tabs, new date scheduled with venue. Partial list of some of the non-standard stuff I learned for the show: Still Got the Blues - Gary Moore Prison of Love - Robben Ford Black Velvet Lie to Me - johnny Lang I Feel Lucky-Mary Chapin Carpenter Go the Distance - Walter Trout Gotta Leave - Davey Knowles Midnight Blues - Gary Moore Too Tired - Gary Moore Quitters Never Win - Johnny Lang Sloe Gin - Joe Bonamassa

Uh, that's row to hoe... While the visual imagery conjured up by those two statements is definitely different, I think their meaning is ironically identical. In fact it may become one of my new standard mixed metaphors.

@EscapeRocks: I really love your projects and when compared to some of the K&M options it's not really any more expensive. One thing I really worry about is setup/teardown time and the dimensions of the stand once folded up. And then of course it's the huge leap into the unknown that tends to hold me back! The stock keyboard kits they have are not what I want and I really don't understand what all the pieces do so I have no real idea how to piece my own contraption together.

But did the Shear relic-6 even make it to production? It generated some good youtube content back in 2017 but really nothing since then.

Owner for several months and gigged with it a lot. Yes, I find poly AT useful. Forgive me if I've mentioned on this site before; one of the bands I play in does some real boring 2 - 4 chords songs. John Mayers Covered in Rain and Chris Isaaks Wicked Game for example. You can just use a couple of pads and really make some of those parts a LOT more interesting sounding just by changing your finger pressure while holding some inversion of the same chords over and over again for 5 minutes. It's actually pretty effective and useful and keeps me from dying of boredom during some of those 2 chord snoozers. They made the keyboard work very well for poly AT also, in that the AT is pretty deep and controllable and not just an on-off switch like it seems to be on a lot of other keyboards. On the other hand, when not doing poly AT stuff, it's not really my favorite synth keybed. When compared to my OB-6, it's a noticeable difference. But then again, the OB-6 AT is pretty poor, so there's some trade offs. So the Hydras's keybed isn't the greatest for say fast leads, but it's certainly playable and optimized for poly AT. The Hydra can certainly sound digital, but that's tame-able. In the presets there's a lot of those kind of digital sounds, almost like they really weren't going for a VA type synth even though it's VA capable. So I'd say there's a pretty wide target area of sounds and some of those are very VA, but it's not a naturally analog sounding machine. YMMV. I noticed that a lot of the super lush presets can absolutely disappear in a live band mix, but they sound great by themselves. They did a great job on the UI for this machine so that it's pretty easy to navigate even though it's incredibly deep. There's still a couple of UI things that I hope get changed in future updates but even as it is right now, it's a quantum leap forward in balancing menu diving vs knob per function. It's kind of funny in that some of the mutants are normal things like sync and PWM, but those pages have a lot of other variables that aren't explained very well (or in some cases at all) in the manual. So I have at times had difficulty getting the synth to do some of the standard synth tricks. I mean in most synths, sync is an on/off button but in the Hydra it's got ratio/source/depth/window/feedback/dry-wet. One other minor complaint is the pitch bend wheel has a lot of dead space on it. Most of the pitch modulation happens in the first 60% of travel from zero and the last 25% of travel is basically no modulation. Add in the silly tabs that they put on the pitch/modulation wheels, and I have a little trouble getting the same response that I get from other synths. Overall, a killer little machine especially for the price. Can't wait to see what ASM is working on now.

I have a Hydra-synth, and I have to agree: they did a fantastic job of blending menus with dedicated switches. They do have a fair number of hard wired buttons and switches on the thing, and to be honest there's a few "head-scratchers" about it's architecture, but I rarely find it a waste of time to deep dive. It's still a young product from a new company so I think some of that is to be expected and probably nothing that can't be fixed in future updates. I just received an Arturia Polybrute, and the great thing about that very complicated piece of kit is the editor; Polybrute Connect. It is amazing, simple to use, and really leverages the product. Compare that with basically anything SoundTower touches. I think VAST could be made infinitely more usable with just a decent simple computer editor with dropdown menus, but the SoundTower Forte editor is worse than worthless. While on the subject of editors: a 3rd party just came out with a fully functional editor for Hydrasynth on his own and it appears to work just fine. Why is this so hard for SoundTower to do? I mean the OB-6 editor is about 70% functional and 30% trash-ware too. I'm also a guitar player and another great example is the Line6 Helix. For as complicated as that thing is, it's dead easy to use and has the smartest thing ever: small "scribble strips" above the assignable controllers that tell you what you actually assigned to the controller. It was a terribly expensive jump in product price for them but fair to say that it's become the dominant player in the market. Every band that I play in (currently 5) has a player who uses a Line6 Helix. When you consider that the original price of a Helix was about half a Forte7, that was one expensive pedal board, but they guessed correctly that people would pay it if it sounded good and was easy to program. OBTW it has a very functional computer based editor librarian that they developed in-house only after the users pretty much revolted over the lack of one.

I've had a Forte7 for 3 or 4 years and it was my first Kurzweil. Vast for me is a black hole. I really tried hard for a long time to learn it, but in the end I realized it was, for me, a choice about whether I wanted to spend time being a musician or earn a Phd in Kurzweil. If you just want to use the available sounds made by other people; there are a lot of them and they're darn good. Love the pianos and really love the EPs. Just live in the Multi Mode and maybe use the Patch Kreator templates to create anything from scratch. But I found that if you're in the Program-edit mode looking at the VAST layers and blocks etc...I was wasting a lot of time and not getting what I wanted. I got a lot more of satisfaction out of my Forte when I vowed to NOT to enter Program-edit mode. I used to play in a band with another keyboard player who used a pc3 and he pulled a ton of great stuff out of it. Later when I got my Forte and started talking "Vast" with him, I realized that he didn't really know ANYTHING about Vast. So you can definitely get a lot out of the instrument without ever entering Program-Edit mode. But in my opinion, VAST needs a huge overhaul based specifically on doing nothing but improving the user interface. Vast already sounds awesome and has more features than I can think of ever wanting...I just can't get my arms around it's 1990's interface. Until it does VAST will remain a niche product for people who don't mind remembering that the phasers are effects codes 250-269 or that the EQ's were in effects presets 350-355. Or the list of available mod sources was like 100 items long (awesome!), but they only display one at a time as you scroll a and lot of them are undecipherable abbreviations (bummer). Or what the difference is between keymap 999 and 998 is. I seriously have to keep a 5 page cheat sheet next to me when I'm programming for a show.