Dr88s

My $0.02 (though in Canada we"ve done away with the penny so that would be rounded down to $0.00): Any of the cameras should be adequate for the teaching. For YouTube / performance, I think it"s important to know if you play acoustic piano or DP, and if you"re just recording yourself or other musicians. If you"re recording acoustic sets, for sure the built in microphones on these cameras are not optimized to pick up the full richness of the instruments and you"d want to get your own specialized external mic for that. If you play digital piano and if you"re solo or the other band members are mic"ed, I"d suggest picking up the OBS software. It"s free and really easy to use - select the audio source you have plugged into the computer (I use my mixer / interface), select whatever video source you end up choosing (webcam / HDMI capture card), hit record and you"re off to the races. Since the pandemic my wife and I have been busy covering some songs and posting them for friends on Facebook and YouTube. The quality of the audio has increased tremendously since I started using my interface and OBS for the recordings. It"s night and day compared to internal microphones of the various recording devices I was using.

I think we have to distinguish between 'playing another instrument' and 'playing another instrument well'... I can play some guitar chords, a basic bassline, and a basic backbeat on drums, but I don"t think I"d ever say that I actually play any of those instruments. (Some days I"m not even sure I qualify as playing keyboards either...) A few weeks ago I challenged myself to record a multi instrumental cover just to see if I could. It"s one thing to be able to muddle around on an instrument but it"s another thing to play it solidly enough to gel with other parts. Here"s a minute for your viewing and listening (dis)pleasure.

Even if some threads may now and again wander into political territory, I can"t understand why that would be sufficient to make you leave, Dan. I set up my profile on Facebook to almost exclusively interact with musicians, many of whom I know from here. Lately, at least 80% of my Facebook feed has been about politics to the point that I"m no longer tremendously interested in logging on *there*. Here, though, it"s still 99% about the music.

Nice, Dan, but I think you might run into some plagiarism issues over 4"33'...

...and, for those of you with more infantile senses of humour like mine that have seen the show, the thread title just made me think of

I"m going to second Marzzz"s suggestion to keep the epi pen handy - I"m not sure if the price has stabilized or not. Here in Canada they"re probably the equivalent of $80 US. Should you happen to get stung again and have a worse reaction, having your phone handy may not be sufficient. This is coming from the dad of a kid with allergies who has twice seen the near miraculous instantaneous improvement an epipen can have on someone having a reaction with difficulty breathing.

I love the weight of the board and I am fine with the action, but I find the interface really awkward.

I wonder if any artists today will achieve the same level of musical fame as their counterparts from forty or more years ago. Pre 1990"s, there were by today"s standards only few outlets by which one could experience new music. There were a handful of local radio stations whose programmers would choose the few dozen songs that you would be hearing at any given time, and there were music stores where you could potentially buy albums from more obscure artists but still within the limits of the store"s inventory capacity. As a result, a generation of people grew up living a largely shared musical experience, and the musical cream rose to the top. With so many different ways to listen to music nowadays and so many different popular genres, I don"t think that we have that shared musical experience any longer. I think that would make it very tough for any of today"s artists to ever achieve the same level of fame as those in the 60s, 70s, or 80s.

Totally off topic but many years ago I was a summer student volunteering in a neuroscience lab and when things were quiet I loved to spray the 100% ethanol out of the squirt bottle into the fume hood and marvel at how quickly it evaporates.

That"s rough. I can understand.

Back in the day I searched long and hard for one of the rare flash ram cards from a third party that were compatible with my QS8. I was so excited when I finally procured one. I remember the soundbridge part was not a problem at all, and it took no time flat to load Mike Pinder"s Mellotron samples onto my card. How many times did I use those samples after triumphantly transferring them? Zero.

I"ve been keeping the original boxes for this very reason but the space they take up over the long term is substantial. Especially for keyboards that I"ll probably play until they break.

You can still socially distance on small stages!

A salient point that I didn"t mention is that one of the yearly events I play is videoed by a professional crew and mixed with the FOH board mix and then uploaded to YouTube. I really look forward to them as they"re so professionally done, but they"re extremely unforgiving and every little goof is there loudly and clearly and it concretizes the missteps as part of my perception of the song. Unfortunate.

Awesome. We should start a thread on train wrecks.

Not to derail my own thread but I love the organ playing on this particular version. [video:youtube]

You"re close â it is Stevie Winwood, but with Eric Clapton in Blind Faith. I personally adore the song.

I"m not talking about 'Mustang Sally' or 'Brown Eyed Girl' that you have played so many times that you can"t bear to listen to anymore - Most of my shows are one offs at various events and fundraisers, so it"s not like my bands have weekly gigs to perfect songs over time. If something goes wrong, it"s indelibly engrained in my memory as a part of that song. Other songs I just remember with negative feelings for the difficulty in getting them prepared, either for the amount of time I had to woodshed to get a certain part down, or for the frustrations I would have when some other bandmember for one reason or another just couldn"t seem to 'get' their part. The longer I have been playing, the more songs this has happened to, and I generally can"t make it through one round of the presets on my car"s radio without encountering one of those songs. In some way, they have been forever ruined for me. Is it just me?

Thanks for all the super kind words of support, folks. I appreciate it. I was really bummed out when this all happened yesterday but I"m feeling a lot better now.

My first thought was of course Godwin"s law, but this ended up not being an accusation born of frustration or ideology; there was actually a concrete reason the poster thought I had such leanings.

Here"s a post I never thought I would have to make. Yesterday I made the cardinal sin of commenting on someone"s social media post and within an hour I was accused of being a Neonazi. It was all quite bizarre seeing as how neither the post nor the comment had anything at all to do with anything that would prompt such an accusation. It was subsequently explained to me by a third party reading the post that '88" is sometimes used as a code of sorts to mean 'HH", an abbreviation for a salutation in those circles that I won"t write here. I think it goes without saying on a keyboard forum that the 88 in Dr88s refers to the 88 keys on a piano keyboard and not anything more nefarious. I just wanted to make that clear in case anyone on here was wondering all of these years...

This is true. The connector is TRRS while most cables you"d think of plugging in there are TRS.

I"m happy you"ve found your solution. I"ll contribute got the sake of others who might be in the same boat. My wife and I have been doing a few videos and livestreams here and there to keep our friends entertained during this time of social distancing. I have found that interfaces into the iPad are unreliable as sometimes there seems to be enough power, and sometimes not. At the advice of a few KC members, I tried OBS on my PC which is ridiculously easy to use. Just set your video input device and audio input device, and you"re off to the races. For the video I use an HD WebCam. For the audio I use my Roland interface as the computer provides enough power to reliably power the interface as opposed to the iPad. I just ordered a Mackie USB mixer with some basic onboard effects to simplify setup as now I"m using a mixer and separate vocal reverb unit.

I tried the TC-Helicon voicetone pedal live once. I had set the scale but the knob is fairly loose / easy to wiggle and the key somehow got shifted in between songs. I was horrified that my harmonies started a half step off. Never again.

This was my wife"s morning wake up alarm for the better part of last year. [video:youtube]