SamuelBLupowitz

A music teacher buddy of mine is trying to find a colleague's daughter an amp for her Nord Electro for under $200. That rules out most of the amplification that's discussed on this forum, even the kind we make fun of. :wink: She's just going to be playing at home for now, rather than taking it out to perform, so my thought is some inexpensive studio monitors would be nice -- I imagine she doesn't care about stereo, though I'd prefer to make a stereo-capable recommendation. Still, for max $200, what would you folks do? Look for an inexpensive set of "studio" monitors? Find a decent powered active monitor? Just use a set of Dell computer speakers from the side of the road and/or any office I wander into at my place of employment? I've never spent less than $500 on keyboard amplification that I didn't rescue from a garbage pickup, so I'm wondering what you all would recommend!

Just wanted to mention that I used the WIDI master with my Mojo at a campfire rehearsal the other night, controlling Wurli patches and Pianoteq in Mainstage... very satisfying! Maybe if I had A/B'd it with a cable, I'd notice a difference in latency, and I imagine the 32 gigs of RAM in my new MacBook doesn't hurt matters, but either way I'm very pleased that this is an option. One less cable to hook up whenever gigging is happening again.

I would really like to see a little more clearly how to get the Piano Bass to balance on the G101... right now my Piano Bass is sequestered across my studio from the G-101 on an x-stand, which feels wrong for multiple reasons...

Have a good one, Dave!

I'm pretty sure it's the flat 7 every time, but it sounds like that bass note might be a hair sharp -- makes sense if that's the Rhodes Piano Bass, which I'm pretty sure it is, rather than their frequent in-studio augmentation with a bass guitar. When I last saw Gov't Mule a few years ago at my local theater, they closed their show with this song. It was pretty great.

Then at 2:40 some of the levers come back up, and at 3:30 most of the rest come back up, then at 4:10 you see the levers go down again. I can't see what he's doing to do that. I believe there are preset foot switches that move the tabs, similar to the registration presets on a pipe organ.

There was a member of the school board at my district growing up that was (fortunately) a big supporter of music education and its associated programs. The only trouble was, he was a diehard theater organ aficionado, and he was determined to pass his appreciation on to the next generation. He used to haunt the middle school cafeteria and solicit students to join his Theater Organ Club, which took bus trips to various old Pennsylvania theaters that still had these organs functioning. He would hover over you while you were eating with your friends, occasionally sit down next to you if you seemed interested, coerce you into signing his contact list, and leave you with Xeroxed informational literature. Basically, any minute chance of anyone finding these instruments cool, he snuffed out completely. Even the high school band director had trouble taking this guy seriuosly. I did get to watch ragtime piano virtuoso Terry Waldo play this piece in college, and it's pretty breathtaking. He had a humorous introduction where he described the original key, tempo, etc and after each would say "...but that's really hard, so I'm going to transpose it down to C" and take the tempo down and that sort of thing. He lurched into a lackluster rendition for a chorus or so, then winked and launched into orbit with the intended key and tempo. Irrestistable.

Thanks â and just to be clear, not particularly worried about not being able to fund quality cables, just wondering if there was a place with some more options than the two specific lengths of stereo dual-XLR cable I found that I could go to when I have these odd needs.

Do folks have a solid source for cables outside of the usual music vendors for when they need something offbeat and aren"t the build-it-yourself type? One of the best little investments I made in the process of putting my home studio together was buying a handful of stereo TRS cable pairs â two headed ones with a black and a red that split out on both ends. Since I run a lot of stereo keyboards and such, the amount of time and aggravation this has saved me is not insignificant, and it really helps keep my moderately-sized space (and the keys area) tidy, more so than when I velcroed two cables of equal length together for purposes of stereo. I"d like some similar XLRs for running monitor feeds and perhaps the occasional XY pair of stereo mics. I"ve seen one or two options online, but I just want to make sure I"m not missing out on a Hot Tip a la Monoprice â 'oh, you can order them here in any length, And they"re always quality,' that sort of thing. Thanks all!

I am happy to facilitate said live Zoom thing just because I want to be a part of it. Their recent updates included a 'high fidelity music mode' that leaves off their default data compression and dynamic compression. The difference on voices is night and day. Time to mic up that Leslie, dB!

