Stephen Fortner

My Fantom 7 review unit just arrived a few days ago and there is a LOT to wrap my head around. So far I'm very impressed with the overall sound quality, build quality, massive complement of audio, MIDI, USB, CV/gate, and controller I/O, the fast and extremely QUIET semi-weighted synth action on my unit, the styling, and the fact that they've crammed so much functionality and so many operating modes into it. The rhythm patterns have arranger-like sections (verses, intros, fills, etc). Others have mentioned in this thread that there doesn't seem to be any VK/VR-like drawbar control for organ sounds, and I too have yet to find any. (Surprising because the RD-2000 stage piano does have that.) I too am going to YouTube University watching Roland and third-party videos. I'm talking to Roland and am going to try to pull some of their best people (hopefully brother Tibbs and/or brother Diaz) into either this or a new thread so we can get our collective questions answered straight from the source. My main speed bump so far is that the keyboard does SO much that navigation has an inevitable learning curve. One example: I found the single-Tone Scene and thought, "Great, I'll use this to step through a bunch of the new Tones in bank A." Yet after going through a handful of sounds in each category, it would jump to a seemingly random new category and then I'd step through a few featured Tones there. I knew there had to be more. (Tones, BTW, is Roland's current parlance for a single "patch" i.e. not a combi / multi / performance.) It came down to clicking a padlock icon while on the Zone View screen. Lock it, and you would step through all the Tones in the sound category selected in that long button row at bottom right. Now, when I see a padlock icon, my first thought is that it's meant to prevent tampering and therefore locks other settings on the touchscreen and/or panel. Or maybe it's a memory-protect that keeps you from storing. Nope. It's a toggle between two different ways of scrolling through Tones. There are certainly some design cues from the Montage, and it's always in multi-timbral mode like the Montage. However, it "thinks" quite differently from the Montage and MODX in terms of hierarchy and organization. Exactly how? Yeah, working on that. Good news is that in the past few months I've been working on some MODX tutorial videos and have gotten familiar enough with it that when I really learn the Fantom, I'll be able to give you a robust, point-by-point comparison. First impression: Who's seen "Penny Dreadful," the wonderful series originally on Showtime (now Netflix) that mashes up characters from classic horror? If you've seen it, you know that however watchable Eva Green is, the Frankenstein's Creature character steals the show. He is an incredibly sophisticated and intelligent being with an encyclopedic knowledge of poetry and literature. He's powerful and mostly a force for good. Yet because he's sewn together out of different bits, he can also be awkward and unpredictable, and doesn't always understand how regular folks expect him to act. The Fantom at its release has felt, in the brief time it's been in my la-BOR-a-tory, kind of like that. By the end of season 3, the Creature has made vast strides in moral and emotional growth, and if you think I'm making an analogy to where the Fantom could go with software updates, then we're thinking alike. More to come. Alive! It's alive!

Forum friends, I wrote a review of the Casio Privia PX-S3000 digital piano and wanted to share it here. It's a good long read, with links to my videos at the bottom. Twitter version: The PX-S3000 offers a ridiculous amount of sound quality, power, and fun for the price of $799. And it looks really cool, too. https://www.pianobuyer.com/article/review-casio-privia-px-s3000/

The DSS-1 has a bit of a cult following. Not an instrument you'd take to a gig these days. But I remember the filter sounding really good. I see a huge price span on Reverb â $275 up to $800-ish.

Plus one on just about everything said here. I'll add musicians who don't want to rehearse, as well as those who think rehearsals are for learning one's individual parts. (No, that's called homework. Rehearsals are for integrating the parts together and working out intros, endings, arrangements, and song transitions.) Sadly, my original and current hometown of Burlington, Vermont seems to have more than its share of lazy people. A few months ago I jammed with a rather well-known local drummer. He was great. But I was asked to bring in ideas for songs I want to cover, and I did. The bass player, a friend of his, looked at the Steely Dan, '80s synth pop, and a few other things on my list, and said, "Nothing too arrangement-heavy. I don't want to have to rehearse a lot." I did not contact them about getting together again.

