SamuelBLupowitz

Aw, thanks you guys! I'm so happy to have the forum, and all of you. Especially as I lurch into my old age. :wink:

Oooooh boy I had just talked myself down from the Hydrasynth because I want something a little smaller and lower profile if I get a new live synth... damn them!

My investigation for when we ultimately replace the carpet in my studio led to a lot of good acoustic points for vinyl flooring -- similar sonic character to wood, but much easier and less expensive to install. My wife and I were also looking into some of the acoustic floor padding to go underneath the vinyl, to quiet things down a bit.

Ugh. Can't say I didn't see this coming, but still disappointing as a Seaboard user.

There's a song on my new record coming out next week that's built around full-on Clav-that-civilians-will-mistake-for-crunch-guitar. In an act of absolutely shameless self promotion, I will share it here when the record drops.

Thanks for sharing this! I had missed the boat but will be following now. Great resource for hearing what we're all up to easily. That is correct!

It's gorgeous, Dave. Congratulations! My 200 is one of my prize posessions. A beautiful instrument with loads of character. Enjoy.

Just to keep this wonderful discussion going, but also throw some different parameters into the mix -- one of the other options I've investigated, and would be interested in comparable boards, is the Yamaha Reface CS. Doesn't have the patch memory or output routing options of some of the other boards (granted, a lot of the stuff folks have mentioned is 5-10 times the cost of the CS), but it's small, lightweight, and relatively versatile for my needs, and I could use an iPad for patch storage and not have to rely on it for sound output (no disconnection from the sound source, or hung notes, if it fails). That's sort of the opposite end of the spectrum from a Prophet or Nord Stage 3 Compact, but is more of a "replacement" for my Seaboard/bluetooth rig as a complement to my much bigger, heavier organ and piano boards, keeping my rig as more of a 2.5-piece rig rather than the full 3!

...and just as a follow-up on my last post, put out a music video for one of the new album tracks today, just showing me laying down all the parts in my studio. [video:youtube]

So true! Unfortunately, late last year my old Mainstage Mac had a hard drive failure and I had to replace it. I think the issue lies more with Roli and their push to cloud service than the Apple OS updates, but it was enough to give me a headache and bail, since my complicated setup for our 25-minute rock opera was not going to fly without significant reprogramming. I've used my Seaboard's built-in Bluetooth on many, many gigs without issue in the before times; not really sure what was causing the dropouts on this show. Interference from everything else going on at the outdoor pavilion? Some user error I wasn't thinking of? The now-aged OS on my iPad? These are the kind of troubleshooting questions I don't feel like I have the same energy to deal with as I did before Covid, hahaha. I actually got one of the CME WIDI devices when they came out last year, with the intention of equipping the Mojo with it for smaller gigs where I could use it as a dual-manual controller with built-in organ. I haven't gotten there yet! All the suggestions are great; I'm eating 'em up. Giving me toys to salivate over for the many months it will certainly be before I'm ready to invest in anything new... just nice to have something to look forward to!

I'm finding that after a year and a half of pandemic, I no longer have the patience or drive to deal with the Mainstage/iOS/MIDI controller life I was deeply invested in for the couple of years prior to the intial lockdown. It's just seemed so time consuming and tedious to prepare, and I've had so little bandwidth. The last straw for me was prepping for the first show by Noon Fifteen (my main band) since January 2020 -- many of the patches I had programmed for our material in Mainstage no longer worked, having been killed by updates and such in the interim. I went with a stripped-down iOS rig rather than spending the hours to re-program my complex mix of synths, samples, and sound effects triggered by various boards, and at the gig had to deal with a host of Bluetooth dropouts and stuck/hung notes. It was distracting to me, and (the hung notes in particular) the rest of the band. So I think it's time to enter a new phase where I stick to hardware for awhile. And while my trusty Novation Ultranova can fill my synth void for the time being, I can't help but think about what kind of synth or workstation might better fill that "third board" need -- I have a dedicated organ and piano, so this would be for pitch bendy leads, basses, and (ideally) pads. How versatile a board sonically I need, well, that's something I can ponder! With my Seaboard/controller setup, I was primarily controlling synths, but also Mellotron, clavinet, pitched percussion, and anything else that wasn't covered by the Mojo or my Wurlitzer (now more often a Yamaha CP88). But I can definitely get into more of a "this is one instrument that can cover a lot of roles" like a Poly D or Hydrasynth, rather than "this can play any sound you can imagine" like a Nord Stage Compact or, I don't know, fill in the blank. I haven't done any research yet... I just thought all y'all were the right people to come to talk about, pipe dream, what would be the coolest thing to put over my piano to shred like Wakeman as well as groove like Stevie when Hammond or piano won't do? I know I want reliability and immediacy -- something I don't love about the Novation is that, while it's very knobby, the rotary encoders need to be individually programmed for every patch, which is incredibly tedious, so I wind up not using them and mostly being a preset jockey (even if I've programmed the presets myself). I like a combination of patch memory and real-time control -- the live sets on my Nord Electro are really the ideal for me. Aftertouch would be great, expression pedal control would be ideal, and a light, fast action is a must. Ideally three or four octaves of keys, but I could be swayed to more or less. Oh, and I love stereo when I can get it, but I also love my talkbox, and it would be a sick bonus to have something with programmable outputs so I could have certain patches routed separately to the talkbox and don't have to worry about toggling the box on and off. I'm sure there are zillions of directions I could go with this. So... what would YOU do?

