SamuelBLupowitz

I think another factor is whether you"re using them and getting joy out of them, or can see yourself doing so, or if they"re just taking up space. I got a great deal on my Wurlitzer with legs, pedal, and road case, and the seller said to me 'it"s a great instrument, but I"m not running a museum, and if I don"t play it, it needs to go.' None of that is helpful with whether you"ll make more money now or in a few years, but I think if you can use the money more than you can use the old boards, that"s your answer.

Thanks, this is great to hear. I remember there was a very active thread about Camelot when the first version came out in late 2018 (?), but most folks seemed to come to the same conclusion that it was too buggy and unreliable to be a true replacement for Mainstage or an iOS Mainstage solution. Looking forward to your Gearlab posts. I've also seen some video evidence that Ali Gokturk has been working on Keystage Version 2, which will allow AUv3 plugins to be opened directly in the app, rather than just functioning as a MIDI control app. Exciting times for digital music-making!

For interested parties, my tech has been e-mailing me as he starts to work... here's some of what he's saying: So, no surprise, it's a good thing I took it to a tech instead of bringing it home and finding out it didn't work. Everything he's said so far has been reasonable, so as long as nothing turns out to be catastrophically bad and expensive to fix, I'm hoping this will still be a lucky find when all is said and done.

Moved some things around in the studio this morning to prepare for the piano tuner (and to make space for the A100 and the 147 when the tech is done with them) and was excited to try stacking the Rhodes Piano Bass on top of the G-101... yikes, not quite as perfect a mate as, say, a Clavinet on a Hammond, or my Nord Electro on my Wurlitzer. I referenced some pictures of Ray Manzarek with the two boards stacked, but anytime I moved the Rhodes back as far as it looked in his setup, the center of gravity just felt a liiiiittle too far back for my comfort. Seemed like one little push would send the whole stack toppling backward (been there, not eager to repeat). Might be that the floor in my studio isn't quite level, and the carpet exacerbates it. But even with the Rhodes scooted pretty far back, its keybed still hangs pretty far over the controls and the keys of the Gibson. I guess I'll let that dream go for now. That Piano Bass is probably the least practical keyboard in my collection, but it's just too cool to let go of. Fortunately, the G-101 makes a fine platform for my Novation Ultranova, even if that's an odd pairing of eras and sonic character!

I kinda disagree? Without a multitouch interface, I think they would be an utter drag to use. But that's just me; I am moving further and further away from computer-based virtual instruments because their sound quality doesn't make up for their complete lack of immediacy. I get this from a conceptual standpoint -- it is easier to move the resonance knob or adjust the filter cutoff in the middle of a song on a touchscreen than with a mouse -- but in the heat of battle, at least for my purposes, it's not really practical to make mid-song adjustments unless I've mapped the parameters I need to a physical controller ahead of time. I just dealt with this yesterday, when a synth lead I had programmed in Model D was mixed much too low relative to the rest of my keyboards, and I had to keep playing organ with one hand while using my other to double-tap the home button, pull up the app, tap my finger just right on the volume knob on the UI, and then adjust it JUST enough for the patch to cut (but not so loud that it would tear my head off). Maybe it would have been even harder on a MacBook, but at a certain point the touchscreen doesn't save me from going into "panicky device-tweaking mode" instead of "immediate, instinctive instrument-tweaking mode." I've wanted the equivalent of Model D on OS X just because it would mean I could choose between using my MacBook OR my iPad for a gig, rather than "this is definitely a gig where I need Mainstage, but I will also need to make sure my iPad is hooked up to the MacBook because it's the only way I can get that sweet, sweet Minimoog sound without spending $200 on an Arturia VST or something." Real first world problems, considering the expense of the Apple hardware, and the affordability of both the $18 iOS app and the much more expensive VST relative to an actual friggin' Minimoog... but there it is, I guess. Maybe I'm just bitter because my iPad can't handle the processing power it takes to use Keystage's XY pad without zippering, and moving my finger around on an iPad to do filter sweeps makes my heart happy. For expression and musicality, the touchscreen is absolutely better, it's spur-of-the-moment problem solving where there are diminishing returns for me relative to a mouse. I have a Behringer X-Touch Mini that I use to map various knobs and buttons per patch. I use it with my Mainstage concerts more often than I use it with an iPad-only rig, but that's mostly because if I'm using an iPad-only rig, I'm trying to have as few devices as possible, and bringing the X-Touch also means bringing a USB hub, which means another power supply to plug in, and those things add up (and also take up a lot of top-of-keyboard real estate).

