Stephen Fortner

Someone close to me, and to this project, offered the opinion that it really should be called the PC5, as it"s more of an upgrade from the PC4 than anything else. For quite a while in the early 2000s, my gig rig was a 76-key K2600 with a K2661 above it, and KB3 sounds going through separate outputs to either my Leslie 142 or a Voce Spin II simulator. If Kurzweil makes a 61-key K2700, I could see perching it above my Forte7 and making a modern version of the same rig for all the live gigs that currently don"t exist. We have it so good now. There are so many ways to get to the same destination. If you're in Yamaha world, a CP73 (or 88 if you need those extra keys) and MODX â plus a clonewheel if you need a dedicated organ â packs a lot of punch into a minimum of weight. From the looks of the Hammond SK Pro, a lot of combo gigs could be done using it and nothing else. As a longtime Kurzweil player, though (my first was a K2000, for which I maxed out a credit card in 1995), I am eager to get my hands on the K2700 and form my own opinions about its continuity with the rest of the line.

I relate this only to report, not to express an opinion. But someone on change.org has started a petition for GearSlutz to change their name on the grounds that it"s misogynistic and less than inclusive. The thing is getting legs. https://all.change.org/p/gearslutz-gearslutz-please-change-your-name Nice to have a clear, descriptive, and totally uncontroversial name like 'Music Player,' innit? ð SF

Al I totally see your point. I don't think Korg expects that people will be using external effects, given that the mixer has a roster of internal ones. That may indeed be short-sighted, given that the DAWless-slash-Eurorack-slash-Elektron crowd â basically younger versions of the same hipsters that made the MicroKorg a legend â loves all manner of stompboxes, Strymon stuff, the Eventide H9, Moogerfoogers, etc. It's hard to figure why they didn't just feed those with auxes 1 and 2, which are the first thing any band-member-who's-also-the-sound-guy grabs for monitor mixes anyway.

Caveat: I haven't done nearly enough research on what's currently out there. A bar-shaped amp intended for an arranger keyboard is almost certainly not going to be powerful enough in a loud rock or soul band onstage. It sounds like the vision here is something like a horizontal take on a Bose L1 style system, perhaps with a detached housing that holds the power amp and subwoofer and sits on the floor. That would certainly be cool.

Musicians" Phones In addition to the operator"s headphone jack on the top, the rear panel (facing towards the musicians), has two independent outputs for what Korg calls Musicians" Phones. These are fed by aux masters 3 and 4. Aux sends 3 and 4 are normally post-fader but can be switched to pre-fader, per channel, with a button. There"s a knob next to each Musician"s Phones level control that injects more or less of the main mix into the headphone outputs. The idea is that you can give two headphone mixes 'more me' (or rather, less main mix relative to 'me') without tinkering with the main mix or any of the auxes. In practice it works well, and should cover most cases except where an artist wants to hear more or less of a specific channel other than themselves.

Interesting. The 'mono synth' section we can see in the foreground looks to be one among several sections on the instrument. So yes, it could be some kind of combo or ensemble keyboard, though it looks less organ-forward than an SK-series keyboard. I agree that the demo isn't much to go on. And, if they"re doing something with a synthesizer component, it had better go beyond merely being a PCM-based sound engine with knobs and sliders. FWIW, Asian keyboard companies" offices in the U.S. (and for that matter Europe) tend to be sales, marketing, and distribution outposts, though some have more input into R&D and design for the Western market than others. For the most part, though, the mothership comes up with something and it"s the U.S. office"s job to sell it. My experience of HUSA is that they"re towards the middle in this regard, because Suzuki recognizes the American legacy of the Hammond organ. I could be totally wrong, as at this point I have no inside information, but my gut says this might be something in the ARP Quadra and Korg Trident vein.

