MathOfInsects
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Posts posted by MathOfInsects
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I will say that it takes a very secure woman (or person) to be with a musician. We're a little like firefighters in that we have this whole separate "home" life with the people we play music with. But more difficult is how "voluntary" a lot of our time looks. People play instruments for a hobby, so from the outside it can look like you're just hanging around poking around on your instrument INSTEAD of poking around on your woman, when you're actually working and using the unstructured time as something constructive and necessary.
My ex was a musician and even though "practice culture" was definitely part of her mindset, she never did get used to me going off and sitting at the piano when she had other preferences for how I used my time.
I toured Europe with a blues singer the year we got divorced (after the split), and that nicely paid tour is in some of our divorce papers as showing how neglectful I was. In any other field (including her classical world), that would have been evidence of accomplishment and ambition.
So yeah...it's a thing.
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23 minutes ago, kpl1228 said:
True.
This certainly "greys" it all up for sure. To me that version's the gold standard.
At huge levels unfortunately it has all become acceptable to me. I can almost forgive the big buck tours doing it (well, maybe not the Eagles because of their history of vocal purity) because it's an actual show. Lights, dancers, video, all of it. Still hate it but I can at least acknowledge it for what it is.
I know I'm in the opposite camp with this but I HATE it at the local club/bar level. You're not syncing up to a three-story-tall video screen and 20 dancers and pyro....you're playing a bar at happy hour. At that watered down level, so raw, you're just doing karaoke with your instrument. i've seen musicians miming their instruments at the bar/club level, and heard tons of British synthpop synthline pouring out of a band's PA during their entire set with NO keyboard player.
And "everyone else does it so why not" is no excuse.
I know it's all grey and everyone has their take.
I couldn't agree more. I hate when "local" bands use tracks. The whole point of watching a local band, IMO, is to see how they figure out a way to play something.
As I said above, for whatever reason it doesn't bother me for solos or duos, particularly one I'm the keyboardist for, UNLESS there was just no reason to use a track and you did it anyway. Why not use one for "Smooth Operator," it only makes it groovier. On the flip side, why would you ever use one for "At Last," it only covers it in cheese. Maybe 25% is the threshold I feel OK about. Then it starts to feel downscale and useless.
Any dancing singer you see in a large-scale context is lip-syncing. You just can't sing up to the level people demand while you're dancing. I have to just decide not to know that I know that, to enjoy the show.
You've basically never seen a live-performed Super Bowl performance in your lifetime. Maybe Prince? I can't remember if he was tracked too, but my sense of him is that he'd be the one to say "take it or leave it." Everyone else has to sign a contract agreeing that their performance will be prerecorded (the day before, I believe, is the custom), including vocals. Sometimes you're only hearing the pre-recorded vocals, sometimes you're hearing a mix, some much more occasional times you're hearing all live vox. But you will never, ever, hear live musicians playing behind the singer.
That beautiful chamber ensemble performance at Obama's inauguration? Pre-taped. All of the performances were. It was cold that day, and not only is it impossible to keep strings in tune and play them well with cold hands, but all you'd have heard if it was live would have been wind across mic membranes.
People would be amazed how much of their understanding of "liveness" is based on willful self-delusion.-
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1 minute ago, mcgoo said:
And Billy Preston
(Billy Preston was accounted for in the set-up question.)
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6 hours ago, SamuelBLupowitz said:
I've been seeing promotion for this on social media; definitely interested in seeing it once it's out. Hard to deny Nicky's influence; other than Billy Preston, I wonder how many other musicians got to play with both the Beatles and the Stones?
Two I can think of are John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
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3 hours ago, Joe Muscara said:
I feel like this is such a good deal for Tom that we oughta start a GoFundMe for him. If we all gave him a few bucks, he could get it moved properly…
I’m down for this. Let’s do it.
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3 hours ago, CyberGene said:
I was wondering if I should write it as bVI or just VI since it’s a minor key, apparent by i.
I know, it's always an open question with minor keys. The Nashville guys avoid it by charting against the relative major--so your dreaded progression would be vi-IV (or really 6- 4).