I've been an Apple guy since I was a teenager, but man, the way they've been gatekeeping music the last few years really rubs me the wrong way (I'd love to just play the music I purchased through Bandcamp on my phone, but I can't even BUY it through my phone, much less download it). The cloud is great for what it does, but I'm not a fan of subscription services where the service itself is viewed as the product, rather than the blood, sweat, and tears of the creative work that makes up the content (here's looking at you, Spotify). A friend and coworker of mine, a programmer, was a diehard Apple user who switched to an Android phone basically out of spite. He's dead now. (No, seriously, he did die, for reasons completely unrelated to his choice of smartphone, but he had a dark sense of humor and really would have appreciated the joke there. Forgive me.) But poor YouTube. One more sad attempt to get anybody to pay for their premium service. Sorry, Google, but we all started using it before there were any ads, and videos capped at 10 minutes. Nobody wants to pay you money to remove the ads that we didn't need to be there in the first place. I'm not sure if I've really responded directly to what you're dealing with, Craig, but I was certainly ready to get up on my soapbox and whine this morning! May your Minidisc player live a long and productive life.

Yeah, while I have no real need for the YC61 (though a board with a pitch or mod wheel would be kind of nice at this point, I realize), I've been enjoying seeing what Yamaha's latest creations have to offer. Looking forward to hearing more about what you do with it! In the meantime I'll dream of a CP88 sometime down the line.

Mine is supposed to arrive Friday, just in time to have no more gigs on the calendar... plenty of time to play around with it in the studio before the stakes are high, then! Keep me posted on the occasional iOS lag, and if that improves for any of you. Playing a few gigs with just an iPad as a sound source for my Seaboard has me really itching to get my replacement MacBook, to be honest, and I've found my 2018 iPad Mini starts getting gummy with the Seaboard's MIDI-over-Bluetooth at times, but I'm still looking forward to having the option to connect other boards to an iOS or OS X rig wirelessly.

Steve, I'd love to check out some of your son's music if you're willing to share. He's, uh, not that much younger than me (my brother was born in '93). If he is also in the Philly area, I have a lot of friends and family there and I'm in town fairly often (well, at least, I was, pre-covid).

As you know at this point I've spent the last few weeks aggressively researching and pestering people about the right interface to put at the center of my home studio, with decisions made and a plan to pull the trigger today. Did I still have to look up the D-Box+ when you posted it? Of course I did.

Haven"t had an update for awhile because I was out of commission with a nasty stomach bug for the first two weeks of August, so it set back my plans for the A100. But tonight we got the organ and Leslie loaded up into the trailer and dropped off with the tech! 'The bigger it is, the faster it moves out of here,' he said, 'and this is pretty big.' He looked like a kid at Christmas. Woof, learned you gotta strap those ROKs tight on the bottom though. Had a close call getting it out of the trailer and onto the sidewalk outside the tech"s house. Don"t want to jinx myself, but I think somebody up there wants me to have this organ... let"s hope loading it back in and out after it"s ready to go is uneventful!

This is terrible to hear and must be awful to witness firsthand. I have a close friend in Sacramento and another friend from college in the Bay Area who we just spoke with last night, and it"s a grim reality of our time. I really hope it"s over sooner rather than later, but I"m sure there"s deep anxiety to contend with on top of the horror.

I had the same thought, and it makes the joke funnier, but I didn"t recall originally hearing the joke with a specific musician at the butt of it... that said, I"m remembering it through a haze of at least a decade.

I"ll also confirm that I"m able to load Spitfire Labs in Mainstage, but I"m glad for the tutorial on Kushview Element, which I couldn"t figure out while trying to find a Minimoog VST I liked for Mac.

A jazz musician calls his union office, and asks if there is a seat available in the big band of a notoriously temperamental, tyrannical bandleader. 'I"m sorry,' the union rep says, 'but the leader of that band passed away last night.' The next night, the musician calls the office again, asking about the same gig. 'I"m sorry, but the bandleader died two days ago. Didn"t you call about this yesterday?' The musician responds, 'I just wanted to hear you say it.'