This is SO COOL. Bet like you could throw a little wah pedal action on that Line 6 too, sound like the Peddlers. :grin:

Audio and/or video examples please!

Here you go. Those two-handed licks over the G kept tripping me up -- trickier than I thought! I don't quite nail the left hand on the second half of that G, and I accidentally hit a Bb over the D7 instead of Mr. B Natural, but you get the idea. Thanks for giving me a fun little thing to learn. [video:youtube]

I remember reading a Benmont Tench interview where he discussed his appreciation of reverb swirling around in a leslie. I have also read that interview â it"s cost me a lot of money. :wink:

I had never heard this tune before, but I really dig it, and the piano parts sounded right up my alley, so I took a minute before my wife's next voice lesson to jump behind the piano and figure it out. I think I got pretty close, but what I figured out here might not be exactly what's on the record -- either way, I'll try to give you the theory that backs up my interpretation of his licks. Basically, it's a mix of pentatonic lines and different chord inversions with some passing tones, nothing too fancy, just (as you pointed out) lots of bluesy grace notes and stuff to dress it up. The tune is in C, but the intro starts on the V with that chromatic octave lick in the right hand and an octave G root in the left; the left hand walks up chromatically to the VI and the right hand lands on the corresponding Ami7 chord, sounds like it's voiced bottom to top E-G-C-E. Then he reinverts the chord in the right hand as a C major triad, but rolling over some black keys to get there (sounds like maybe his thumb hits the C and he uses the rest of his fingers to roll up D - D# - E for the middle voice and F - F# - G for the upper voice). Then it's another G chord, and I think he's playing a harmonized blues lick with both hands (or he's just got more dexterity in his right hand than I do based on the fluidity of the grace notes; sounds like something Josh Paxton could do with one hand when he rolls out of bed in the morning). That first run over the G sounds like D - Db - C - B in the upper voice and G - E - Eb - D in the lower voice. Then the second run is G - E - Eb - D in the upper voice and B - Bb - A - G in the lower voice. After that it's even more straightforward: an F7 chord, big fat octave F in the bass I think, and he plays descending 6ths, so two different inversions of the F7 with passing tones to get from one to the other. Sounds the upper voice line is A - G - F, and the parallel harmony line underneath is C - Bb - A. Then the restatement is C - Bb - A upper / Eb - D - C lower. Then a D7 with an F# in the bass, same principle in the right hand over those chords. F# - E - D upper / A - G - F# lower, then A- G - F# upper / C - B - A lower. Note that he plays the bluesy Bb in the lines over the F7 (a IV chord in our home key of C), but we get the leading tone in the D7 since it's a secondary dominant of the V chord, so we're borrowing from the key of G. Of course, he really milks those grace-note rolls up to these voicings to give them style and make them sound more intricate than they really are. I like to play the sixths with my pinky on top and my index finger on the bottom, and roll up to the lower note with my thumb a whole step below and then flam my index finger onto the target note from the black key a half step underneath. Again, this is the kind of thing Josh Paxton does in his sleep, so I don't know if I'm really the authority on this technique. I've just copped a lot of licks from Nicky Hopkins over the years. Anyway, the last chord is a nice gospel-tinged F/G (maybe a G13?); it sounded good to me when I voiced it with octave Gs in the left hand and my right thumb hitting both the G and A below middle C, with the C, F, and G above it. Might be an E in there but I think that sounded more jazzy than what's on the record. If I have a little time later tonight or tomorrow I'll try to take a little video, but hopefully this is helpful! Either way, I had a good time. Way more fun than the hour and a half AV meeting I was sitting through when I read your post :grin:

Agreed... also, I spy a Sansamp on the clav -- been messing around with that myself. Which model are you using?

