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SamuelBLupowitz

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Everything posted by SamuelBLupowitz

  1. Every now and then I see a post about someone converting a set of Hammond pedals into a MIDI controller, using kits like you might get from https://www.midiboutique.com/ or similar sources. Wondering if anyone has any experience with this sort of mod, and how involved a process we're looking at. In my perfect world, I could use the bass pedals on my A100 normally, or MIDI them up to a synth or laptop, or both at once. But I worry this might be out of my technical wheelhouse, prohibitively expensive, or both, in which case I'll have to settle for swapping the original pedals out with my set of Roland PK5s like I've been doing. What say you, forumites?
  2. Howard Stern can really be grating as an interviewer, but for better or worse, he gets much more out of his interviews than the usual talking points and canned responses, and you can tell Billy Joel LOVES to answer a question that he HASN'T been asked dozens of times. Even Paul McCartney has to go off book a bit with Stern, despite his best efforts to tell the same six Beatles stories he's been telling for the past fifty years. 😉 Thanks for sharing, bud!
  3. I'm so sorry to hear that. Certainly, a downside of singing with earplugs in is that your voice resonating in your own head is MUCH louder (not entirely a downside depending on the monitoring in the room, but certainly I've had the experience where my voice with plugs in is too loud to be certain of my intonation). My personal experience with custom molds, both earplugs and my IEMs (more specifically custom molded sleeves for my off-the-rack Shure 215s), has been incredibly positive. I have tiny little ear canals and universal fit products NEVER stay in consistently. I'm no longer getting distracted trying to shove them back into my ears while I'm playing. So, as another forumite said, worth trying some of the cheap solutions and see if they work for you before you spend more money on something that's been unsatisfactory! But I suppose it is possible that there was some sort of manufacturing/molding issue your first go-round.
  4. When I'm not using in-ears, I have a set of Westone custom molded earplugs with exchangeable 15dB and 20dB filters. They're one of the best purchases I've ever made ($200 I think? They've made some changes to their line in the past couple of years) and they're invaluable for rehearsals, attending concerts, and small gigs without a full PA/sound engineer. https://westone.com/defendear/defendear-recreational I lost a set once at a show I went to out of town. That was a bummer, but I replaced them immediately. I spend so much of my time with my head five feet from crash cymbals, and I credit the musician plugs with keeping my hearing as good as it's been.
  5. This thread is reminding me that I need to take some time to tweak the Leslie sim on my Mojo, now that I'm gigging with the sim a lot more often ... I bet if I even just tweak the speed and rampup/down times to match my 147 a bit better, it'll sound a little more natural onstage to me.
  6. I think it must be Townshend. Chris Stainton is credited as pianist on three specific tracks ("5:15," "Drowned," and "The Dirty Jobs," which is one of my very favorite Who deep cuts) and none of the other members of the Who are credited with any keyboards, while Pete is credited with the "remainder." It's funny, I think of him as a synth guy and assumed he did all the arpeggiator stuff throughout that record, but it didn't occur to me that he'd have played that piano feature. One of my favorite albums, but it's been a few years since I've given it a spin. Need to listen for that G in the intro to "Love Reign O'er Me" now!
  7. I remember playing an arrangement of George Harrison's "Something" in a combo in college, and the faculty mentor saying to the piano player (I was on bass at the time) "You know, some songs just don't sound right if you add color tones; sometimes you have to just play the triad." I have kept that in mind when I worry about writing something that's not "sophisticated" enough.
  8. Here's one of the few clips I could find on YouTube of Lee Michaels at the Hammond and Frosty on drums: Ferocious!
  9. Back when we were young teenagers in our first band together, one of my longtime guitar player buddies and his family befriended a New Jersey-based band called the Dead Elvi, sort of a horror-themed rockabilly outfit where everyone (hence the name) dressed up like Elvis, but, like, zombies or skeletons and stuff. Anyway, the lead guitarist told my young friend a story of his first band's first big gig: the talent show at their school auditorium. Knowing this was the opportunity to show all of their peers what they were made of, they went for the jugular with a cover of -- before it became a running joke for the whole music world -- Free Bird. The guitarist recounted how when the time came for the solo, he stepped out onto the catwalk that had been constructed for the event, the stage lights shining bright on him as he tore into the solo, closing his eyes and giving it his all. The song ended. The house lights came up. He could see, then, that the audience had gotten bored, and during his long solo, most of them had slipped out the back door of the auditorium. Despite having heard it secondhand twenty years ago, I think about this story... often. 😆
  10. Okay also other than having heard "Do You Know What I Mean?" on WMGK growing up, I knew nothing about Lee Michaels... now I'm checking out this rock piano/organ duo stuff, and how has it been missing all my life?! Definitely going to dig into him some more.
