SamuelBLupowitz

I think something that critics have lambasted him for, but I find to be one of his immense talents, is that he is an incredible vocal mimic. If you ever hear early live bootlegs, he was prone to busting into bits of Joe Cocker and Bruce Springsteen songs with impressions that would turn anybody's head. I think in some ways, people find his genre explorations jarring because he can't help but sing his Ray Charles-inspired songs like Ray Charles, his Beatlesque numbers like John Lennon, his Tumbleweedy tunes like early Elton. But his voice has always been an incredible instrument for its versatility. You can hear some traces of the "singer-songwriter vibrato" on Piano Man and Streetlife Serenade, but it's most pronounced on the Cold Spring Harbor record, which Billy himself has largely disavowed for his lack of control over the process (and, depending on who you ask, a mastering issue that pitched up the whole thing). Still, if you want to hear young Billy Joel doing his best Paul McCartney impression and figuring his style out, it's a fascinating record with some truly great songs, like "She's Got a Way" and "Everybody Loves You Now."

Oh, Billy and Liberty had a falling out in the early 2000s over some business/money stuff (and disagreements over certain members of the band, if the gossip I hear is correct). Lib hasn't played with him for more than 20 years at this point; it's been Chuck Burgi on drums in his touring band since the Buy My Box Set tour in 2006. A shame; Liberty was a huge part of Billy's sound, and the longest-serving member of his band up until that point (the only holdover from the old band when Billy cleaned house in the 80s).

I think it is, and also an unusual (but not unprecedented) move for him to work without any of his touring musicians. That was a big sticking point for him early in his career, and caused him to reject producers as established as James William Guercio and Sir George Martin. But he shook up his band a lot for the Storm Front album in 1989, and aquiesced to working with Danny Kortchmar's chosen players for a lot of The River of Dreams. At this point in his ongoing "I'm just going to play from the same catalog of songs that came out between 1973 and 1993" performing career, I admire him trying new things, regardless of the outcome. It can be exciting to hear an established artist get uncomfortable, though in this case the result does have most of the marks of a Billy Joel Ballad. I had seen elsewhere that the Parisi guys were involved with this; they were heavily endorsing ROLI products and the Seaboard in particular for awhile. I wonder if this is a Billy Joel-led project, or if the track had some other history before he got involved. I am curious what inspired him to put out a song now. Though he is wrapping up his extended residency at Madison Square Garden, so maybe he was looking for something new?

My wife also was hearing early Elton in the vocal, which is cool because a lot of the vocals way back on Piano Man remind me of Tumbleweed Connection (I know Billy spent a long time trying to shake the Elton comparisons, to moderate, but not total, success). The only thing really getting under my skin with the production is the vocal. His performance is great, there's just this warbly thing going on (someone leaving the pitch correction plugin on at slightly too high a level in mixing?) that I hear a LOT on older male rockers' vocals from the past 10 or 15 years (certainly Mick's vocals on the new Stones stuff, and Paul McCartney's more recent output), and it drives me insane. I'm not sure what the goal is there. It didn't make Leon Russell sound better on The Union back in 2010, sort of feels like making sure the pitch was 100% spot on misses the point of his style. That gripe aside, I'm definitely curious about the writing process and how much of it was collaboration, and who else played on the track. I'm certainly interested what brought this on, and if there will be more. I owe so much of my musical upbringing to Billy Joel, and I'm thrilled that he felt motivated to write and release something new, since that's been an exceedingly rare treat since 1993.

That may be so, but he's also known to be a little bit of an intense, cantankerous purist, so who can say, really! It's a different climate economically than the early days of MMW when they'd load the B3 and Leslie out of the van and the stairs into the club themselves -- and I don't imagine he does much moving Hammonds around on his own at this stage of his career...

Assuming you are starting totally from scratch, here's the first, most important lesson I had to learn to start understanding how to make this stuff work: MIDI Out - from the device sending a message to another device -- "play this note," "switch to this patch," "open the filter." MIDI In - for the device that is *receiving* a MIDI signal and reacting to it -- a patch change, a parameter adjustment, audio output. Some of you might laugh, but when I started hooking up my bass pedals to control a digital organ or synth, it took me awhile to get a grip on how to connect the cable between the two! "well if the sound is coming OUT of the synth, then I need to put the MIDI into the ... no wait, that's not right ..."

My Wurlitzer 200 is one of my prized possessions. I stopped taking it to gigs for the most part after the pandemic (both to save my back and because I now have a home studio I can keep it set up in), but man, truly nothing like the real thing -- the feel, the sound, the response. Maintenance is kind of a pain though, I admit. I'd be fascinated by a Vintage Vibe-style contemporary electromechanical piano that's more reed-y than tine-y. I imagine the market would be more for mid- to upper-level touring and recording artists (and of course home use by affluent folks), than those of us carting our own gear to gigs. That seems to be how Vintage Vibe gets by, what with Stevie Wonder, Esperanza Spaulding, and John Ginty touring with their pianos and clav copies. Interested to see where this goes!