Mixed feelings here as well. I remember leaving the theater feeling like every character except the protagonist was a cardboard cut-out present only to advance the plot. His long-suffering manager-slash-love interest, his parents, the Kate McKinnon character, the perpetually stoned sidekick, etc. A wacky alternative fan theory (that I just made up) makes more sense of all this: He was actually killed in the accident and everything we see is his "final season of Lost" near-death experience. Hence all the characters are his idealizations of who those people are in his life. Hence John Lennon living in a small house by the sea as an ordinary guy. (That whole treatment left a bad taste in my mouth.) But, a lot of smiley moments, great music of course. All in all a pleasant but unmemorable confection full of empty calories.

IIRC, I think the last rate for a full-page display ad in Keyboard (the final print issue was April 2017) was $5,000. But because of what Dave Bryce said and numerous other factors, the number is pretty much meaningless, not unlike the MSRP for any instrument manufacturer that still uses those.

Assembly Bill 5, which has just become law in California, will mandate that most people working as "independent contractors" be reclassified as employees, with all the benefits and protections that entails. It was largely inspired by the plight of Uber and Lyft drivers, for whom I agree something needed to happen. But we're all reading a lot of panicky (perhaps rightfully) coverage of AB5 regarding the music and film/TV industries. Such as this article in Variety. I haven't done a thorough study of the bill's language, but one-size-fits-all wording with unintended consequences is unsurprising, especially in CA. If you're a California creative or user of creatives' services, how will this bill impact your business? Are there upsides? Workarounds? Is there really no parameter regarding duration of employment (e.g. it seems straightforward enough that musicians hired for the time it takes to record an album, even as they're working on other things too, should be contractors)? Can freelancers get around this by registering as a business entity (sole proprietorship, S-corp, etc.) and hanging out a shingle? I do know that a lot of conscientious people were working on language for an exemption, which was then rejected by the American Federation of Musicians. Having taken a swing at this hornets' nest, I will now duck.

I know the Neko well because I sort of put it on the map with my review of it in Keyboard in, IIRC, 2003. David Emm, IMHO it never found its niche because at a time when all-in-one workstations were still popular, it didn't offer keyboardists enough unbox-it-and-go functionality. It was pretty Frankenstein-like, in fact, amounting to a cool "PC case mod" that simply put a keyboard, some control surfaces, a touchscreen, and an audio interface into a single slick chassis. But initially, the user had to figure out all the programming to make all those controls work. So, keyboardists accustomed to Motifs and K2600s expected to boot up a sequencer program or DAW, hit the hardware PLAY button, and have the software's transport play. It didn't necessarily, and those musicians went, "This doesn't work." Computer-based musicians unafraid to take a PC into a live setting (a lot fewer then than now) focused on the obsolescence issues â upgrading something where all the guts are this embedded is much harder than swapping out a PC, especially when you get to one of those generational rollovers where motherboards and CPU sockets change. These things improved over later iterations, some in response to my initial gripes in the review according to the founder. ("We're just gonna call the second edition of this thing 'Fortner's bitch list,'' he said to me, only half-jokingly.) Open Labs' savvy marketing strategy put it into the hands of players with techs who could really make it sing, such as Timbaland and Morris Hayes of Prince's band. But yeah, it never really caught on in the mainstream M.I. consciousness, perhaps because it was perceived as too expensive. As regards things today, David, your point about squinting at small screens is well taken. Laptops (Mac and Windows) are now a lot more stable for live use, and in the studio nearly everyone is going to use a DAW. Yamaha recognized this and abandoned the onboard sequencer in first the MX series â the entry-level Motif family synth â then the Montage and MODX. They instead focused on the very tight integration with Cubase. The Fantom's case for onboard sequencing needs to be that it is more immediate and inspiring than working with a computer. It looks like they're trying to make it hip and Ableton-like. Even so, I think that's a difficult case to make today. Or is it? Again, there's a part of synth culture that gravitates to hardware sequencers and disses DAWs. LCD Soundsystem saw it coming: "I hear you're buying a synthesizer and an arpeggiator / And are throwing your computer out the window / Because you want to make something real / You want to make a Yaz record." This is also the part of synth culture that's way into Eurorack and thinks parallel fifths means a bottle of booze in each hand (because of course the sequencer is doing the playing). With the CV and gate outs on the Fantom, Roland may be showing awareness of this and going after those folks. Or I may be totally overthinking this. The prices are very close to Montage prices, length for length. Roland may just be going, "For the same price, we give you more stuff: V-Piano engine! Dedicated synthy knobs in addition to the expected controllers! Drum pads! Clip-based hipster sequencing if you want it! CV/gate out to interface with your modular world!" I have to admit I'm intrigued by a company making a kitchen sink workstation in an era where most everything in synths and keyboards is moving towards specialization. Gonna have my work cut out for me when my Fantom shows up!