But the nature of the 6 with a minor chord is always a bit up in the air until there's more info. I usually refer to the INTERVALS, rather than the scale degrees, to be extra clear. (So Cm-Eb-Ab-G would be i, bIII, bVI, V.) It's not quite proper but it's also IMO the way least likely to raise questions.-
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24 minutes ago, Anderton said:
The person I compete with the most is who I was last week.
Same. Or yesterday. Or the one I sorta like to think I am in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
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bVI.
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1 hour ago, TommyRude said:
SCORED! The clouds parted at the perfect moment. MIND BOGGLING! Highly recommend! 👍😁
Nice! The one we watched in 2017 was life-changing. Congrats.
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9 minutes ago, TommyRude said:
Yes, outside Austin. The festival was canceled this morning due to the possibility of thunderstorms and lightning. So we got out of there, and began to chase patches of blue sky. Found a spot, the parking lot of the Holiday Inn Express in Marble Falls TX 😁
Getting some good views!
Wow. Not happy to hear that it was a clusterF for you, but very glad I didn't drag the kids there, miss these two days of school, just to lie awake all night and then have the eclipse day cancelled. It was fate...
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I'll still stick with "colleagues."
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Plus, FORTY GUITARS IN A YEAR AND A HALF?? You just made a small army of married guitar players twitch in soul-killing pain.
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1 hour ago, Tom Williams said:
Those four words may affect my ability to take the sage advice about professional piano movers. This move isn't across town -- it's a hundred mile run from one small town to another.
The cost of regretting moving this yourself or with non-pros far exceeds anything you'll spend to do it correctly, plus anything you saved on the low offer for the piano itself. It's like buying the Hope Diamond and carrying it home velcro'd to the outside of your backpack. I mean, it *might* work out fine, but it's not worth the bet-on-red to find out.
Not to mention, even a low-level snafu in any part of the process will then cost you more in piano tech on the other end--cost easily greater than the few hundred for legit piano movers.
I moved a grand piano from NY to CA and I don't think it was more than $700. The cost for piano moving is really in the initial move-out/move-in. Otherwise it takes no real room in their trucks; you're paying gas and time after that, nothing else.-
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Is that the one outside Austin? We were going to go. Now I'm glad we didn't! Though my son is a certified Vulfpeck fan, so he'd have liked that part of it.
Good luck and I hope it clears up for you. -
1 minute ago, Anderton said:
The definition of competition is much broader than sporting events (or commerce). In its most general meaning, according to ChapGPT's summary from multiple dictionaries, "competition encompasses the effort to outperform others, secure resources, or achieve success in various contexts."
By saying "get better" I think the logical result would be that those who get better will outperform those who don't. But that's only one facet of competition. Another one is "achieve success," and having regular gigs and getting paid for them seems at least to me to qualify as success. As to securing resources, gigs are a finite resource. So, by definition, people compete for those finite resources by getting better to outperform others. I think at least in Notes's case, competition definitely applies to what he does. I certainly don't pick up on him being mad, just adapting to the current reality of his milieu.
On the other hand, I doubt we will ever see him compete in a javelin throw, or pro wrestling 🤣 But I've never met the guy, maybe he's 220 pounds of pure muscle 🤔
This is a side-trip of a side-trip, so we can shelve it any time in favor of the main road, but...
Ignoring the semantic ways someone can defend the term, viewing the others in the same field as you as your "competition" is more than just a choice of words, in my mind. It is a mindset. When that field is music, IMO it misses the whole point of the endeavor. We're not in this to "outbook" others (specific others, I mean). If we wanted to do that we could choose...well, basically any other job. I have never once counted the gigs I've done as a means of seeing if I "beat" someone else. What is the point of that? I could sell insurance and stop worrying about all of it, if that was my goal. I count them to see how I'm doing compared to last year, and to figure out how much rent is going to hurt this month.
We WANT other people playing, it makes the marketplace better for all of us (unless they're playing for free and driving down our rates, which in that case, they can eat all the turds). If you're working in a slice of the field with little opportunity, than the "better" you need to get is to be hirable for more kinds of gigs.Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of people playing gigs I'd love to have. If @Bobadohshe ever leaves the Padres gig I'll be knocking on that door so fast some metal drummer will ask to borrow my double-kick pedal. But I can't imagine ever thinking of him or someone else as a "competitor." We're just people working the same profession.
