SamuelBLupowitz

Gospel organists -- gospel musicians in general -- are some of the most impressive on earth, as far as I'm concerned, and have a level of feel, chops, and harmonic know-how that always seems to hit the mark for this suburban agnostic Jewish kid. The gospel players in my town have regularly blown away many of the more traditionally schooled local musicians in their ability to wing it while responding to a preacher, or another player. Thank you for sharing this. Inspirational despite/because of the tragic circumstances.

I love keyboard/drum duos, and this was a total blast for me. For the music, and also that Domi found a pair of stands that set up the Lead at exactly the correct height and front-to-back distance above the Stage. I say this as an observation, not a criticism: never before have two stunning musicians instilled in me such a deep desire to play Mario Kart.

Not to mention that the virtual instruments bundled with Logic range from pretty good to great.

I wasn't familiar with Bonnie at all, and the pop scene has never been my thing even when I was young, and I'm even less in tune now. So I really, really enjoyed this episode, hearing about the ins and outs of a top-level touring organization from one of the musical footsoldiers. She was so engaging and clearly knows her stuff. Also, the desert island discs are always a highlight for me, but Rage Against the Machine AND the Dresden Dolls? If we had known each other as teenagers, I'm sure I would have been in love.

That was so much fun! I really enjoyed hearing the compare and contrast of his solo career versus his time as a sideman, and I also have warm feelings towards anyone crazy enough to haul vintage keyboards without a road crew. Also, nice shout-out to "Bat out of Hell."

Ten or so years ago, my mother left the church she had been a part of since she was a child due to similar board decision-making. Sorry to hear they've treated you so shabbily. It sounds like they're in for a rude awakening when they try to get their "reinvented" music off the ground. Truer words have rarely been spoken.

AAC is an Apple-owned encoding format similar to MP3. So it will compress your audio somewhat (YouTube will anyway) but it shouldn't be destroying it that way. There may be some setting where it is lowering the bitrate, or using an overly aggressive data compression setting to encode the audio... But if you don't want to play with all these things (I get paid to do that, you don't :wink:), and you're happy with the way the MKV file turned out, try uploading that to YouTube before anything else. It's not listed as an officially supported format, but I've definitely uploaded MKV files to YouTube before. Unless they've tightened restrictions, I think that format is similar enough to MP4 in the way it's processed that YouTube will take it.

As someone who used to work in that particular area, know that Media Mail is your friend!

Second on the Roland stand; also handy for a small synth. Onstage Stands also makes an inexpensive (less than $20) but functional laptop stand that screws onto the top of a mic stand, and that's a little more compact as far as setup and teardown, though not as robust as the Roland.

To add to Joe's comment: I'm sure this varies from state to state, but New York is providing substantial Pandemic Insurance payments in addition to its typical unemployment payments. My wife lost more than half of her voice students in the change to remote instruction (plus loss of scholarships and summer programs), and while it took her hounding NYS unemployment for over six weeks to get a confirmation and then still longer to get a payout, you can imagine our relief when we got all of the back payments... One of my bandmates was just furloughed for the month of June, and he was able to get unemployment plus pandemic insurance right away. Again, not sure if that's useful or encouraging outside of New York State, but hopefully you are able to take advantage of the social safety net while you get your highly skilled self back on your feet. Hope you're hanging in there too, Dan! Thinking about you.

Joe was only giving all y'all a hard time because he popped in to see if the link would still work, and I now get e-mail notifications whenever someone jumps in and I'm not in Zoom. A nice pleasant surprise for my Friday evening, second only to the drummer from my band showing up in our driveway unannounced, playing Peter Gabriel on a Bluetooth speaker.

Dammit Mike, this forum is just full of exciting ideas for things I didn't think I needed before!

- I'm not holding my breath, but it would be amazing to have Pianoteq on iOS. Unfortunately, they don't seem interested ... but I'm still waiting for it. I will third this. Phenomenal cosmic power... in an itty-bitty living space.

Yeah, and it has a lot of buses and outputs for analog monitoring, which is cool. I could get away with the analog-mix-to-two-digital-inputs-for-a-stereo-recording in certain instances, like mixing a live-in-the-studio performance as it happens (and I may wind up doing that for awhile depending on how long it is before I can get up the scratch for a new interface). But it's ultimately not how I want to make a record, even if it's more or less how they made Sgt. Pepper. I'd say having a tactile mix surface, whether pure analog or something that controls my DAW over MIDI, is a much lower priority for me than the quality of my conversion and the amount of I/O. A lot of times, it will be the drummer or me dealing with the mix from our tablets behind our respective rigs anyway. Edit: I should also mention that if it comes down to it, I have 4- and 8-channel interfaces and optical cables at the office I can borrow if I want to do a 16-or-more-channel session, so if it makes more sense to invest in a solid 8-channel interface and build up a modular system gradually, I'm definitely open to it ... again, I'd just want to make sure I can get enough aux feeds for individual monitoring sooner rather than later. Ain't it the truth! We've all been there...