Time to share one of my favorite mashups of all time. [video:youtube]

"WUFPH" and "Snip Snap" were already on my list, believe it or not, and I wound up titling our guitarist's two instrumental originals "Did I Stutter?" and "Second Drink." "The Boboddys" and "Chair Model" are inspired, as is "Few Word Trick." I was trying to come up with something like that â The Blupowitz Organ Company, or Blupowitz Organ Corporation? â¦with their signature tune, "Blupowitz Blitz"! (yeah, I know it's Sam B. Lupowitz, but I never read it like that, and in my mind, you're stuck with it. ) I appreciate the respect for my left hand bass work and your assumption of my leadership role, but I think all y'all are *vastly* overestimating how much work I'm doing relative to the guitarist and drummer!

Does anyone have any short, easily digestible videos they like to introduce someone to the basics and little hacks of Hammond drawbars and leslie speed? Starting to get the band together for my album release show next month. The sax player in the band, a longtime collaborator, is going to be covering auxiliary keys on the show so I can focus more on piano and vocals. He"s a brilliant musician all around, and describes himself as 'competent' at keys â definitely capable of 'give me the progression and I"ll play a pad.' But he"s never played Hammond before, so I"m looking for an easy way to introduce him to 'pull these four out,' 'the white ones are even harmonics,' and 'speed up the Leslie to build into the chorus' without me just talking at him. Easy enough to YouTube search but I thought some of y"all might have educational resources you particularly like!

I had an extremely ill-timed return to indoor gigging this weekend, but I am basking in the satisfaction of the first show with my new organ trio, a low-key but surprisingly effective side project with the guitarist I play with in pretty much everything and a new drummer we found who is the total package â great attitude, unbeatable chops, easy to work with, can pick up anything we throw at him immediately. Pulling the weight of bass, comping, and melody in an instrumental organ trio is a big step for me â I"m lucky to be flanked by two incredible musicians, but I"m also really proud of myself. That kind of satisfaction has been hard to achieve these days. We"re doing sort of a funk/R&B approach to the format, more like Soulive than Jimmy Smith, and we covered the Beatles, Marvin Gaye, Traffic, and Led Zeppelin, as well as played a few meter-shifting originals the guitarist brought in. We don"t have a name yet â made a long list of names that mostly reference The Office, and we"re heavily leaning toward Save Bandit! Anyway, just feeling good about it after the gig and wanted to share. It"s great to be able to rehearse with my A100 and 147, but the Mojo/Motion Sound KBR-3D was a formidable gig rig. Looking forward to doing more of this. Such an easy setup and sound check, and such freedom on the gig.

I am appalled that you would so blatantly rip off a Jack Lemmon / Walter Matthau comedy from the 1990s!

Announced my upcoming solo release, No Man Is an Island, today -- full album won't be out until September but I made a track available in advance with the pre-order on Bandcamp. It's a sort of Ben Folds Five-inspired anthem about overcoming my bitterness over my hometown rival's ascent to the fame I once aspired to, and it's called Table Flip! Mostly a one-man-band production, but I got to reunite my old band from high school/college, with the other guys contributing some acoustic guitar, percussion, and backing vocals remotely (one of the guitarists literally just yelled his vocals into his phone and texted them to me). It's a lot of fun, and also probably NSFW, as a heads up... some four-letter words in this upbeat little ditty. :wink:

Plenty has been said already, so all I can add is this nugget of wisdom from the legendary Frasier Crane: 'If less is more, think of how much more more will be!'