Mute Groups This function caught my attention, though if this were a formal review in a magazine I'd write about it after writing about more basic things. Thank goodness it isn't. The MW-2408 has four mute groups and they"re really easy to use. Simply hold down one of the Mute Group buttons on the right of the console (A,B, C, and D) until its light starts blinking. While it"s blinking, press the Mute buttons of the individual channels you want to be part of the group. Once all the desired channels are muted, press the Mute Group button again. Now, pressing that Mute Group button will mute and unmute all those channels at once. This has benefits for both recording and live performance. Let"s say your session or gig involves a miked-up drum kit, but you're not always going to be recording it or sending it through the P.A. (Like when overdubbing in a session or doing an acoustic-only tune at a gig.) Make a mute group for the drums and presto, you eliminate those live mics and any noise floor or other issues associated with them. It"s a great solution for any situation where you have a lot of live inputs that you don"t want to use all the time, but neither do you want to disable them individually because you"ve set levels, EQ"ed, and otherwise gotten the sound you want. This is about the easiest way I"ve ever used to set up mute groups on a mixer â no menus and no programming. Break Mute Locate at the far right just above the master fader, this mutes all input channels except stereo 25/26, which is the one with the 1/8" stereo mini input at the upper right of the top panel. It also does not mute audio streaming from your computer over the USB connection. The use case here is pretty obvious: Muting your live inputs while playing break music from a phone, iPod, laptop, or other connected device. Speaking of connected devices, RCA inputs are conspicuously absent on the MW series. My Crest XR-24 sports these as 'tape ins.' Maybe it"s old-school to want those, but a fair amount of modern DJ-oriented gear still uses them, so it might be nice to have even one stereo pair.

Marino, sorry to be offline for a while. Fall and winter 2020 has just kept hitting me over the head with a folding chair. There is no dedicated cascade bus or connector, but you could easily run the output of one mixer into a stereo channel on the other. Leave the stereo channel at unity gain with EQ off, etc.

Al, those Musicians" Phones outputs are a big part of the MW-2408"s story and I"m about to dig into this exact issue. Again, my attraction to the Korg is that other than the effects and the stereo USB audio connection, everything can go through it without hitting its A/D converters. So I can monitor and route with it as I do 96kHz on my Apollo. Oh, yeah. Like most all-digital mixers in this category or the closest thing to it, the Korg only does 44.1 and 48kHz.

As we have a lot of keyboard players on the MPN forums, this seems like the perfect place to ask this. Do you have an overhead camera rig for shooting how-to-play or synth tutorial videos? If so I'd love to hear a description of what you did and see a picture. One issue when shooting straight down is, you can't use too wide-angle a lens or else you get bow distortion. This is partly because keyboard instruments are a lot wider than they are deep, so parallel lines that show up not parallel are pretty disruptive to the image. So you have to get far away enough to use something like a 50mm prime lens. If shooting straight down that's, like, the ceiling. (I've also used the trick of placing a keyboard at a near-vertical angle on one of my Jaspers stands and using a tripod, but when we get into heavy 88s, this makes me nervous.) Bruddas like Ed Diaz have this impressively nailed, with trusses mounted across their ceiling to hang lights and cameras, and I think I might knuckle down and go this route. But I"ve got a lot more in common with Bob Moog than Bob Vila, so curious to see what DIY solutions people have cooked up.

As I"ve been rearranging my studio I"ve taken the opportunity to look at serial numbers on items, look up their replacement or market value, and start making a spreadsheet of everything I have down to the last stand and snake. I knew I"d accumulated some gear over the years, but I"m only about three quarters done and the number in the sum cell is already mind-blowing. I"m not so comfortable anymore with having this all under my homeowner"s insurance. Who are we liking these days and what are best practices? Still Clarion? Rider on your homeowner"s insurance for items used in a professional capacity? (Not that I'm making any money with them during the pandemic, but looking towards the future.) Note: This gear will not be going out on gigs for the foreseeable future. When that happens, it will be a specific and limited subset. Some of you may know from Facebook that I lost a car recently to an electrical fire, and escaped with about 20 seconds to spare before the entire interior went up in a fireball. So I"m doing a lot of safety-oriented things to the house I"ve been putting off, and that got me thinking about insurance.