Addendum: Or maybe it's that the people here are intelligent and respectful and the moderators are quick to shut down abusive behavior. 4chan, 8chan, and to a lesser degree Reddit, all use a bulletin board format, and in those forests, everything you touch is toxic. (Kind of like when the space hippies thought they'd found the planet Eden in that Star Trek episode. We found out Spock can jam, though!)

Love this article, and I love our own dark forest here at MPN. Though I spend some time on FB â mainly crafting bad puns as some of you may know â I'm finding it more and more innervating. Of course, it's designed to keep one mindlessly scrolling to see what comes up next. I've found this almost puts me into a trance-like state, but an odd sort of one where if I see something that makes me angry, I'm more likely to dash off what I think is a clever screed and hit "send." That's not how I want to be. One can do a lot of scrolling here as well, but the process is more proactive. You search for topics that look interesting, click on them, and look for information that's relevant to your own situation or problem. Or, you get even more proactive and create a new topic yourself. Neurologically, I'm in a totally different brain-state here than I am in the endlessly scrolling or pull-to-refresh world of social media. Whatever brain-state Facebook and Twitter put us in has proven to make us intolerant and quicker to anger â but mainly when we're in that environment.

Hey 09, long time no see! I recently built a PC out of older components that were the best available circa 2013-2015. This may not be the way you want to go, but you can get a lot of horsepower for the money. BASE MACHINE: Dell Precision T5600 with 8-core Xeon E5-2680 at 2.7GHz, 32GB DDR3 RAM (4 x 8GB Samsung server RAM). Plenty of ports, including two USB3 (one front, one back). This was a $350 thrift store find, which was actually the whole thing that got this started. UPGRADES: As this is a dual-socket motherboard, I added a second identical Xeon and another 32GB of RAM. Each processor must have the same amount of RAM in the same configuration. Also, this is a special variety of server RAM. I matched what was in there already by taking a photo of one of the modules and looking for that serial number online. Drives: Samsung 860 EVO 1TB x 4: system drive, two in software RAID as main project drive, one more for samples. External Fantom 3TB spinner for backups. Video card: Nvidia GTX 1080 Founders Edition. This has three DisplayPort plus one HDMI connections, and supports up to 7680 x 1440 resolution. That corresponds exactly to the three 27" Acer QHD monitors ($400 for all) I scored on Craigslist from a gamer in New Hampshire. One caveat: There is no way, even with a PCI card, to upgrade from SATA to NVMe as a *boot* drive on this system. It's a BIOS thing, and even researching UEFI options I haven't found a way. I believe you can use NVMe as a *storage* option, which could give me a screaming advantage for my media drives. Failing that I'll add a hardware RAID card and go crazier with the RAID. For the cherry on the cake, my friend who helped me put the system together gave me an original IBM Model M clicky keyboard, in black, no less. WITH the three displays and original machine, the entire thing cost under $2000. It positively screams on anything DAW-related, and edits 4K video competently. (For rendering video, I use a special codec package for Premiere called Vokouder, which takes full advantage of the GPUs in the Nvidia card. At Mike Martin's advice, I have gotten into DaVinci Resolve and am getting a lot happier.) As always, YMMV. If I were building a current PC, I'd start with probably an AMD Ryzen 9 CPU and choose recommended parts on PC Parts Picker from there.