For me, as someone who got into the show 20 years after it aired, I feel like the self-importance and pomposity of Frasier and Niles is usually the butt of the joke -- their attempts at social climbing and self-aggrandizement pretty much always blow up in their faces. Though I will say, as a former English major, I'm a sucker for an arcane literary joke, and the show is full of those. Definitely less about the minutiae of everyday life than Seinfeld, which was also impeccably written, but with fewer quips about Chaucer, midcentury American theater ("Well, I wish you had lent her your Tennessee Williams biography. She wouldn't have kept forgetting his name and calling him Indiana Jones") and expensive wine. Like all 90s sitcoms, there are some ideas and moments that have aged poorly, but it generally does pretty well compared to its peers -- it's much less homophobic than, say, Friends. And the writing is almost always stellar and erudite, like playwriting (which, if we're going to keep picking on Friends even though nobody asked, that's definitely not something you can say for that show, either). I love the moments when they get David Hyde Pierce to play the piano. Kelsey Grammer is always very obviously miming, but by a few seasons in they start looking for excuses for Niles to play instead of Frasier. I sang the praises of David Hyde Pierce in a previous post in this thread, but I think it's worth mentioning again how key his immense talent was to the success of the show. His physical comedy is magic (never better displayed than in the nearly-dialogue-less opening segment of the "Three Valentines" episode), and as a stage actor who has done everything from Spamalot to Sondheim, he brings a certain groundedness and finesse to a character that could otherwise be overly cartoonish, or a pale rehash of his onscreen brother. Listen, she might be close to my mother's age, but Peri Gilpin can still get it. 😉

There's another episode where Frasier and Niles help Martin finish a song he wrote for Frank Sinatra. Season 3. Might enjoy that one as well!

This episode is the source of one of the most quotable lines in the entire show: "if less is more, imagine how much more more would be!" I think about that in the recording studio ... all the time.

I didn't grow up in a Frasier household (my dad was more into Seinfeld) but my wife brought a love of that show into our marriage and now it's one of my go-to comfort shows. At its best -- and it stays pretty consistently funny even through the later seasons -- it's old-school, door-slamming farce, a 22-minute Neil Simon play every episode. Haven't been able to bring myself to watch the recent revival (let's be honest, I'm not in it for Kelsey Grammer; David Hyde Pierce *made* that show) but you can bet I'll be watching the 1996 comedy of errors "Look Before You Leap" on February 29th this year. Oh yeah, and the swanky jazz score is pretty cool too.

Wow and the keyboard section is the tip of the iceberg. I guess if you're going to have two bass players, they might as well be John Entwistle and Stanley Clarke.

As someone who did a whole lot of movable-do solfege in college, I appreciated Mary having a Phrygian lamb there! For real, some people get down on movable do, but those four years of sight singing helped train my ear and hear pitch relationships contextually SO much better than pure interval training ever did. My biggest leap forward in "hearing what I want to play before I play it" in my musical education.

The advantage of an instrumental three-piece is that it's easier to book in smaller venues that don't have the sound and stage infrastructure that some of my larger projects need to make it worthwhile. The disadvantage of an instrumental three-piece is that so far I've been playing a lot of smaller venues that don't have the sound and stage infrastructure that some of my larger projects need to make it worthwhile! Hauling the amp is still easier than a mixer, mains, speaker stands, a bunch of mics and mic stands, and monitor wedges, I suppose. But the one actual club show we've played so far has been easier to load in, set up, and get levels, that's for sure. Baby steps!

Not out of the question if it comes to it, and if I wind up using it often again, I may do that. With this amp it's not even so much the weight but the size and bulk of it. Trickier for loading in the car, maneuvering down narrow stairways, etc. If I need to I can carry it by one handle, but good luck fitting through a door that way! The specs say it weighs 70 pounds but it's never felt that heavy to me, at least not the way the weight is distributed. Just harder to slide into the back of the car than the Two Amp Solution.