Yeah, and I'm not sure in certain cases how deep he went to make it work, versus how quick-and-dirty a job he did to save me money. I think he may have underestimated how much I was willing to spend on this, but also, he's not a full-restoration-no-questions-asked kind of guy usually -- if I bring him something broken, he fixes it, and occasionally improves some functionality, but it's not like when I've tried to make an appointment with RetroLinear and they told me flat-out "we don't 'just' tune and voice; don't bring us your Wurlitzer unless you're willing to pay for a full restoration job." Fortunately, it did just seem to be an issue with dirty/unseated tube connections, and I know I'm going to have to troubleshoot things like that from time to time. It's the life I've chosen!

"He's very talented!" I wouldn't necessarily list Clapton as one of my favorites (he's definitely one of my dad's favorites, so I grew up with a lot of enthusiasm around him), but that Derek and the Dominoes record is definitely in my top ten. Even though I'd heard Layla one too many times by the time I listened to the whole record, hearing it in context made me experience it differently. Aren't albums fun? Speaking of the "Great British Guitar Triumverate* (*Some Exclusions Apply)," does everyone know the story about the version of "You Shook Me" on the first Zeppelin album? Page produced essentially the same arrangement for Jeff Beck, then turned around and redid it with Zeppelin without saying anything to Beck first. Page must have been a hard guy to be friends with, at least during that era. Also, I know he was doing the backstroke through a sea of heroin at the time and Plant and Jones were basically left to their own devices to write the album, but Page's solo on "Hot Dog" from In Through the Out Door is one of the worst guitar solos I've ever heard. It doesn't even sound like a first take, it sounds like a joke take he played because he knew they were just getting levels, and then he just said "good enough." Man, when that band was on, though...

A lot of EDM references, and it reminded me of a period in the early 2010s when dubstep broke into the mainstream and every pop, rock, and even metal record was incorporating dubstep-influenced synth sounds (the hugely gritty, grating kind) and beats. Some records from that period less than a decade ago sound incredibly dated now... there are one or two I can think of that just reeked of 'established artist trying a little desperately to keep up with the times.'

I"m in Mix Mode right now, and finding and removing the mud is the great challenge I"m always trying to overcome, especially as someone who loves him some bass. It is amazing how a tiny dip in a frequency you"re not really perceiving across the board will change everything. Getting everything sounding big, fat, and punchy without feeling like there"s a cheesecloth in front of it relative to my references... the quest for the holy grail.

Thank you! I have manuals and schematics, because the internet is full of wonders as well as horrors, but I also know I can use this forum as a resource if I get stuck, and I really appreciate that. Also, please know that I only referred to the 12au7 as "the big one" because I know this crowd has been intimately familiar with the technical details , in many cases for longer than I have been alive. :wink:

You know, I'm not actually sure. He was typically sort of vague and inconsistent filling me in on the work he did... I could always ask him though. I'm happy and slightly relieved to say that I've mostly solved the static; I noticed that there was one tube (the, um, big one in the front) in the Leslie amp that produced static if I tapped or lightly wiggled it, so while the rig was powered down, I just pulled it out and put it back in again. Greatly reduced the issue, and as mentioned above, totally made sense that the vibrations from the low notes on the organ (never mind dragging it around in the trailer) might have unseated some things. I have some DeOxit on order and I'll clean it and the other tubes up just to be thorough, but it feels good to do a successful (if extremely simple and minor) fix on my own. Guess I have to find something to track it on now! Working on a few Noon Fifteen tunes for release in fall, which we did the basics for back in December, but it's possible I've got a better organ sollo in me than the one that's currently on there... :wink:

Now the ttracks they've done with Larry Goldings, that's a different story entirely!

Yeah, and at $3k US, actually not as expensive as I thought it would be. Just a good piece of information to file away... Man, I gotta tell you, I'm not sure if it's that I've always been a grouchy old man or what, but as much as I sometimes dig the Scary Pockets crew, these funk rearrangements of every popular song under the sun really get under my skin sometimes, which is weird, because in theory I'm into that sort of thing... I'm wondering if it bothers me because the arrangements are often completely removed from the lyrical content. That's definitely true of this one. Sorry to grumble and get us off track, though. Yes! Many pretty instruments! Me likey!

It's okay, I have family in town so I actually missed most of the party myself (though I did get to see a few of you for a bit, which was nice). Again soon. As the days get shorter and the weather cooler (at least in my neck of the, er, globe) the company and conversation is most welcome.