SamuelBLupowitz

Here's the login info again!

Glad it's all happening! I'll be popping in and out; spent the morning painting a room in the new house and will be spending much of the afternoon doing some last-minute packing before the movers come for the furniture tomorrow. See you all in a bit! I'll repost the link momentarily.

Man that is a beast, but then again, I believe the KBR-3D already weighs in around 70 pounds (it's never felt quite that heavy to me, but maybe it's just the way I carry it). I've heard such good things about the newer Motion Sound stereo amps, not just from you, Mitch. Forgive me if this has been explained elsewhere, but I assume there's a difference between these newer models and the clean-stereo 12" speakers on an older KBR-3D? Inquiring minds...

I love a good DIY studio-related project. What's the temperature like in there? Some friends of mine made a similar (but far more hacked-together) blanket fort/vocal booth for a record they were working on and it did the trick, but apparently it got very warm very quickly.

Absolutely! But personally, I don't think of this as a limitation, at least for my use cases: the original reason I wanted a Seaboard was because I often found myself in situations where I was playing, say, an organ pad with one hand, and a synth line in the other, and I didn't want to have to drop the pad to work the pitch bend or mod wheel. The Seaboard allowed me to overcome the limitation of needing two hands for a simple synth part: one to play notes, and the other to control expression. I could do all of that with one hand and keep the other busy elsewhere. There are times when I'm not multitasking that I want to use the Seaboard differently; I occasionally map certain parameters to other knobs, sliders, pedals, and wheels so that I don't need to control all aspects of the sound I'm playing with the same one-handed gesture. But also, there are times when a normal keyboard (or another instrument) is just more suited to certain parts. If I'm playing synth bass, for instance, the song and the part I want to play often determine whether I want to play the Seaboard, or a typical synth controller with pitch bend and modulation wheels. So it certainly doesn't solve all potential problems of playing a keyboard instrument expressively.

The answer is obvious: adjust the size ratios of the keyboard so that they are more suited to the human hand. Then, make the keys light up pretty colors when you play them. A sound artistic and financial move if I've ever heard one! :wink: I too don't see the piano keyboard going anywhere in the coming century, but I'm always on board for a nice "yes-and" to the typical.

So glad you asked. :grin: We'll use the following Zoom meeting link: https://cornell.zoom.us/j/94185593517 or you can enter the meeting ID 941 8559 3517 upon firing up Zoom. You will need a password to enter because bots like to scrape the internet for open Zoom meeting links and ruin everyone's day. The password is "clonk" with a capital C and a zero in place of the letter o. I will repost this on Friday. I agree, the wide timeframe will mean we could miss each other -- we're going to try this particular experiment and see how it goes for everyone. It's been nice to have a lot of us in one place, but it's been particularly tough for Europe and the Aussies (also the name of the new synth dance project I'll be starting if I can't get together with other musicians soon). And as many of you have learned by now through work or other commitments, the more people there are in these videoconferences, the more unwieldy and less personal they can get, so we'll see how it goes this time.

It's hard to lose a friend even under "normal" circumstances. Glad you have a way to celebrate his life through music during this challenging time. Stay safe and healthy. We'll be thinking about you.

Wow, thanks! Just the thing I've been looking for to hold up my 65-pound, $2500 workstation! Reminds me of this gem: [video:youtube]

Careful now -- don't imply we haven't had the OP's back here! :wink: (Also, "Back Street Girl" by the Rolling Stones, and "Rocking Chair" by The Band!)

Absolutely, but I think there are shades and nuances of "understanding." Theoretically, we make sure everyone in our society learns to read, not with the anticipation that they'll all become authors or even literature students, but so they can speak a common language. Many other countries make sure everyone learns at least a second actual, verbal language (the US isn't the best at that, one might argue that our language education is a similar priority to our music education... though that's coming from someone who works in both of those fields, so take what you will). Again, that's not in the curriculum so that everyone can become linguistics professors or ambassadors or interpreters, it's to maximize understanding and comprehension of shared human experience. In my mind, communication, critical thinking, and broad cultural literacy aren't "soft" concepts or luxuries. They're about history, really. Having a baseline for where we come from, why things are the way they are. Otherwise, there's no growth, no innovation, no evolution of the species. Understanding a process on some level has always led to a greater appreciation of a product. indeed, I think there's been great damage done by the cultural myth that learning music theory, or how to read music, or doing anything other than Teaching Yourself, is weak, and will damage your Inner Genius -- but then again, you could argue that those ideas were partially a reaction to a decades or even centuries of dogmatic formal music instruction that emphasized pedantry over discovery and creativity. None of this is really to the benefit of politicians or advertisers, but that's my case for it. My high school band director described your experience as a "busman's holiday" -- as in, when a bus driver goes on vacation, how does he get away from work? Eh, maybe that was funnier back when more people had to take buses... anyway, in quarantine, I've been digging really hard into standup comedy, because it's an art form I enjoy and appreciate, but not something I actively participate in. My enjoyment of watching, listening to, or playing music has been up and down with my alternating calmness and depression. But I don't think that's the same as your girlfriend and her friends gaining a greater understanding of what goes into making music. Might their tastes become more discerning? Would they enjoy certain performances less? Either is possible... I had never had a good steak or nice red wine before I met my wife, and now those are two of my favorite things. I don't enjoy a Wendy's burger any less for my appreciation of a medium rare New York strip... but there is wine that used to do it for me that I won't drink anymore. So who's to say. :wink:

I too have been disappointed by the rise of COVID just as Roland was about to open their seafood restaurant.