  11. I know I've talked about it on the forum before, but one of my favorite recording adventures of my life was when I booked Sage Chapel at Cornell University (where I have my day gig) to record the pipe organ there for a record my band was making. There were just one or two spots that demanded a little bit of grandiosity that stuck out from my usual big Hammond pads, and setting up a stereo pair of condensers and recording that room trembling with sound really got some vibe. When we went back to the studio and loaded the recording into the main Pro Tools session, we found that the pipe organ was not quite at concert pitch, enough that it was a hair distracting. After puzzling over the challenge of using any kind of pitch correction with all those overtones, our engineer had the idea "what if I just pitch shifted the whole stereo track up a few cents and see if that helps it?" So he went "cha-CHUNK" and there it was -- the internal tuning discrepancies were no big deal, it was just that the organ sound as a whole was a hair flat of A440, and shifting it up made it sit in the track perfectly. Every time I go back and listen to that record, I get a huge grin on my face.
  12. Wow, what a sweet, heartwarming thread this turned out to be! Some of you older folks are really giving me something to aspire to. I just celebrated ten years (in various overlapping projects) with my guitar player of choice, and of course my wife and I (together 13 years total) have been playing music together since early on in our relationship. I have a few other ongoing collaborations with musician friends from the past decade, give or take, though they're not usually uninterrupted. I am still very, very close with my three dear friends and bandmates from growing up, two of which I met and started playing music with over 20 years ago (the third, the drummer, is coming up on that second decade in a year or two). The musical part of our relationship hasn't been consistent since I settled in central New York in the early 2010s, but we still like to find opportunities to play together every few years. I would feel truly blessed if 20, 30, 40 years on, like some of you folks, I am still celebrating these creative relationships. A musical connection is like a marriage in so many ways -- sometimes it burns out violently, sometimes it winds down and runs its course, and sometimes, whether through circumstance or hard work or both, it sustains and grows. It's definitely something worth appreciating when that happens.
  13. I've been playing a lot with a drummer who was born and raised in Denmark, and his favorite joke is to announce that he's going to play "the German clave" and proceed to play unison quarter notes on the kick and snare. 😆
  14. Much respect to all y'all older players who had no choice but to use the real thing -- what you are describing sounds like a literal nightmare to me and a perfect example of why my A100 stays at home. And I say that as someone who gigged with a Wurli for several years with minimal (but memorable) issues as described above. Having a good tech on call was essential.
  15. Got me there. Ian McLagen's Wurli sound on Stay With Me is one of the early recordings that made me obsessed with the instrument, probably a solid decade before I ever got to play the real thing.
  16. I'm chomping at the bit to start sharing the studio recordings I've been making with Pocket Bandits, my organ trio, but in the meantime, this was so much fun I wanted to share it. We've been doing some shows in a small listening room/taproom in town where we play two short sets of our own music bookending a set backing up a different singer-songwriter and interpreting their original music. Then we've been bringing the guest artist back up for a cover as an encore. My collaborators were kind enough to entertain my love for musical theater so our friend Joe Gibson could let 'er rip on a number from Jesus Christ Superstar. I whiff the organ solo in the middle but otherwise, not bad for one rehearsal.
  17. Ugh what a slick rig, damn right it should be played out!
  18. Yeah, I definitely think of Brad Mehldau as being in a different world -- both chronologically and on their big formative influences -- than guys like Chick and Herbie. I think of his contemporaries as being guys like John Medeski (not strictly a "pianist" of course). Michel Patrucciani was mentioned earlier and is probably a better comparison, but he was born in 1962, while Mehldau was born in 1970. Not a huge age gap, but a significant time period to separate them as far as formative influences, I might argue. Regardless, I'm sure there are MANY great Gen X-er jazz pianists I've never heard of (and I would love some recommendations!), but I think it's also a much smaller pool of well-known jazz legends that were coming into prominence in the 90s as opposed to the 70s. But as others have pointed out, calling anyone the Greatest of Them All is an unavoidably debatable title.