Hoo boy, having reviewed the Montage in Keyboard, Roland looks like they're really trying to one-up it in a "let's throw the kitchen sink in this thing" sort of way. Ableton-inspired sequencing capabilities, extra panel of synthy knobs on the right, drum pads, Roland's virtual analog ecosystem, etc etc. I've been asked to review the new Fantom for a quick 2-pager in the "Keyboard" section of Electronic Musician, but we'll have opportunities to talk more in-depth about it here, for sure. The "does anyone really want a self-contained workstation anymore?" topic is well-trodden. I can say that sequencing on a workstation synth has, for at least the last ten years, felt like building a ship in a bottle compared to what I can do hooking up to a computer. If a keyboard maker could really get the interface right, they theoretically could counter-message that hooking up to a computer feels like, well, hooking up to a computer. There's already a precedent for this in the "DAWless analog and modular" culture, but for those folks, the black-and-white keyboard is not their interface of choice. Interested in the parallels for us old-school players.

Hi DevonB, My situation was that I was upgrading from a 2008-era "cheese grater" Mac Pro to a late 2012 iMac with what were maximum specs for the time. So, no FW on the iMac. Because I'm a know-it-all (LOL) I installed the UA Thunderbolt card in the Apollo, plugged it into the new iMac, and thought I'd be good to go downloading software updates. Nope! Computer wouldn't see the UAD Meter or Console apps no matter what I did. Because this is the first Apollo, it took some time digging into the UA knowledge base to put two and two together, but I finally figured it out.

Hello all, Not so long ago, I installed a Thunderbolt 2 card in my beloved FireWire silver-face Apollo. It can be tricky. FWIW, I thought I'd leave a tip that the trick is for it to receive a firmware and OS update via FireWire FIRST. Then you do another install via the Thunderbolt port. So it's a good idea if your FireWire-equipped computer is still around. Mine wasn't, but an FW800-to-T2 adapter did the trick. Anyone interested in a step-by-step on how I did it? There are a lot of original Apollos still in service but not nearly as many computers with FW, so I imagine a few folks have gone through this. SF

The Hydra looks fascinating, seems well-built from the pictures (and if Glen Darcey is involved I'm sure it is), and the price is right compared to a lot of premium synths that have us all drooling on the couch cushions as we look under them for money (Moog One, Waldorf Quantum, Prophet XL, etc.) I've pinged Mr. Darcey about maybe getting my hands on one.

I have a Kurzweil VA-1, as I was writing the instruction manual for it before then-parent-company Samick killed the project. It's one of a handful of prototypes. I'd be happy to contribute some videos and sound samples of it.

Got it working. While I wait for my new CCK to get here, I combined my old Dock version with a Dock-to-Lightning adaptor that I use to hook my iPhone into the stereo of my 2011 Audi. Everything works like a charm.

Hey everyone, I've been on but somehow missed this thread! Thank you for all the birthday wishes!

Dr. Mike, a CCK would have been my first choice, as grouchy as I'm being. In fact I thought I had a couple in my all-things-Apple Tupperware, but the only one I could find was for the old dock connector! Still frosts me that no local store has something as recent and still-useful as a Lightning CCK, though. I got used to the Bay Area, where I could decide I needed something NOW and have it within a 20-minute drive (three hours with traffic).

