SamuelBLupowitz

Yes. This. I'm not in the market for any new electromechanical keyboards right now, but the price of the Valente isn't that outrageous compared to what a restored clav, Hammond, or Rhodes sometimes goes for (when I saw the promo video my bet was 5 grand easy). Whether or not it would be my choice over any of the above is another discussion, but I'm excited to know that it's out there. That's more exciting to me in the big picture than even the best, most convenient gigging board designed for ease, portability, and imitation.

Very excited to be the first to the party with the Billy Martin/Wil Blades duo. [video:youtube]

Your story has inspired me. I've had a project on the back burner -- the almost-completed album by the band of a friend who passed away last year -- hindered by the lack of complete multitrack sessions, and various deficiencies in the best mixes of all the tunes (all in MP3 format, of course...). Maybe it's time to get back at it and see how we can make those mixes live.

No way to do that, unfortunately, as my A100's built-in speakers were jettisoned long ago, and there's no line-out installed. No, unfortunately while switching the volume to Normal and/or the vibrato on takes us on the express train to distortion land, they only accellerate what is already happening even with the volume on soft. No I did not. That's a great question. He didn't say anything about replacing the capacitors (but that doesn't mean he didn't do it); I just know he replaced all of the tubes. But it makes sense to have backup parts ready to go regardless, so I should probably pull the trigger on that, since not being able to swap out any of the tubes has been making this more of a mystery than I wanted it to be. Thank you, all of you!

Bumping this back up because I haven't figured out the source of the issue yet, and it's been getting worse over the last few days (I had a long few hours of uninterrupted playing on Saturday, and since then it's been noticeably easier to trigger the distortion, and playing the bass pedals is a non-starter now). Video below. The sounds make me think it's a tube issue, but testing for microphonic tubes hasn't turned up any culprits in particular, and running my Nord into the Leslie via the preamp pedal has been fine. Adjusting the volume on the Leslie amp doesn't change the behavior (it changes the volume of the behavior, but not when it happens). Anyway, let me know if you have any ideas on what I should try or do. [video:youtube]

Hopefully it allows you to hit the audience like a SLEDGEHAMMER!

Haven't had a chance to do much testing and troubleshooting yet, but I figured I'd post here in case someone thinks of likely issues or easy solutions before I get there. My Hammond A100 and Leslie 147 started doing a fun new thing in the last day or two where when the Hammond volume is set to Normal, moving the pedal near or toward zero causes a low-end rumble that gets gradually louder for a second or two before a nasty clipping distortion. This happens regardless of whether or not I'm playing anything on the Hammond, and it doesn't happen *above* a certain volume threshold (or below -- when the volume is set to Soft, which is my usual practicing-alone volume, all is well). The clipping happens more quickly if I have the Leslie on fast, but that doesn't tell me if this is an issue with the organ or the 147. Mysteries abound! I love me my vintage gear. :wink: I'm going to run some things into the Leslie through my preamp pedal (another Outkaster solid) and see if I can reproduce the issue with another instrument, but any thoughts or insight will be welcome. Cleaning up the tube sockets did fix the intermittent static problem I was having last month, so we're doing great so far!

I assume this is yet another Dave Matthews from the horn arranger active in the 70s and 80s (did a lot of work for Phil Ramone, including the horn sections for Billy Joel's "An Innocent Man" album) and leader of "Dave Matthews Big Band?" I corresponded with that Dave Matthews once to see if he still had the charts for "Easy Money" filed away anywhere, but he said they were all lost to the ages...

These are a blast! Going to enjoy ripping off his voicings on the comping patterns for sure. Thanks for sharing.

Could this be the problem. isn't covid known to affect muscle and joints in a way similar to your complaint. I think OP meant that due to the presence of Covid, they play 4-5 hours a day, not that they themself are infected.

Ray Kurzweil's nefarious twist: the "chord trigger" feature turns whatever patch you're using into the GM classic "Orchestra Hit."

I think the price point will help answer that question. For a piano-oriented MIDI controller, something with a solid, comfortable action and a small number of controls would be just what the doctor ordered for me if the price and portability make it a better gig option than, say, a Kawai VPC-1. But the higher the price (or the chinsier-feeling the action), the less likely I'd be to invest. Of course, if we learn anything from this forum, it's that we all have very specific, disparate needs...