  19. Hey @nursers, weren't you the one I just saw on Facebook saying you hadn't known until very recently that there was a dislike button on the forum? Excuse ME for leaving my clavinet in my home studio instead of carrying it case-less into crowded bars anymore.
  20. I'd argue though -- it doesn't *have* to be, and while our favorites may remain for years and years, and we may have less time to absorb new music, that doesn't mean we have to become the resentful, arrogant voice represented by that article shared by the OP. The music I grew up with was largely made by my parents' generation, though not all of what connected with me was to my parents' taste (they loved Elton John, Billy Joel, and the Beatles, though they never got obsessive about them the way I did; Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix didn't really do it for them). I hear new music of all kinds regularly that blows me away. I think as artists, and especially those of us who grew up under the shadow of a "damn kids today don't know what's good for them" mentality, we have a responsibility to be more open-minded than those who came before us.
  21. I've managed to get pretty good deals on all my "expensive" boards, so every one I own cost me, individually, less than $2K. I'm pretty sure my Wurlitzer would sell for more than I bought it for in 2015, and my clav being a sort of "permanent loan/inheritance" situation, well, that's probably the most expensive thing I've taken out to a gig based on its actual resale value (though it mostly stays in my studio at this point). But pretty much anything I take out these days, I wouldn't exactly have the money to replace just sitting there in my bank account, so, as others have noted, 1) expensive is relative and 2) it's always a bit of a risk to leave the comfort of your home, but sometimes ships must leave their harbors!
  22. I use IEMs, as do some of my bandmates in certain projects. But we have a lot of different combinations of musicians come through our studio to rehearse, so the extra setup isn't always practical or possible. Also, my wife teaches voice lessons in our studio, and for certain clients, she likes to have a microphone set up (particularly for those that are gigging musicians who do a lot of amplified singing). So having PA reinforcement in the room is something we want to have available to us. If a tower array is a good fit for that in a medium-sized studio space with mics pointing in various directions, I'm open to it. Good to hear that your experience with one onstage has been good.
  23. There is definitely a setting you can toggle for this on my Electro 4D. Just double-checked the manual to make sure. "Perc 9 Drawbar Cancel" is option 8 on the B3 menu on that board.
  24. Well folks, the 12-year-old Samson travel PA I've been carting around to small gigs and using as a rehearsal PA forever has finally given up the ghost. It's time for an upgrade. I'm looking for something that can function as monitors for band rehearsals in my home studio, as well as to serve as a PA for small to medium gigs. We have a few mixers (analog and digital) lying around, so I thought powered speakers would be the most flexible option. Some 12-inch Mackies (or similar powered speakers with two channels and the option to stereo link) would definitely be a step up from what we have, and that seems to be a good compromise of weight/portability and enough power to amplify vocals, keys, and acoustic guitar over a drum set and guitar amps in a relatively small studio space, or in a small venue without a house PA. We did see a good deal locally on some lightly used Behringer powered speakers with stands, but they're 15-inchers, and with each one weighing close to 40 pounds, we're concerned that the size and weight would be a little more than we want for what we need. Alternately, my wife's Sweetwater guy recommended one of the EV Evolve tower systems, and that would be in our budget. He swore by it for its portability and for use as a rehearsal/small gig PA for his indie rock band. I'm a tad skeptical, though -- while it's a different brand, a small local venue has this style in-house, and I feel like it sounds a little muddy, and I'm concerned about feedback putting this in the corner of a studio instead of strategically-placed wedges. Plus, you'd need an entire second unit to run in stereo, and being a keyboard player, that irks me a bit (no need to get into that debate, of course...). That said, the portability, small footprint, and the built-in, app-controlled multichannel mixer is appealing, so I'm not ruling it out before I do some research. So I thought I'd check with the forum for thoughts, feedback, and recommendations -- speakers you like, different styles you've used, experience you might have had in this situation. Our budget isn't massive but up to about $1500 is doable, and again, my ideal situation is something that will be equally useful in both a rehearsal and gigging situation (not looking for studio monitors here). Thanks, friends!
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