Modular toys are FUN. Hopefully we see some creative uses of this sort of thing.

Thanks Craig! This is the sort of feedback I needed. The internet is full of people saying 'this is garbage' and 'this is the best thing ever,' and neither extreme is really helpful. Thanks for pointing out the limitations at higher sample rates, too â noted, and shouldn"t be an issue for my needs at this time. I think I should follow my gut and pull the trigger on the MOTU (and maybe a couple of XLR male to TRS female adapters if I need to run a keyboard submix in or something).

I can't wait to catch up and listen to this. I could have listened to more podcasts when I was out of commission with the stomach virus, but mostly I watched every Mystery Science Theater episode on YouTube. Which, as it turns out, is a lot of them.

I posted about this over in Dr. Mike's forum, but I thought I could benefit from the brain trust here as well (KuruPrionz, of course, has already read my ramblings about this...). I've been looking for an interface to put at the center of my new home studio. Unlike a lot of project studios, the focus is really going to be on full band tracking, as well as regular rehearsing and livestreaming (once Covid settles down and we can all get in a room together again, of course). That means I need a lot of I/O, to mic up a full band and to send everyone individual mixes for their headphones or IEMs. Really, I want to keep the studio workflow similar to the live shows we're doing with our drummer's Behringer XR18. Since we'll be operating the DAW from behind keyboards or drums other than the very rare occasion we bring in an outside engineer, tablet or phone control over all the mixes is ideal, rather than having to jump up and run to an interface to tweak gain settings or turn phantom power on or off. Something that will function as a standalone, low-latency mixer with effects will be great for individual monitoring, for live streaming, and for rehearsing, and a workflow that easily switches over to recording multitrack in Logic is exactly the "self-sustaining creative music space" vibe I'm trying to foster. But most of those digital rack mixers, even the higher-end ones, aren't really meant as studio devices. Even though most of them will function as an interface, even the schmancy Yamaha TF Rack caps out at 48k. I often record my multitrack sessions at 48k, but I also often overdub on other people's sessions, and getting tracks recorded at 96k or above is pretty common. So there's always ADAT for stringing together a bunch of interfaces, and purchasing further devices to get the physical outputs I need for full-band monitoring. But I found one single product on the market that works like a digital rack mixer, but is also designed to be a studio interface (with sample rates up to 192k): the MOTU Stage-B16. At this point I'm pretty well settled on this device, since it's expandable if I ever need more I/O, it's got a browser-accessible mixer app the whole band can use, and the dearth of quarter inch inputs or outputs, while annoying, is manageable. I've used MOTU gear to make records in the past and not had any issues. But I'm curious about other folks' experiences. There's the voice in my head that says "if you don't spend the extra dough on Universal Audio or Apogee gear, everyone will know that you're a hack whose records don't sound good." I tend to be of the mind that it's the music and the musicians, not the gear the record is made on, but I don't want gear that's going to get in the way of me making great sounding records. I have a feeling the preamps and converters in the MOTU will be as good as anything I've worked on in the past, other than maybe the Apogee Element I have at work, but like I said, I'd love to hear others' experiences since I'm not super familiar with this product line and have no way to really test it. So tell me why I should (or shouldn't, I guess) pull the trigger and start friggin' tracking!