Gotta add a personal note given the pics above: The room in which all this set up, my studio, used to be my teenage bedroom. Lived here during my early 20s as well as I went to college locally (University of Vermont). I now look after the house as mom is in assisted living, but the point is, this is the room in which I dreamed of having a tenth of the gear I do now, and of writing so much as a word for Keyboard magazine. Summer of '89 was when I first got prolific writing songs, and that happened in this room with my DX7, Korg Poly-800, and borrowed gear from bandmates including an Ensoniq ESQ-1, Tascam 244 four-track, and Alesis HR-16 drum machine and MIDIverb. I think I wrote about 20 songs that summer, which is the most I've ever done in such a brief period of time. Now I've got about three more to-the-ceiling racks of synths to (re) set up, a truss to rig for a downward-facing motion control video camera and lights, and freestanding instruments like my 1974 Rhodes Suitcase and 1947 Hammond CV. And now, with all this gear in here, instead of writing 20 songs in three months I get whiny-ass creative block about where and how to begin a project and blame my 'perfectionism.' Ever have one of those moments when you wish you could go back in time and give yourself advice? I just had one where I realized my younger self would be the one schooling me, i.e. slapping me silly for having a single complaint about my current life. Still need a mixer, though, and going to dive all the way into this one. But it is so, so nice to be here, be doing this, and have y'all as friends and colleagues.

Happy Halloween! Due to the continued presence of cooties that are scarier than anything I could dress up as, I"ve spent mine following in brother Bryce"s footsteps and reconfiguring my studio around ergonomics and new synths. This has been a perfect opportunity to insert the new Korg SoundLink MW-2408 mixer, which Korg hopes will be appealing for both live and studio use. I"m gonna begin by testing out in the studio because, well, still not many live gigs in my neck of the woods. If I get a chance to take it out in the wild, you"ll hear it here first. Because I hang out here, I have a little problem with lots and lots of keyboards. Or maybe that"s the other way around. Some folks people prefer to go all inside the box and simply have enough inputs on their audio interfaces to keep everything plugged in and ready to go. And there"s a case to be made for keeping signal paths as short as possible, adding only processors that are part of the sound you"re trying to get. Me, I like to have a board as a central traffic cop. My SSL SiX has become my indispensable companion for critical tracking and monitor control, and I can imagine what one with enough inputs for all my keyboards would cost. Therein lies the issue. If you look at 'project studio' mixers today, there isn"t a lot between the super-bargain stuff and consoles beginning in the low five figures. Now, I get it that the quality and features we get at a given price point has gone up since having a Mackie 8-Bus and an ADAT or three was an aspirational goal. I know people pressing live digital mixers like the Yamaha TF and Allen & Heath SQ into service in the studio and getting good results, and price-wise those occupy the sort of midrange I have in mind. I think the PreSonus StudioLive stuff, especially the latest generation, occupies a very cool niche and performs great â if you want to use it as your audio interface. I want to use the A/D converters in my Universal Audio Apollo, which I don"t think any remotely affordable digital mixer can outdo sonically. So, an analog board is fine by me, and I also want it to be 'keyboardy,' whether that means stereo inputs (which it has), features a one-person multimedia creator with a synth obsession might find useful, or both. The Speck SSM or XtraMix would be perfect for a guy like me, but they"re hunted to extinction on the used market and even the $10,000 LiLo is discontinued. Looking at