Rant alert. I found myself very frustrated and up against a deadline this week, with the simple need to run a connection from a USB-B port on the Casio Privia PX-S3000 I'm reviewing (for Larry Fine's excellent "Piano Buyer" publication) to the Lightning port on my previous-generation iPad Pro. This is because Casio has a cool learning app called Chordana Play that gives you "Guitar Hero" like graphics streaming towards a virtual keyboard, and can sync up with a variety of Casio instruments. This is NOT a criticism of Casio. The USB-A port on the Privia is for a thumb drive, with which you can record audio or save and load data. The USB-B port is how you'd connect to a computer or tablet. That's standard procedure on just about any keyboard by just about any manufacturer. Not a single store in the Burlington, Vermont metro area â which has a population of 214,000 â had an Apple Camera Connection kit. Not that I should have to pay $40 for one, anyway, as it's essentially a Lightning-to-USB-A adaptor (which would then let me use a regular USB cable to get to the piano). A straight-up Lightning-to-USB-B cable? At Best Buy, Walmart, Target, and even an Apple-specialist store called Smalldog, I got looked at like I had five heads. Of course, they did have a USB-C to USB-B cable, and so suggested I solve my problem by purchasing a newer iPad! I finally ordered a custom cable on Amazon, and the product description says it's designed for MIDI, so fingers crossed. Of course, it arrives after my deadline. In fact, I saw very few Lightning accessories of any kind in the stores. I know everything is going USB-C, but my iPad Pro is a beast. It's got another five years of service in it at least. Retailers just want to push people towards the very latest models of everything and stop offering accessory support for things that are even just a couple of years old. You can get 1500 flavors of cases and ear buds, though. Perhaps my rant is about my home town. What I wouldn't give for a Fry's or a SuperMicro (enviously looking at you, Boston people) around here. We just don't have the population base to support anything but the lowest common consumer denominator. Power users, hackers, and DIYers? Or even musicians who need a specific cable? Yeah, not so much. Burlington is a wonderful place in so many ways, but if you're looking for more than to enjoy some Ben & Jerry's or perhaps excellent cheddar while possibly running into a member of Phish, plan ahead and order online! Lesson learned ... Oh, and if you tell me I should learn to make my own cables, I'll buy you a pizza if you come over and do it for me.

Shocked and saddened to hear. Aspen was always one of the people I most looked forward to catching up with at NAMM and other trade shows. It reminds me to take no one for granted, however huge they seem.

Dr. Mike, Mine has an Nvidia GPU but with only 1MB of VRAM. I'll do some research on the 2014 machines.

My virtual instrument host and mobile recording machine is a mid-2012 15" MPB Retina upgraded with a 512MB SSD from OtherWorld. Two USB3 ports, two Thunderbolt 2, HDMI out, and SD card reader. Only puny thing is the 8GB of RAM, which IIRC cannot be upgraded on this iteration. Where I'm feeling a pinch is that I'm increasingly needing to produce high-quality videos on the go, and though HD (1920) is fine, 4K in Premiere brings the machine to its knees. I too am looking at the 16" rumors and considering selling plasma, prostitution, etc. I'm right with Dr. Mike: Jony Ive without Steve Jobs as a balance was turning Apple into the Bang & Olufsen of computers: Form before function, super slick designs, but neither the most powerful, flexible, or upgradeable components compared to some less glamorous products. But for any music-making needs that don't have a visual component, the old MPB is trucking along just fine.

I have a 142 and highly recommend it unless it's been severely neglected. There's a bit to getting an old one 100 percent, but it's not rocket science, and once you get them straight, they tend to stay straight. Mine was originally a Ken Rich restoration. I eventually installed a Keyboard Specialties "super stock" amp chassis and via my Speakeasy preamp / speed control pedal, it makes any clonewheel sound amazing. Hell, it makes the organ sounds on my old DX7 sound amazing. The alignment of the slow motors piggybacked on the fast motors is a thing to pay attention to, as you want the slow motor's shaft to touch the fast motor's flywheel at just the right angle. That's true of any Leslie with a two-motor setup, though. What's the asking price, if I may ask?

George was a great friend and an incredible resource to me during my early freelance years. I knew him through both his Kurzweil and Yamaha tenures. Very, very sad to hear this news.