I have one of those 24-channel 8-bus consoles. I'll be thrilled if you tell me "oh the pres in that are actually pretty good," but I got it for the ultimate price (free) so you won't break my heart if you encourage me not to use it for recording. :wink: A good deal and utilizing the gear I already have is helpful, but I do want to make long-term investments, ultimately.

I'd also been eyeing some of the other PreSonus gear -- the Quantum line is looking like a good fit as well. I do have a big Mackie analog console gathering dust that could pair with the 4848, but I'd probably be better served in the long run by the built-in preamps in the Quantum or Quantum 2626 (though something about the ultra-low price tag on that one gives me pause) and doing optical expansion for more inputs ... all things to chew on!

Magnificent. Gene Roddenberry, eat your heart out.

I'm reviving this thread in the hopes of zeroing in on what products I should be looking at for the core of my new home studio (yeah, I'm pretty pumped about that). The general approach of the space is as a single room studio (no separate control room or, at this time, iso booths), lots of capturing multitrack live performances (drums, bass, keys, guitars, some scratch vocals) in addition to one-person overdubs. It will also be a rehearsal space, where I hope to use the same headphone/in-ear monitor setup that we use for recording, so we basically have a creative space we can capture, blurring the line between rehearsal and studio time. Sometimes there will be a separate engineer; often one of the musicians will be pulling double-duty. So I'd like an interface that can capture at least 12 simultaneous audio tracks, preferably 16 or more. A console/mixer layout would be great if find the right thing, but isn't a necessity; something that's just I/O and conversion that I can control in the box and/or remotely by iPad would be fine, too. Six or more individual monitor mixes and outputs would also be ideal, since, again, we'll be using headphones and in-ears, even if some guitarists or horn players also have a wedge going in certain situations. As I noted in a post above, a lot of the interface-as-mixer-as-interface-s cap out at 48k recording (or, in the case of the Zoom L20, allows 96k but only when recording to an SD card, adding an extra step between performance and DAW). The Behringer XR18 appears to have this issue, which is a bummer, since one of my bands has been using it live and in rehearsal, and it would be an excellent solution for what I plan to do with our music space. To be clear, I often record at 48k and have no issues with it as far as sound; I often sync recordings to performance video anyway. But I'm also often in a position where I'm overdubbing to someone else's pre-existing session, and 96k is pretty common. It would be inconvenient to have enough inputs for a live band, but not be able to overdub a synth to my friend's studio track using the same setup. As a related note, at my studio at work (I do audio and video work for a university) I have the four-channel Apogee Element, which is great, but even the largest version of it has eight XLR inputs, so I'd be looking at at least two of them connected via optical cable if I go that way, and I'd still have to invest in an additional solution for multiple headphone mix outputs. So, I'm interested in folks' thoughts on what gear, or what combinations of gear, might be the best value as far as quality and price. I don't have a particular budget in mind yet (gotta get some work done on the roof of the house, replace the heating unit, that sort of thing first); I'm willing to spend a few grand for the right setup, but obviously I'm not investing in building Abbey Road here and don't want to start getting into tens of thousands of dollars. I have a realistic idea of how much my music returns on my financial investments at this point. :wink:

Some of the best political music of the past few years has been made with instruments and musicians -- first one that comes to mind is Childish Gambino with "Redbone" and "This is America." Sure, there's a lot of hip-hop sampling and drum machines combined with the synths, guitars, and electromechanical keyboards, but he always performs with a live band, and it's a culmination of all the music tech that's become available over the past century. I think that's pretty cool! And there's always Theo Katzman if you're looking for something protest-y with more traditional pop/rock instrumentation. Those are just two that immediately come to mind. Remember, older folks complained about new music technology in the 60s and 70s too. :wink:

Hahaha I missed this thread the first time around two years ago, and I'm also drooling over it this time around. Very clever, very cool! I've been using my Mojo as the core of my rig as well, but since my synths are all software, I've been getting around the pitch/mod situation with the ModWheels app for my iPhone (which sits right where your joystick does but I need to velcro down or something) and controlling the synths over Bluetooth. I'm pretty sure Rabbit Bundrick used to have a setup where he would use analog synth modules to process his B3 with The Who; I really like your clonewheel/MIDI programming/analog synth variation!

An undisputed classic. Between that, Abbey Road, and the first Crosby Stills and Nash record, quite a year for rock music and vocal harmonies. Didn't the Stones put out Let It Bleed that year too? And Led Zeppelin II. I've been realizing just how many of my favorite records came out in 1970 -- Layla, Jesus Christ Superstar, What's Going On, Deja Vu... I figured out awhile back that the period between 1968-1973 is really what touches me the most; there's a fusion of rock and soul music happening in the pop scene that just does the trick for me. Also a turbulent period. Also hoping for some lasting change here.