the Korg, it ticked a lot of my boxes, and come in at the low end of my price range: $2,100 list but around $1,500 street anywhere you look right now. It"s chiefly an analog board, with the signal only hitting its internal A/D if you use the onboard effects or USB output (which is not multitrack, just a stereo mirror of the main fader). It has an eight-bus design, with eight balanced group outs on TRS connectors, but arranged in stereo groups of four (1/2, etc.) with four group faders in the output section. As with other mixers of this design, you"d route something to just one group output by assigning it to a group pair, then hard-panning it one way or the other. A big talking point in Korg"s marketing is that the SoundLink MW series was co-designed by Greg Mackie and Peter Watts. Mackie needs no introduction and was responsible for a lot of the signal path and routing features. Watts is a famed former Trident engineer who designed the Korg"s 'HiVolt' mic preamps. Korg claims these punch way above their price in terms of noise floor, headroom, clarity, and warmth, and we"re gonna test that out with a variety of source signals. I currently have five keyboards running through it. These are a Prophet REV2, Nord Wave 2, Roland Fantom, Nord Grand, and first-gen Studiologic Numa Organ. Oh, I"m gonna add more. I"m gonna max this thing completely out and go full Vangelis in my room and record something to post here if I"m brave enough. The Roland has XLR outs, so it"s using mono channels 7 and 8. The rest are using the first four stereo channels. The mixer"s eight group outputs are connected number-for-number to my Apollo"s line inputs. Its USB connection is feeding my secondary iMac (read about my dual iMac setup here) and acting as its audio interface, while my primary iMac is tethered to the Apollo via Thunderbolt 3. I"m not yet using the Korg"s monitor outs, though I will test them directly through my ADAM S2A speakers. I"ve simply run its main outs into the EXT1 inputs on the SSL SiX (EXT2 gets the monitor signal from the Apollo), as currently I want to monitor the main bus. Not to mention, removing the SiX altogether would"ve meant even more crawling around under and behind things and cussing that I"ve already done so far. It"s sitting in for my beloved Crest XR-24, which is an absolute beast for routing flexibility and a very clean sounding mixer. I"m not going to say the Korg is dead quiet â turn up the trims and the faders all the way and you"ll hear some white noise â but at any gain structure you"d actually use, the Korg will certainly not add any appreciable noise floor to your recordings. I"ve noticed one quirk so far. The stereo channels (9/10 through 23/24) offer a single XLR mic or stereo TRS line inputs. There"s a mic/line source switch on each channel, but it"s not an input selector: setting it to mic didn"t mute the signals I had plugged into the line ins. I guess it selects the gain curve for the trim pot at the top of the channel strip, but switching it produced no change in volume. The quirky part is that it did add bass and low-mids to the sound, just a little but immediately audible, on every channel I tested. And this is with the EQs all flat. Next up I"ll report on the EQ and effects, but with everything flat, so far so good. It"s clean, what goes in is what comes out, and the routing looks hella flexible. You even get mute groups, which I haven"t seen on a mixer this affordable. The digital section has niceties like a feedback eliminator and dynamics processing on the main, aux 1, and aux 2 busses. The mono channels (1-8) have a one-knob compressor. In tonight"s noodling, if it has a 'sound,' I"d say it"s ever so slightly on the bright side. There"s a smaller version, the MW-1608, and if you can hear '2408' without thinking of some iteration of the MOTU audio interface so many of us relied on for so long, well, you"re younger than me. More to come, and as always, ask a question and I"ll investigate and get the answer! Quick snapshots below.