The Beatles also come to mind first thinking of 60s pop piano ("Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da," "Lovely Rita," "Rocky Raccoon," etc) and of course they used a lot of other keyboards, like the organ in Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and the Mellotron that opens Strawberry Fields Forever. Other keyboard -- there's always The Monkees' "I'm a Believer," which has a pretty distinctive organ lick, lots of Doors tunes as mentioned above, and of course, Green Onions!

Mike, I know you live not too far from me, relatively speaking. Let me know if there's anything I can keep an eye out for you.

Diapason? Vox Humana? I have a figured bass arrangement in my trunk of sheet music. :wink:

God I needed that this morning.

Damn Gen Z kids, always taking issue with the quality of old Moogerfoogers. :wink:

If you want to stick with hardware, that's understandable (I've been itching to try my Seaboard as a controller for a Model D), but if you have an iPad or even a newer iPhone around, there are a number of apps that could provide you with synth bass sounds that respond more naturally to the Seaboard. That said, I will second others: the Seaboard allows for extremely expressive left hand bass playing, but it is a bit like switching from fretted to fretless bass as far as having to mind your tuning. I struggled with that a bit on the one gig I've played Seaboard bass. But like anything else, practice makes perfect. Somebody on the forum loves using the Seaboard for exactly this purpose... was it Sven, maybe?

If they could only do 96k I'd get one (or maybe an X32 Producer) as a studio interface in a heartbeat. Even though I'm happy to record at 48k a lot of the time, too many other folks I know track at 96k for me to feel set with an interface that doesn't work at that rate at all. It's a killer live mixer. Should point out that while it does have six customizable aux outs, they are XLR outs; there's only one phone output. When my band got one and switched to in-ears, we all needed to get the P2 in-ear amplifiers.

Definitely interested in what you find! Again, it might just be a matter of various idiosyncrasies of my setup, but it's good to get outside my own head about it. Yes, can't beat "free" for easy Bluetooth MIDI routing. Interested in your comparison with ModWheels and Weeel; without having tried both, I get the sense that Weeel is more flexible, but since KeyStage already offers a programmable X/Y surface, I went with the one that was more blatantly "swipe here for pitch, swipe here for mod."

I have dreamed of this delicious combination. If you have the chance to record some video or audio, please do share it!

I half expect Rick Wakeman to socially distance by performing on a platform full of keyboards that hovers in the atmosphere. That I'd pay to see. Whether indoor concerts are happening in December... perhaps he's planning a festive outdoor performance for the holiday season, eh? :wink: Lord knows I've played local "winter festivals" outdoors in 20 degree weather... my Motion Sound really didn't like that.

I don't know, something tells me that the drunk bros who reached up to the stage and put their grubby fingers on the upper manual of my Mojo last Halloween would also go nuts for some classic Van Halen.

How do you think I've been spending my quarantine time already? :wink: On a more serious note, I'm learning about how to get around some of the idiosyncrasies of the iOS platform for audio. Being used to Mainstage, I figured it made more sense to streamline by loading as many apps into AUM as I could, but I find that I hit the CPU ceiling much, much sooner loading up big AUM sessions than opening each app individually. That also reduces the latency for an analog audio pass-through. Is that a typical experience? I've always found AUM handy, but I'm learning just how useful some of its MIDI features are for forcing certain apps to respond to program changes when they normally wouldn't (here's looking at you, Noise). It would be preferable to load up a single AUM session containing all the apps I need for a certain gig instead of opening them one by one, but we all have to make compromises from time to time. Good to know about the iConnect gear; that confirms much of what I've heard about it. Something to keep in mind. I did discover a fun alternate solution to my "separate output just for talkbox" quandry... I starting using the ModWheels app on my iPhone for some of the synth parts I've been tracking for people lately, since it turns out I only have one board in my collection with pitch and mod wheels, and it's not class compliant, so using it as a synth controller isn't nearly as convenient as it should be. But using the MidiMittr app to connect the pitch and mod wheels over Bluetooth allows me to not only wirelessly send pitch bend and modulation signals to my MacBook or iPad, but also to route MIDI to my iPhone at my discretion (using KeyStage, I can select specific song sections during which to do this, and therefore leave the talkbox itself active at all times). My iPhone 7 isn't up to the task of hardcore performance apps, but for a simple unfiltered sawtooth wave and an LFO for vibrato, it's an easy external, talkbox-only module until the day comes that I get an interface for live use with more outputs. And no sweat about taking awhile to respond; I know this is your forum, but it's not your personal help desk... and lord knows if I had the Hydrasynth in my possession I'd be plenty distracted.