The new band van that they bought in January (if that isn't bad timing I don't know what is), and she's married to the guitarist, so technically all of his gear, I suppose. Honestly, in this instance, the concern is more about Covid and being fined by New York State than the weather, though the drummer is clearly trying not to be the one who says "I don't want to play outside if it's 30 degrees." When I was playing with this band regularly back in 2015, we played outdoors at a winter festival in December in a "heated tent" (you can imagine how well those outdoor heaters worked). I was well-served by my fingerless gloves, but I recall that the Leslie was having a really tough time changing speeds at that gig... at least that one belonged to the band, not me. :wink:

Yeah, outdoor gigs have been among my best and my worst. There's nothing that reminds me why I do this more than playing one of our local downtown concert series shows, or a big outdoor stage at a festival. But those outdoor bar/brewery/club gigs... those tend to reek of "we'll rake in the bucks if we hire a band!" as exlaimed by business owners who neither understand nor care about the logistics of hiring a live band. I have watched a friend power down his amp and put his guitar away in situations like that when the weather turns bad -- his opinion being that if the stage isn't protected from rain and the venue doesn't have a plan B, it's not worth the price of his equipment to stick it out. I have to agree with him there. Most of my projects simply aren't playing in front of people right now to avoid exactly this; my friends who are still doing these kinds of gigs have had mostly decent experiences but the bad ones are so upsetting that I don't feel like I'm missing out. Still, I'm dreading the long winter here. I miss the audiences, but I can carry on without them if I get to keep playing with other people... but that's still a challenge. In one of the groups I've been playing with that's been semi-active (two shows and one cancellation this summer), the singer desperately wants to set up an outdoor show on Halloween, and the full-time members of the band are trying not to get on her bad side while clearly expressing concern about putting it together with potential weather issues and diminishing returns/high ticket prices as far as the audience goes (New York has a strict limit of 50 people on gatherings, and that would include the band). And of course, once jamming outside isn't a possibility, we have to trust four or five households to stay Covid-free if we plan on rehearsing. Tricky.

True that. The bass player in my funk band is a beast, and big TOP fan, but he has deep scars from playing What Is Hip in a cover band back in college. As a bass player myself (and as an organist!) I can relate.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: MIDI over Bluetooth is my favorite advancement in music technology of the century so far.

Handy for that Eagles/Styx mashup every audience has been desperately waiting for, I'm sure... Little did he know how many of us would need a Zoom control in 2020.

A friend of mine who passed away last year was really into Arduino. He was working on a project he called 'the Glove' that let him control lighting cues from the stage while playing guitar. He would have loved these (especially the guitar with a modulation axis). Gonna pour one out for him today.

I think it might be like Paul McCartney with the Hofner bass -- it's what he was using when the band first made a big splash, at early concerts and big TV appearances like the Ed Sullivan show, so it's what sticks in people's minds (particularly non-musicians). With McCartney, the sound of a lot of the truly legendary studio works is his Rickenbacker bass, much like how Ray spent more of the Doors' career playing an organ other than the Vox, but for the casual fan those sort of images can get frozen in time along with the early songs. Anyway, one man's crackpot theory!

I've never thought about this, but this explains why I have so much more trouble with pressing the wrong button on a Super Nintendo than a Gamecube, even though both fell outside my prime childhood video gaming period and I've probably played both systems a similar amount in the years since (if anything, I've played the SNES more). I was hoping to tie this comment back into music but really I just wanted to talk about Nintendo.

I've never seen Ray play pedals, or heard him talk about it -- and he was never shy about discussing his gear or technique. John Paul Jones used bass pedals regularly while playing keyboards and mandolin, of course, and if your friend saw Zeppelin live as well as the Doors, the haze of years passed (substances or not) can do that sort of thing to memory. Every now and then I'll find an old picture or video that contradicts a very vivid memory that my brain has adjusted over the years based on other available information. It's a fascinating thing, the human mind...

Disaster Fatigue, absolutely. The working from home part has been manageable -- I'm lucky with how supportive and reasonable my place of employment and my team there has been, and it's been a --if I can use the word -- convenient time for my wife and I to have bought a home and be settling in. I miss playing with my bands a lot, but I've had lots of music projects to work on, and lots of things to write about, of course, since I've never shied away from writing political music. But I feel like over the past few years, the visible horrors and deliberate cruelty nationally and globally have just been piling on, and piling on, and getting more aggressive, more callous, more vicious, and the entry of the virus into our sphere just took it to a whole new level of awful. Part of me is incredulous, and part of me is completely unsurprised by the way things are going -- things are presented differently, but nothing that's happening is new, just shocking. It's a very, very unsettling time. I'm sure the 60s were too, and the 80s, and every decade for the last 300 or 400 years if you're, for example, an Indigenous person. I'm trying to live my life to the best of my ability and use what powers I have for good, but it is exhausting, and it's terrifying.

You must have had a better stereo than I had. I thought it was "Just like the one we love" I thought it was "one-winged girl" for awhile, which is, in retrospect, a horrifying image. Didn't Miley Cyrus do a video like that? :wink:

Ah, sanctimony. Still one of America"s greatest exports.

Thanks everyone! Your feedback is appreciated, as always.