Okay, I'll jump in, in the interest of easing myself into this particular forum (building a home studio, you know). My wife and I met in college. We were actually in an English lit class together (Poetry I with Kevin Murphy, the professor cool enough to appear on the cover of my first solo album), but we didn't really get to know each other until we both took Joel Gelpe's History and Analysis of American Musical Theater course (because that's the kind of nerds we are). However, most of the people who took that class didn't take it because they were nerds, they took it because they were musical theater performance majors and it was required (they all got to perform songs instead of write essays, too). The class was early in the morning, and most of the theater majors were already BELTING! My wife was having none of it, and chose a seat next to me, because out of all the people in the class, I annoyed her the least. She terrified me (I've always found intimidating women attractive) but we clearly had a love of the subject matter in common, as well as certain video games, which her Legend of Zelda tattoo (we have another winner) clued me into. But I was in another relationship at the time, with a girlfriend who had followed me to college from high school, and I was still too young and dumb to act on all the red flags. So the fall semester ended, as did Joel's class, and that was the end of my time sitting next to Mandy. That winter I finally got up the stones to break up with my high school girlfriend (after which all of my friends from back home and from school greeted me with a resounding "thank god"). And a few months later, Mandy and I bumped into each other on campus -- she was happy enough to see me that she gave me a hug, which was a pleasant surprise (again, with the intimidation). We decided to grab lunch and catch up. I really had no agenda; I'd just been really enjoying the freedom of not having my ex constantly breathing down my neck about any activity I chose to do that didn't involve her, or she didn't enjoy. But Mandy and I got lunch and really hit it off, so we got lunch again next week. Then we went home for spring break -- she didn't come to a gig I had the Friday spring break began, because she said she needed to drive home to Cleveland... but she later told me was because she was worried I would be bad and it would ruin that magic for her. Anyway, we spent all of Spring Break texting, and had our first official date the night we got back to school. That was closing in on ten years ago. Now we're married, we have a band, we own a house together... and she says I still annoy her less than everybody else. :wink:

Yes, I try to stay on a similar schedule to my office (which is a Mac shop on a campus that is more dominantly Windows): wait a full calendar year after the new OS drops before updating. Of course, the way it's been, that means we tend to update right before the next new OS drops. But it keeps me from having to spend my days in the computer lab, helping figure out why students can't record audio or some other nonsense that was working fine before. Or at least it did, back when I went into the office, and our computer labs were open...

I'm getting a new MacBook sometime next week, to replace my old work MacBook (a 2014 that I had running Mojave; it had belonged to my predecessor at work so I'm pleased it lasted as long as it did). We'll see how I feel about Catalina when the new one arrives!

No more landline, but you can Facetime her as long as one of her kids is there to explain how it works. :wink:

Yeah, as I've said, 48k is fine for my own sessions, but I do receive sessions recorded at 96k to overdub to from time to time, and I want to be ready for that as well. I could of course have a separate interface on hand to record at higher sample rates (since I only need the 16+ inputs if I'm initiating a multitrack session, in which case, I tend to go with 48k), but I'd rather have one core studio device that's ready to go for everything I need than hack a bunch of pieces together. As I mentioned, I have a Steinberg interface that I could use for those overdubs, but it has two inputs, and I prefer three mics on a Leslie, so that's already another thing I'd have to upgrade. So right now the Motu Stage-16 is still my front runner. Again, I don't want to be so focused on more inputs for less money that I'm selling myself short on sound quality... but without actually trying any of this equipment with my own music I don't really see any way to gauge potential sonic deficiencies (i.e. "live vs studio" sound, whatever that means) before picking something and buying it. I should mention that I'm not trying to make super hi-fi classical recordings. Bands in a room, trying to make a Stax style record and capture a vibe or whatever. Again, as long as the gear isn't going to get in my way, I'm sure it will make me happy. But I'm anxious about spending a lot of money and then the gear, rather than my abilities, gets in my way!

This is what I've been calling a "Mixer In A Stage Box," and there are a whole bunch of manufacturers making them. My Sweetwater guy pointed me to a couple of other higher-end rackmount digital mixers instead of the Motu, including the Yamaha TF Rack and the Presonus Studiolive 32R. Great products, and the Yamaha in particular has a better feature set than the Motu... but again, no ability to record above 48k! I'm starting to feel silly beating this dead horse, like maybe I need to just pony up and daisy chain some interfaces with ADAT and be done with it, but a self-contained mixer that will also work smoothly as an interface is really much better for my use case, and I feel like I'm going a little crazy that these expensive, super-powered digital mixers can't work at the sample rates that my $120 Steinberg interface can. I understand converters and preamps add a lot of cost, so maybe it's the converters having to run at high sample rates that keeps more products like this from being available? Are my needs really so unusual? I don't want to cut off my nose to spite my face, and maybe my priorities are out of whack (I'm open to hearing that, honestly) but I'm still feeling a little perplexed how difficult it is to get the amount of I/O I want in an interface that can record at industry standard sample rates. The Motu is still the only one I've seen.