Sure, if you and I are auditioning for the same chair in a specific band, I suppose then we are competing. But really, even then we're just both applying. Someone will be selected and that's all we can say about that.
In my mind, if you're "competing," you need to spend that time and energy instead developing whatever part of your skillset or show makes you unavoidable-to-hire. Be so good they can't ignore you. But do it so you're the best musician/option that you can be, not to "beat" others. That's a losing proposition all around, IMO. We're a scarce resource. We are more valuable together than fragmented. We're devalued enough by society already, not to make it worse by devaluing one another.
On a whole different (closer to OP) topic, funny how different local scenes have different cultures. I almost never see any solos or duos use tracks here, but if a solo player doesn't loop, I don't think they can count on a ton of work here.
However, the times pre-pandy that I played with a singer who used tracks...I'm not going to lie: paradise. To play a duo gig and get to just be the "keyboard player" in the soundfield, and sometimes even to have the keys already on the track? Gold, Jerry, gold!-
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+whatever number we’re at on this one. It’s not very expensive to move a piano with good piano movers. And very expensive not to and to wish you had.
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Nah. This ain't the Olympics. You and your musical colleagues are engaging in your chosen profession, collectively. This is all of us getting to put our feet in the same ocean. That's all.
If people are getting the jobs you want, don't get mad. Get better. -
“Competitors”??
They’ve got some crazy sports these days.
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3 hours ago, Tom Williams said:
Update
It's real.
I took a day trip to the Pittsburgh area today, visited the seller, and played on the piano. I brought along a buddy who has some piano tuning skills (post-grad studies, believe it or not) and had moved a few pianos when he was college faculty.
It's in pretty good shape for being ~3 years since its last tuning. The finish is flawless -- pretty good for a piano purchased new in 1999 (I saw the receipt. Seller kept meticulous records.) Some lower dampers are a bit sluggish, and there's a little sticking between the F# and G a 12th above middle C. Oh, and Una Corda doesn't move the action far enough.
Like the YC pianos I remember from the 1980s, this 5'2" (157 cm) piano sounds like a 7' or bigger. Gorgeous timbre.
Now all I gotta do is figure out how to get it to my house in two weeks without breaking the bank on the logistics end of it.
P.S. -- does anyone know how to remove the legs from a YC baby grand?
Congrats, Tom!
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1 hour ago, Bill H. said:
As far as Eagles today, it's one thing to look at graphs and see lines match up, and quite another to listen to two separate performances that are exactly the same. If anyone hasn't already listened to that clip, just check out the part between three and five minutes in.
It's chilling. The crazy part is that Desperado is one of the easiest Eagles songs to sing. Heck I've sung it hundreds of times. Even in G it's not that bad. If Desperado is mimed, then everything is.
It's also possible that sometimes he does it live, and sometimes, when he's not feeling up to it, he lip-syncs, and those recordings happened to be from lip-synced instances. Very common...
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"There must be some kind of way out of here"
Said a joker to a thief.
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OK, a tastier apple. Do we all realize that this was prerecorded? Yet we are willing accept it and talking about it as a Great Moment in Music History. So there is something beyond the mere fact of the vocal being prerecorded that we respond badly to.
This is a very grey area and all is never what it seems when it comes to liveness and "what we're willing to call 'live' even when it's not."
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Also, I assume we all know that that's not Freddie Mercury on the high notes...?
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33 minutes ago, analogika said:
Because — and I think that's the heart of the matter here — nobody cares.Hmmm. I guess I’m an outlier then, because I do. And FWIW, if I were at that theoretical Edith Piaf concert, I’d spend the whole time watching whatever remnants of the orchestra I could see, and nigh on ignoring Piaf.
Also, as a sidenote, Pavarotti used prerecorded vocals on more than one occasion.
Quick Roland question.
in The Keyboard Corner
Posted
To me it's the NS3 in a walk.