And unfortunately, unlike on the YC, the CP doesn't give you a way to selectively play its sounds from an external controller (it's all or nothing). Oh, that's unfortunate. I thought I remembered going through some of that with Fortner in his GearLab review, and he had basically sussed out a way that you could have a certain patch set for a certain zone to respond to a certain MIDI channel so that you could trigger that alone from a separate board. But that was a long time ago, and it may have been hypothetical? Also that's a pretty complicated series of hoops to jump through just to not bring a second board. I think I just wanted to know if I could trigger the CP clav from one of the manuals in my Mojo in a two-board rig. Very true. Knowing what the real thing feels like is a gift and a curse. Yeah, you know, I guess that while clav is a "staple" classic keyboard sound, really knowing the ins and outs of the instrument is even more niche than Hammond has become, so I think some manufacturers still don't expect anyone to really know or care about the difference? Of course, the preamp on my D6 is shot, so I haven't been able to use the pickup switches on mine for a few years until I can afford to get it rebuilt anyway... I've gotten used to settling for one tone!

A to ZZ Revenge of the 70s Jimmy Carter & the Energy Crisis Rock Baby Boom Doom Different era, but reminds me of my high school rock band's pop-and-hip-hop-as-heavy-metal medley, which we simply called "The Junior High Dance Medley." It was, of course, a much bigger hit with audiences than any of our original material. I still know the lyrics for the first several verses of Baby Got Back by Sir Mixalot.

I could definitely get behind the clav stuff, but even so, I don't see myself using the clav on my CP88 unless I have an unweighted controller hooked up. And different strokes for different folks -- if me covering the banjo part from, say, Take It Easy on a piano sound isn't cutting it for a bandleader, I'd politely ask them to hire a banjo player. If I needed to cover Any Non-Guitar Sound, I wouldn't have picked up a CP88. I got one because I need an 88-key board I can use to comfortably play piano onstage, and it's helpful to have electric piano sounds that don't make me cringe as well so I can fill that role. I specifically didn't look into the YC88 because even if the Yamaha organs weren't lousy, I don't care to play Hammond on a weighted piano action. A workstation or a Mainstage setup would be a better fit if I needed One Board to Rule Them All for an event band or a musical.

I haven't been doing a great job of staying up to regular gigging hours during covid, and 6pm Pacific puts it at the very dangerous 9 o'clock hour for this aging thirtysomething on the east coast... But I'm gonna try to catch all y'all. I have gigs and rehearsals happening again, after all!

The one time I broke a reed onstage was at winery show on July 4th 2019. We opened the second set with a cover of David Bowie's "Young Americans," and the piano part largely relies on rhythmically hammered octave Cs in the right hand around the moving inner voicings. Hearing the C at the top of that octave gradually start to go flat over the course of the tune was hilarious enough to offset the inconvenience at the time.

I love my Wurli so much that I took it to 80% of my gigs for over five years even though I owned a Nord Electro. It's gonna live in the home studio most of the time now, but it's one of my most treasured posessions. Nothing like it.

This is the rainiest summer in anybody's memory here in upstate New York, and it has put a bit of a damper on everyone's eager return to outdoor live performance. I had a pretty harrowing one yesterday -- a private event on a big property belonging to some folks with, I suspect, a boatload of money, because they hired four bands doing mostly original material (two from out of state), a sound company, catering, set up camping on the grounds... and then it poured all afternoon. I just have to say that I've never been so close to bailing on a gig after loadin. I set up my rig (for this band, a reasonably sizeable one consisting of the Mojo XT, Novation Ultranova, and for the first time the CP88, all running through a Motionsound KBR-3D) between two buckets catching the drips where the tenting over the stage was leaking. Made it through the set safe and almost entirely dry, but I really felt bad for the sound guy that day. After we tore down I went "ah, so, those XLRs are just running through puddles of water, EXCELLENT!" That said, the attendees were very happy to stand in the rain and rock out. Despite the anxiety about the weather, it was a really fun gig overall. The drummer did say to me afterward "I kept expecting to look over at you and see your hair standing up like you were touching the electricity globe at the science center!" Who else has made some questionable calls regarding outdoor performance and weather?