Iconoclast

BIG WRECK. Going to see them this fall. Saw them a couple years ago and I swear there weren't more than 300 people in the crowd. Really a killer group and every bit as good live. Just super high fidelity. They all met at the Berkley School so they know all the chords and modes! BTW, the guitar player with the double kneck guitar was one of the founding members and he has since passed away from cancer. The bald guitar player has also retired and been replaced by of course another monster player.

Same with the keybed. Don't hate it but it's definitely not as nice as the one on my OB-6, which is pretty much my fave synth action. I love the keyboard overall, especially with the new OS. A few things that would help -A universal transpose. I play in a band that detunes everything and the PB will only detune 1/2 step via a tuning knob. -Effects section needs a distortion -PB Connect sends some weird midi stuff I can't track down, so if you have PB connect running on the same computer that you're running mainstage or my NordStage some random things start happening even though I don't have PB as part of my mainstage setup. So PB Connect must be run on a separate computer than your mainstage rig (unless you're smarter with MIDI than me...which I'm sure many of you are). The PB Connect thing is probably the biggest issue for me, the rest are minor problems, but seem to be easy fixes to me.

Yeah Mike, my only real gripe is the time it takes to assemble/disassemble. I know it's not long, but it's certainly longer than my folding stands! However I really like them and have bought 2. If you can make some way for it to be foldable or replace the screws with some kind of quick and stable clamp system, that would be great. Right now, If I'm only using 1 board (which is most of my gigs) the liquid stand is my go to.

My 6 year old Nord Stage 3 is selling for $3500 on Reverb according to their pricing guide, which is still WELL over 50% of what it cost new.

I was in a band that played 3-4 John Mayer songs, and while the BL loved them and did a credible job with them, both the crowd and I thought they were total snoozers. Slow Dancing in a Burning room can be kind of an effective belly-rubber but you'll never catch his songs on my Spotify rotation.

Eddie played the guitar solo on the keys? WTF? I'm going to have to suggest this to the band see if they kick me out for wanting to do it "true to the live version". Having recently had to learn this song I find that it's actually kind of hard to get all the parts down during the chorus. I had had to do some creative layering to get close to all the parts. But yeah, I'm going to, as seriously as possible, suggest I take the guitar solo in Jump and see how long I can keep the gag going.

I knew all those OT posts would pay off someday! I'm IN!

I have a couple patches that I use in Mainstage that are monophonic leads with a small amount of glide on them. And for whatever reason whenever I select these two patches for the first time they start from some note WAY down low and zoom up to where they're supposed to be, which, by the time they get there is already several notes behind in the solo. The specific patches are in the Rosanna solo. I purchased the patches from Arturia and they are otherwise pretty spot on. That solo takes about 4 patch changes to get all the parts and of course it sounds crappy if the note is starting 4 octaves too low. If I select the patch and then go back to it, it's usually fine. But if I close the file (concert) and then re-open it it starts again with the huge glide from down low. I've tried re-saving the concert several different ways with no help. Any of you guys with Mainstage or Arturia experience be able to point me in the right direction I'd be very thankful.

You're right, this more an exercise in sound design than a desire to satisfy my band OCD. I don't know if you remember but I also posted about 6 different versions of a Jump patch here once, just to see how close I could get to it on several different platforms. I'm more than certain you could do this part of the song on a rhodes or clave and maybe a filter/wah and the crowd would go wild as long as the guitar player didn't bore up the solo.

I was window shopping talk boxes and came across this demo on the Sweetwater site. It's not Rocky Mountain Way, but it sure looks more credible than I would have thought.

Pretty sure those are all 2 note chords and they are never simultaneous with the L hand pulse beat.

I have done previous versions of it on a Stage 3 but recently upgraded to a Stage 4 and have been re-doing a lot of patches and I don't know why this particular patch is stuck in my head, but I think it's killer and I couldn't seem to get the feel I wanted with other attempts. Is it kind of overkill? Yeah sure, but I always learn something when I go hard to chase down a patch. There's certainly other songs where I put nowhere near this effort! I'm kinda surprised that one of the biggest ingredients seemed to be reducing the polyphony. I still need to get the filter just right, but the Prophet V keyboard scaling is an on/off switch and I can't seem to get the the filter to sound right in the L and R hands simultaneously. If I get the time, I'm going to try it on Pigments, which has a bit more filter options, and I think I can limit the polyphony on.