Thought some of y'all would find this Plight of the Gigging Musician relatable. I got a used Motion Sound KBR-3D around 2018 so that I could run my clones through a real spinny thing (and still have stereo inputs for my other boards without having to ask for multiple lines or, god forbid, bring additional amps). It served me well onstage and even in some Leslie-less studio situations. But my eventual move to in-ear monitors, plus a post-pandemic desire to lighten my load-in/load-out, left the amp sidelined to a corner of my studio (where I now have a real Leslie 147 when I want to move air). I got the sim on my Mojo dialed in to a place where it sounded great in the in-ears and PA speakers, so why not just run everything direct on gigs and save my back? I still had my SpaceStation when I wanted quick stereo amplification for a rehearsal or vocals-only-in-the-PA gig, and that's a lot less cumbersome. So I started thinking about selling the Motion Sound. When I started gigging in earnest with my organ trio last fall, I wasn't using the in-ears, especially since we were playing more breweries and small venues without house PAs. Still, I was getting by with the SpaceStation and my little 10" Line 6 bass amp from 2008. Yeah, two amps, but both pretty small and easy to transport. But I was struggling with a lack of focus and punch in the bass synth patches, and a shrillness in the organ I wasn't entirely happy with. So for our gig this past weekend, I thought "what the hell, I'll run through the Motion Sound to see if it makes it any different, and if not, I'll know for sure I don't need to keep it." You know how that story ends. Even not using the "Leslie" part of the amp and running the sim and the bass synth into the stereo inputs, there was my full, beautiful organ sound and a synth that was thumping more like a dirty old p-bass than I had been able to dial in previously. Hooray, but also, I guess I'm back to lugging a big hefty amp around for these gigs! At least it's only one of them now, and I can leave it at home when there's a PA with subs at the venue... so it can continue to take up space in my studio rather than my wallet. Life is tough. 😉

Shame the video isn't on YouTube anymore -- find it if you can -- but this is the audio of the same performance. Kofi Burbridge's playing on this Stevie Wonder cover was a game changer for me when I first heard it in college. He does the Stevie rhythmic funk clav thing, but he also goes beyond that and makes the instrument sing like a second guitar (complementing Derek Trucks brilliantly) in a way I hadn't heard previously. It really shaped my approach to playing clavinet. The whole performance is worth listening to, but Kofi's solo creeps in around 3:30.

One of those funny little lyrical idiosyncrasies that pops out to me occasionally! I think this interpretation is solid; the full lyric is essentially a statement of "the more things change, the more they stay the same" and the full chorus lyric is "then we'll get down on our knees and pray we don't get fooled again." So the lyric itself is a hope and a wish -- "maybe in the future we won't be so gullible" -- but the statement of the title, and one might say, the overall impact of the song, is more declarative and assertive. An embodiment of the courage and clarity that the narrator is, with some uncertainty and insecurity, praying for. Or maybe Pete Townshend just thinks he's smarter than everybody else. Who could IMAGINE.

And I was just telling my guitarist he should get a Hammond for his music room! Probably only an eight hour drive for me or so... what could go wrong?

At this rate, I'm expecting to see a thread any day now informing us that Korg has assumed control of the US government and will be rolling out a new Constitution. 😆

What a cool setup. Guess I need to get myself one of those brushes! 😆 EDIT: I see they're coming to my town in March, on a double bill with a singer/songwriter/harpist based not too far from me, Mikaela Davis. Looks like she was featured on one of their recent singles as well. That's cool! If I'm available I'll have to try to catch the show.

The trusty Roland PK-5! I've had mine since about 2014 and I finally feel like I'm getting good at moving around on them ... I feel like it's a slightly different technique from the radial organ style pedals though, and a little tougher to heel-toe through passing tones. I've also found that sometimes the pedals aren't quite as sensitive as I would like and I will miss notes (though maybe we could chalk that up to inconsistent technique on my end, or the MIDI response of the Korg Prologue I've been connecting them to). I see these in the wild so rarely, so it's always nice to be able to confer with other bass pedal users. It's a different feel and approach than left hand bass that I've found demands, and rewards, simplicity. I couldn't do my organ trio gig without a combination of left hand and pedals. EDIT: thought I'd share a picture of my PK-5 pedals as a part of my rig. My philosophy is, if you're doing something that requires some unusual skill you want to impress the audience with, like playing keyboards with your feet, you should do something to call attention to it...

For years, any time I would take the occasional left hand bass gig, I would feel really pleased with myself, but grateful to be returning to situations with great bass players so that I can focus on textures and serving the song (and dancing around onstage). Playing just keys, whether it's more of a singer-songwriter piano style or as an accent/texture instrument in a band that's more driven by guitar or the rhythm section, is a very different animal than when you have to prioritize being a key member of the rhythm section while also covering harmony and/or melody. When we were first getting my organ trio together, I had a lot of doubts about my ability to deliver. If it hadn't been for the years I've spent working with the guitarist (who was the one who really wanted to make the project happen), I might have bowed out. I'm really glad I stuck it out and put in the time necessary to be able to perform the music; it's been incredibly satisfying, and I really feel like I've grown and expanded my abilities. But I do have to think of it as a different role than when I'm playing just keys or just bass in a band.

And of course, one of my very earliest influences: 😉 "Hey Matt, bring in the next piano, will ya?"