Tom Williams

I don't get it, unless you mean "inverse of a good thing."

Tangent: Let me know if you find an AX-Edge editing system that doesn't suck. It's pretty powerful under the hood, but the payoff from using the pathetic Android editor was too low to justify the effort -- and I enjoy programming synths.

More wish than prediction: Physical (not Analog!) modeling: reed instruments, plucked and bowed strings, brasses. We were promised that in the 90s and 00s, and Yahama and Alesis nearly delivered, but they never made it accessible -- Fusion's AM parameters made a DX7 look intuitive and easy. I want to be able to say "base pitch Bb, .375 cylindrical bore" and get a good trombone. Add conical bore and get a tenor tuba or euphonium. Put a large double reed mouthpiece on it and get Schickele's TromBoon. Couple that with a new implementation of Roland's SuperNatural that incorporates aftertouch, and I'll take you to the moon and back.

I realize it's OT, but Jim, your playing is wonderful and enviable.

First track played for me, as did the other two. Octave sounded quite natural -- I'd happily use it. Vent seemed to have (add?) a little more lower-mid presence than the octave; that felt a tad warmer. I'm quite happy with my Kurzweil Leslie, but I think both Octave and Vent sound even better, especially in isolation from the noise of a band. Amen to KuruPrionz's Kudos!

Yes -- and I consider that a good thing. VAST can go deeper than I probably ever will go with it -- even deeper-er now that we have explicit DX-style FM (and a superset of that!). Disclaimer: I'm an aging computer guy, been programming since the late 1970s. That may have biased me towards VAST nerd-vana in the first place.

Others that come to mind on the (con)fusion of music and politics: Mike Huckabee plays bass guitar; attorney Jay Sekulow (sp?) has put out several Youtube videos of a cover band with regular guests like John Elephante (Kansas) and John Schlitt (Head East). Richard Nixon was pretty good at the piano, though nowhere close to Secretary Rice.

Erratum: You used "Nord" and "affordable" in the same paragraph.

It's doable. You will need to edit the effects chain. On its MOD page (the effects chain's, not the patch's), select (typically) box 2 -> speed and assign a pedal, probably the soft pedal?, to it. Save that version of the effects chain, and then use that saved chain on whatever patches you want.

On my PC4-7 (does that come out to negative 3?), I found 200% to be pretty good.

Who's he? Never heard of 'im.

Just one note, a lot of times, with filters: Either the intro (actually transition) sequence for Karn Evil 9 First Impression part 2, or better yet the sequenced motif that starts ELPowell's "The Score." Either one would make me want to wake up so I could start playing the next part.

I seem to remember reading that too. Pretty amazing for a 12 oscillator keyboard. Current Kurzweils have seven(?) segments, but tons of ways to modulate 'em (only on the amplitude envelope; stupid limitation IMO). Funny, thirty years ago my Casio CZ1 had eight stage envelopes with selectable loop point; my Ensoniq EPS envelopes had six stages (x two -- velocity could interpolate between them if I remember right).

Oh. I was getting ready to empathize with you over the frustration of having only two envelopes. I like (at times) having one for amplitude, another for filter, and a third for pitch. All independently velocity controlled.

I'll be impressed if, in 30 years, I'm looking at anything.

I always take them off and keep them. I figure that one of these days (I'm now in my mid-60s) I may need to construct a miniature weir -- a flat funnel if you like -- so that oil or water can go from one place to another with greater precision. I take the pedal condoms off and put them in a little parts drawer. That parts drawer is beside one with used wire nuts, another with caplugs left over from 12v batteries, and the little drawer with four precious strips of genuine ivory that fell off the keys of my first piano in the 1970s.

Huh. I don't think he was perfect, but I don't think he was in the "difficult" category in the way that, say, Buddy Rich and Paul Anka were. A lot of his band members stuck with him for years and even decades, despite having at-will employment (people could be fired, or could choose to leave, at any time).

I'm also surprised by the negativity. The charcoal-ish animation on the Take On Me video was wonderfully original, and the two-octaves-and-a-fifth range in the chorus was impressive. The style of the OP cartoon reminds me a lot of Harry Bliss:

7" Bongo Head. All this percussion is because I'm still making payments on the PC4-7.

My favorite post of the whole thread so far. Con: The FCB 1010 had great hardware, but such lousy firmware that Behringer folks told us how to get Uno EPROMs for it. Neutral: I have never bought a Behringer synth, although the D is tempting. Pro: Their acquisition of Midas, and the subsequent release of the X32 and X-Air series digital mixers, changed the entire mixer industry for the better. Almost overnight we could get the functional equivalent of an $8000 rack of equipment for $800.

Prog History? Heck yeah -- consider me enrolled, please.

For the non-percussion folks, these are midway between drumsticks and brushes, good for lower-volume gigs where they supply an acoustic drum kit.

I know it's a redundancy, but it might help to make the logos at the bottom of the shop's home page clickable.

Not that I could tell. I think that if you do a single transaction -- or a one month and done thing -- it may be $8; but the regular no-promo annual price for Pro is $69.99 billed annually after free trial ends. Correction to my first post: There's one product called Pro, and another called Pro+. Regular Pro, whatever that is, is $30/year. Sigh. Now I forget what I'm kvetching about. The (free) scoring software itself is still quite impressive.

Disclaimer: I'm a Finale user, and quite happy with it. That out of the way, I've been very impressed with MuseScore, the free scoring software. But their marketing is starting to bug me. I received a "Black Friday in August" promotional e-mail today, proclaiming 90% off the regular price of "MuseScore Pro," their growing library of downloadable scores. $0.77/week. Huh. So is the regular price $7.70 per week? $400 per year? Nope. Regular price is $70/year. So it's more like 45% off. Not a bad deal if you need the service (I'm considering it), but the weekly munging of math is getting annoying.