Rocky Mountain Way.mp3 OK, try that on. Definitely good enough for a cover gig and probably better than what Joe has used live.

I don't have an Odyssey soft-synth, but trying it with the Prophet V. Reducing the Polyphony down to 2 seem to create a little snappiness to it that captures some of the feel of it. I can't seem to get the flange/phase effect by modulating PW on a slow LFO though, but an actual flanger seems to do a decent job. Trying to use the velocity to vary the filter/resonance to get the feel.

That's about the size and shape of an Odyssey?

Because all the R hand stuff sounds like a synth and really nothing like an EP? It really sounds to me like a filter is opening on either an LFO synched to song tempo or an envelope modded w/velocity (Did anyone have that in 1972-73?) I just found that on the wiki page for the Arp Odyssey it mentions being used on both Rocky Mountain Way and Life's Been Good To Me.

I just saw some speculation that it's an Arp Odyssey? Anyone? I really seriously doubt that it's a Wurli or Clav.

So I think a wurli or clav might get the pulse, but none of the other R hand stuff sounds like either of those instruments to me.

Need some clues to program the really cool synth(?) part behind the talk-box guitar solo on Rocky Mountain Way. Help me Hive Mind (you're my only hope). What do you possibly hear or is there some ancient interview you read that might give me clues to a better patch for this song. It's a really cool part and I'd really like to nail THAT sound. My available tools: Nord Stage 4, Mainstage, and all the Arturia Instruments and effects. The difficult thing is that low pulse note on the E it seems like there's a filter that opens more on alternating notes, like maybe it's a velocity setting? But I just can't quite get anything to be the right amount. I also hear maybe a slow flanger coming through the patch.

I have a full up functioning DX9 in mint condition and I couldn't give the thing away. Can't bring myself to throw it in the garbage. But I've advertised it for 100$ obo and got zero responses. So yeah, good luck!

I used to train Taiwanese pilots how to fly and they had a saying, "Everything is difficult before it is easy" In other words, the challenge is part of the learning process and you've already been through this process millions of times. What can help? Break the job down into smaller tasks and get some small victories on the way to your ultimate goal. I think this is what your teacher is trying to do for you? So find a couple milestones along the way to your ultimate goal, and make sure you recognize when you've achieved them. Good luck! I'm currently working up some stuff...OK, it's not Bach, it's the piano solo at the end of Sweet Home Alabama, but it's got some techniques that are not part of my normal bag-o-tricks and it's trying my patience too. You'll get there.

I think guys can argue about which DAW is best until the end of time, but the truth is that the capabilities of any of the major ones (Logic, Studio One, Pro Tools etc) far exceed the capabilities of the typical artist. If you already have a Mac, Logic is the cheapest option and is as full featured as a DAW gets. I've used it extensively and I think it's excellent. Mostly I stick with it because I perform with Mainstage and the workflow between the two is nearly identical. There's actually very few people in the world who have used Pro Tools and Logic enough to actually speak to the differences.

I used to run my Hammond XK3c through a PodXt which served many uses. Mostly, it gave me a volume pedal! But I used the delay and some of the reverbs on it almost all the time. Had a few moments where I used a Flanger and the PODXt had a great one. And I also took more than a few organ solo's with the wah pedal. Really cool and unexpected, you'll definitely get the audience's attention with that one.

I have to make some room in the studio and a couple boards just have to go. What's the pros/cons of the various places to sell and are there any less obvious ones than Reverb/Ebay that are effective for musical sales?

I'm a huge fan of all the later PT albums and then the earlier Stephen Wilson Solo albums. The Raven Who Refused to Sing is probably my favorite of the solo albums and the most "proggy" (by my definition at least). Guthrie Govan and Marco Minneman played on that record and of course they alone are amazing. I went to a Steven Wilson show in Phoenix a couple of years ago, on a whim, first time I'd seen him, and it still remains one of the best shows I've ever seen. Absolute masterpiece. He will do certain shows in surround sound and it's surprisingly effective. They use it sparingly but when you realize that some of the music or sounds are coming from all around you, it's an absolute head jerker. Then the way they weave the special effects and movies in with the music, very emotional show. On a different tour, when they do the song "Routine", the song/video combination had literally everyone in the audience in tears. Almost unfair to the audience how devastating that performance is live. Glad you enjoyed them.