It"s funny how a little thing like this can make such a difference. I"ve worked with all kinds of setups: laptop plus desktop, three monitors on a giant swing arm, you name it. Somehow this is the most ergonomically friendly setup I"ve ever used. It"s only been a couple of days but I am working longer with less fatigue and as I do my edit passes, see that I"m making fewer mistakes I need to fix. I think of it like having a really nice second monitor with a bonus CPU and storage built in! Only things I want now are a better chair (not a huge Aeron fan) and a wraparound desk â something like an Argosy Aura â with some rack space in it. That's the next project ...

I think I found a solution, and I'd like to share it for anyone here who wants to do what I'm doing. It's an app called Across, and the website is acrosscenter.com. I have it running right now. It works via Bluetooth. It works like this: You install the Across Center app on both machines. In this app's control panel, you set the one your keyboard and mouse are hooked to as the server and the other as the client. You also have a visual layout for positioning your devices physically. You can combine multiple devices across Mac, Windows, Linux, and Android. Once configured, it works pretty slickly. You can drag the mouse from one computer to the other just as though you were using dual monitors, or restrict it so that you use a hotkey to give the focus to one machine or the other. You cannot drag files across, as this would be a network operation, but I have my two iMacs networked together anyway so I can just drop things into each other's folders. Whichever computer the mouse pointer is on has the keyboard focus. Another cool feature: Clipboard support. You can copy things on one computer and paste them on the other. Now for the caveats. If your two (or more) devices are already Bluetooth paired, you'll need to unpair them first and then let the Across Center program do the work. The company says that other Bluetooth devices in the area won't affect (or be affected by) operations, but if I tried to use my Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse as the server's input devices, the configuration process kept, well, freaking out. Each computer was giving me repeated requests to connect from the other and connections kept failing. I turned them off, replaced them with my wired iMac keyboard and a good ol' Dell wheel mouse, restarted, redid everything, and all was well. My girlfriend's home office with her work iMac seems to be far enough away that my machines aren't picking up on her Magic Mouse and Keyboard â which are already paired to her computer. Perhaps the most annoying thing is that if your client computer has a password on power-up, you won't be able to get to the password entry field because of course Across won't have loaded yet. Good news: This is not a problem if you log out and leave the computer on, or if you have to re-enter your password because the computer went to sleep. I tested this. I don't intend to add my iPhone or iPad to the mix, because why would I interact with touchscreens using a mouse? There's a free demo that limits keyboard input on the client computer (not the server) after 30 minutes, but the license is $22.99 a year â most reasonable. Thereafter, renewals are $19.99 a year with a 15-day grace period. They email you a code, and you enter it in the Across Center app on the server computer. Computers in client mode do not require activation; they just work. I'd love to hear from anyone who tries this out across platforms, with more than two devices, etc. I'm satisfied enough that I just gave them my money. I'm already feeling the ergonomic benefits. For example, I'm working on an instruction manual for a manufacturer right now. (This will also bear fruit for the MPN Gear Lab, as they sent me something really cool.) I can have their thing and my DAW set up on the studio machine with my word processor, browser, and Preview docs with needed info open on the office machine. The two macs are close together at about a 60-degree angle. Before, I had two keyboards and mice. The desk was crowded, and I was constantly turning my chair and needing to reposition my hands, often grabbing the wrong mouse if I was tired. Now, the keyboard is in the center and I just turn my head slightly. Photos of this setup and a screenshot are attached.

So I got this beefy new-to-me iMac. It's on my desk next to my older one, which has become the office-business-writing machine while the new beast is the studio-DAW-video-editing machine. I would like to share a single keyboard and mouse between the two, especially being able to cursor off one screen and have the pointer show up on the other, as if I had two displays hooked up to a single computer. Screen sharing and remote login don't quite do what I'm looking for. UPDATE: I found a solution, and I gave it a mini-review in the next post.

Lady Gaia I'm sorry I somehow missed your post some time ago. I watch these threads for questions all the time. Anyway, I would say the short answer to your concerns is yes. The Bösedorfer multisample is round, woody, and has a nice singing sustain to it. The onboard EQ is fairly basic but will do what you need if you'd like to mellow the Bosie out even more. You might be surprised by the Yamaha CFX sample in the CP series, too. The CFX can go bright, but it doesn't go there as eagerly as the famous (some would say notorious) C7. clawback Good question, and I powered it up and checked. This is indeed editable. You can select whether the sustain pedal affects each of the three sections (Piano, E. Piano, and Sub) individually. You get to it via Settings button > Controllers > Receive SW > Sustain, at which point you'll see a menu where you can turn the sustain pedal receive on and off for each of those three sound sections. That behavior will then apply when you create a split or layer. David Emm We're pretty spoiled these days, aren't we? Heck, just the stuff that comes with Logic for $200 is enough to make a more than decent record or even a film score. I'm an '80s teen, and when I added a DX7 to my first synth (Korg Poly-800), then later augmented that with a borrowed Ensoniq ESQ-1 (the old version), I felt like I was Rick Wakeman. I still noticed the girls at our gigs, but of course, they noticed the drummer and guitar player.

We've all heard them and sometimes used them. A one-line response to a gear review, or gear thread on a forum, that dismisses the piece of equipment in question based on one issue, often subjective. I'll start: "Yeah but the converters suck." Know what I mean? What are some of your "favorites" or most infamous?

I have a MODX7, and I reviewed the Montage for Keyboard in 2016. I'll just throw in that the MODX is so capable that for 90 percent of gigs where I'd need an all-in-one workstation-y keyboard, I'd take it instead of the Montage. The synth action keyboard on the 6 and 7 feels cheap but not terribly so. If you can live with that the weight and cost savings is pretty significant.