I grew up outside Reading, PA, an hour and change from Philly. Went to Ithaca College for undergrad, got involved in the local music scene and planted some roots, now I do A/V and recording for Cornell as a day gig, so I've been here a little over ten years at this point. Yeah, Orleans was the big thing musically to happen here in that period, and I've heard many a tale from some of the older musos who have been around... Dancing in the Moonlight will still get folks of that generation on the dance floor. Buttermilk Falls would also be an excellent spot for zoning out! :wink: Any chance you came across a keyboard player named Neal Massa during your time in Ithaca? Long shot, but he's been around the area forever, and he's the source of a lot of my music scene stories from Back in the Day. He toured in the 70 into the 80s, doing some gigs backing up Martha Reeves and Chuck Berry and that sort of thing, but he's been off the road for a few decades now. I took piano lessons from him for a few years, and his son Joe is the guitar player in almost every project I'm involved in. His daughter Amanda is the singer for one of our bands as well. . I have a bit of a reputation for that too!I get by only because I found a woman who appreciates it.

Funny, I was thinking about the same thing. It doesn't have to be Zoom, though its availability on multiple platforms and its familiarity at this point has its advantages. I support this idea, but/and I'm happy to continue to help facilitate our community gatherings in the meantime. This is taking the thread off topic for a long rant, but I do want to talk about it because I love this story. My last year in middle school, 2004-2005, the beloved longtime concert band director had moved on, and a very young new teacher (who had gone to our middle school ten years before) took over the post. He very consciously tried to clean out the closets and rearrange things to ease the challenge of following in Mr. Nelson's footsteps, and since I was something like a Respected Older Music Student when I was 15, I wound up helping out a bunch in the band room. One task I took on was cleaning out one of the big instrument closets, which was packed full of marching and jazz band gear going back decades. Way in the back corner, there were two very heavy tolex cases that I had to open up and investigate. It was two Rhodes Piano Basses, one black with the blocky Rhodes logo, and one with a sparkle top that still had the "Fender" logo on it. Now, I played bass in my middle school jazz band, but I knew they often had an excess of piano players, and would often have trouble finding bass players between the ages of 12 and 15 who could both read music and improvise, so they would give some of the extra keyboardists the bass charts. While they'd long ago moved on to lighter, less temperamental digital keyboards for that purpose, I was pretty sure that's what the Rhodes basses were relics from. And yes, I had watched enough concert footage of The Doors by then to know what I was looking at, and as a keyboard-playing bassist I was over the moon, almost as over the moon as I was when the new band director said "anything we're not using in there is getting thrown away, so if you want it, take it." So that's how I got two Rhodes Piano Basses for free. The sparkle top one was in pretty rough shape as far as action and tuning, but the black one actually made it to a handful of gigs with my high school/college rock band, so I could put my bass down and play some piano and organ with my right hand. When I was in college, one of the guys I gigged with regularly lit up when I told him about the Rhodes piano basses, so I gave the sparkle top one to him, and a few years later he told me he had traded it for a full Rhodes 73. If I had known how valuable they were, I might not have just given him that sparkle top one, but I figured, I got them for free, so I'm happy to have been able to share the wealth and save them from the dumpster. Who knows, maybe I earned some karma points for that. Certainly I earned them from him! Anyway, I don't use the other one very much anymore -- I brought it out to its first gig in ages a couple of years ago when our bass player had an emergency and I had to cover -- and I was reminded, to my chagrin, of the weight of both the axe itself and its action. I'm definitely a better left-hand bass player now than I was a decade ago, but I've gotten really used to fast synth and organ actions for it... by the end of that set, my left hand and wrist were pretty tuckered out. But now that I have a place for all of my boards at home, I'm happy to have it at the ready should the need strike! Plus, I love showing it off. It means I get to tell this story. :wink:

Since I'm perennially putting off investing in an upgraded board to my time-tested Casio PX-3, I did purchase Pianoteq early last year so I could get a little more out of my stage piano sound without sinking a bunch of cash into a new board. I've been very happy with it since. I'm a big fan of physical modeling; even if the sound isn't always as "authentic," it feels like it reacts more organically to my percussive playing style than what I've been used to with sample-based digital pianos, and that suits me fine. For what I do, the YC5 Rock Piano with the condition slider dialed back just a bit and a lot of damper noise is a really sweet spot for me, though I'll also use their Steinway when I need something a little warmer.\ Edit: I neglected to also mention your wonderful playing, OP!

An accurate guess, Joe! The room is technically still open, and there's no reason to close or delete it unless we start having issues with interlopers (or if people start jumping in there if I have to host something for work and it messes something up). Otherwise, I'm happy to continue to use the same "room" and we just collectively decide when we'd like to invite people to party. Again, my only request is that we don't populate it nonstop, in case I need my Zoom account for other obligations. It was really nice to get to chat with many of you over the course of the session -- I was mostly there Friday afternoon, because Saturday was moving day, and Sunday was moving-the-animal-companions-in day. But if you observe the attached images below, we're settling in to our new home very nicely now!