Version 2.0 OS Roland just released (on September 18) version 2.00 of the OS for the Fantom, which is really its most comprehensive update since the instrument came out. Here"s what it does. Sampling Improvements The Fantom always let you record user samples, but only to the trigger pads, and not multisamples. Both of those things have changed. You can now sample to the keyboard and re-pitch the sample by playing different keys. You can also sample directly to internal or external storage, and select the audio inputs and/or the currently selected Tone as the source. Yup, that means the Fantom can resample itself. Useful sample editing functions include normalizing, adjusting loop start and end points, one-shot and reverse options, and the ability to select the MIDI note number that plays back the sample at its original pitch. Multisampling works via importing multiple audio files into the Fantom, not by real-time recording. You can then map them to key ranges in a destination Tone. I initially thought you couldn"t map them to velocity ranges, but you can. It"s done by assigning each sample to a Partial, and since a Tone can have up to four Partials, you get four velocity layers. Sequencer Improvements It feels a little weird to talk about this because I haven"t written up a full deep dive into the sequencer yet, but I"m glad I waited, because in v.20, the sequencer graduates from an Ableton-meets-808 piece of retail bling to a more professional composition tool. First of all, when editing a pattern, you can now automate control messages in the piano roll view, much like you would in a DAW: On the pattern editing screen, you select the automation, then the pencil or line segment tool (the latter for drawing smooth sweeps), then trace the curve onscreen with your finger. A drop-down menu selects the target parameter, and you can automate as many of them as you please. I was surprised at how smoothly the screen accepted input from my sausage fingers. If you want to use a stylus for more precision, you"ll need the kind designed to work with iPhones and other capacative touchscreens â a capped plastic pen won"t work. Then there"s a 'microscope' view, which basically combines a squished piano roll with a MIDI event list: You can create, erase, copy, paste, and move MIDI events here, one by one. When editing in linear fashion, you"re still working at the pattern level, then combining patterns into groups and groups into songs. The size of the display makes for what I"ve called a 'building a ship in a bottle' vibe, but the functionality is all there. In fact, the functionality is solid enough that it made me wish the Fantom supported an external display and mouse, like Roland"s VS-2480 hard disk recorder did back in the 20-naughties. Scene Chain Improvements The Scene Chain function has always been a way to string scenes together so that you can step through them incrementally (using a footswitch, too) during your set list. The difference in v2.0 is that before, I wasn"t sure why I"d ever use it as opposed to just arranging banks of scenes on user pages on the home screen. Now, it"s my preferred method for getting through a set. Graphically, a chain now looks like an actual chain of blocks (no, not a blockchain) whose color-coding matches the Scenes the home screen. Creating chains is now bonehead simple: touch Edit, select a scene, and it becomes the next one in the chain. An especially cool feature is that the Tone Category buttons (those Jupiter-like ones on the lower right) now become Scene selectors, backlit to match the color coding: You can even add markers in the chain, as you would in an audio or video editing timeline, and jump between them. Zone Control Tweaks The Fantom has always been able to control external devices, but now a single zone can control internal and external sounds at the same time. There"s also some clarification of the relationship between the zone on/off buttons (which also decide whether a zone is internal, external, or both) and the zone selection buttons (these decide which zone has the panel focus). This has sometimes been wonky, e.g. I couldn"t figure out why I was hearing a zone I thought was turned off. Essentially, the Fantom treats the zone selection buttons as a 'monitor preview bus' such that the keyboard will play at least the selected zone regardless of the status of the on/off buttons. (To recap, the select buttons are above the eight main encoders on the left side; the on/off buttons are just below them.) In v2.0, the on/off buttons have a basic and advanced mode, toggled in the system settings. In basic mode they work as before: red indicates an internal zone is active, green an external one. (For the reasons stated above, you might play the keys and hear something even if a zone is turned off i.e. unlit.) In advanced mode, yellow backlight indicates that zone will send to both the internal sound engine and an external source at once, regardless of the status of the selection buttons. I"m oversimplifying a bit here because in both basic and advanced modes, there"s this sort of if-then-else hierarchy of what happens if the 'applicable zone' (i.e. with regard to the on/off button) is the same as the select-buttoned zone, versus if it"s different. There"s a chart for it in the manual update, which gave me a headache. Trial and error was the way to go here. Also, advanced mode is generally better for when you want the keys doing something completely different than the sequencer. Wallpaper This refers to the fact that you can adjust the color of the screen background via red, green, and blue levels. There"s also an alpha (brightness) control and a gradient: darker at the top and lighter at the bottom. The gradient gets darker as you turn the alpha up. For ease of reading I still preferred a black background, which you get with all color levels at zero and alpha at maximum (255).

I've been surprisingly productive since March, and I use that word because I thought the pandemic would have the opposite effect. Instead, the lockdown removed a lot of the distractions I can mistake for things that need doing when in fact I'm procrastinating the actual things that need doing. But yes, the sheer incessant back-to-backness of disasters and bad news has me in a constant state of low-level depression. It's manageable and I have great support tools and people locally, but it's there nonetheless. I think I really need to get off my ass when it comes to creating more of my own music. I'd give anything to even play a cover band gig right now, but in the meantime, I have this roomful of synths. I'm lucky that my partner, who lives with me, is a total music nerd and a gifted conductor and soprano, so it's something we can do together. Outside of that it's been exercise and mindfulness work. It sounds "woo" but I can't say enough about the impact of taking breaks to pay attention to one's breath throughout the day. It's not something anyone can do constantly (maybe some Tibetan monks can) but even little three-minute sessions go a long way. Staying hydrated has been hugely important to my mood, too. I am quite grateful to be in Vermont currently, where we are neither underwater nor on fire and the cooties count is the lowest in the nation. I really do miss my L.A. area music peeps, though, and were it not for the pandemic would have been out there two or three times this year already (e.g. Synthplex). To pick up on one of Craig's original questions, I do put some time into getting food to those in need through connecting farmers with food banks and sometimes directly with families. That helps my own state of mind tremendously. About all I got right now but great topic. This has been on my mind quite a bit of late.

More than a few mastering engineers use B&W home hi-fi speakers as primary monitors. I have a pair of Wharfedale Mach 7 (from back when they were a high-end brand) that I sometimes use as midfields, or just for listening enjoyment, powered by a Sunfire amp. High end hi-fi is an interesting space. There's a lot of innovation and beautiful design but also a lot of what an industry colleague (who designs the stuff as well as pro audio gear) called "voodoo mysticism bullshit." A friend who collects and flips vintage hi-fi gear has a pair of Snell type A. Amazing when you feed them enough power, and by enough power, I mean that each is bi-amplified from its own Bryston 4B. Absolute beasts.

I really, really like how it sounds. It's got that lush smoothness I associate with the CS-80 and Jupiter-8. (Update: Upon having worked with it a lot more, it's more like theJupiter-6 and CS-70M.) Magic Eight Ball says the chances are very good of this showing up in the MPN GearLab!

I've just sold a couple of things on Reverb so far, and I"m happy enough with it. As a rule, I"ll put stuff here on the KC Garage Sale thread and give forumites a crack at it before it goes to the general public on Reverb. LIKE: Selling, shipping, insurance, and escrow all under one roof. That gives buyers confidence as well. Like the ability to set up my own 'shop.' MEH: High selling fee at 5 percent. Bump fees to boost listings can add even more, and they insist on charging sales tax. That"s added to buyer"s price, but can still deter some buyers who"d rather skirt the tax on CL or eBay. Living near Burlington, Vermont is wonderful in many ways (for starters, low Covid and we"re not on fire) but not being in a major metro area pretty much makes CL a non-starter for anything but the lowest-common-denominator music gear, i.e. SM58 mics, ten-year-old Mackie consoles, and entry-level digital slab pianos. For a lot of the stuff I"m planning to sell, people in my area simply don"t have the money and it gets to be sort of clowntown with tire-kickers. With Reverb, I second the motion to make sure you 'bake in' your total selling costs to your asking price. But in general, the pros of Reverb have outweighed the cons for me, and I"ll only bother with other major online outlets if something there simply won"t move.

This is a guess, but I'd bet that's a Bob Schleicher / Electronic Instrument Service chop from Oakland, California. Ray lived in the Napa Valley, which is not too far away, and this really looks like Bob's work. Their page (tonewheel.com) doesn't show chops on offer any more, but when it did I recall seeing some single-manual options there.