SamuelBLupowitz

January 11

And of course, one of my very earliest influences: 😉

"Hey Matt, bring in the next piano, will ya?"

January 10

Yes, keyboards and bass are my two primary instruments.

As of last year, I'm in a project where I'm playing left-hand (or left foot) bass full time; it's something I've always enjoyed dabbling in and has been a lot of fun to dig into more. My experience playing bass guitar absolutely helps my approach and feel, but it is, as others have noted, a separate skill.

Occasionally I'll get a gig where I get to do both, John Paul Jones-style (playing bass and then jumping over to keys while still covering the low-end) and I always feel like a king when I get to do that. But, it winds up being a really grueling load-in/load-out! Except for that one time where I showed up and the backline gear included an Ampeg SVT and a B3 with a Leslie 147...

Anyway, that's what the studio is for, I guess!

40 minutes ago, stoken6 said:

Bass Axe-ual?

We're not confused. We're not greedy. Bass Axe-ual people exist. 🦄

January 10

43 minutes ago, Stokely said:

Non-keys players are not impressed by big rigs. In fact, they strongly dislike them is my takeaway

The space consideration is a real thing. But I will say that my guitar player always liked when I brought out the Wurlitzer and the clavinet because he thought it made the band look cooler/more legit. But then, that's why I've worked with that guitar player in almost every project I've gotten involved in for *checks calendar* the last ten years.

And now that I think about it, a touring band I've played with on and off was always more than happy to help move a Leslie and (when my predecessor was in the band) a Hammond chop in and out of the trailer, because, again, it just added an extra sheen of legitimacy to the project ("Grace Potter would lug her B3 in and out of tiny clubs before she made it big!").

So I think it comes down to that thing it ALWAYS comes down to, which is the luck of finding collaborators who support your insanity rather than merely tolerate or resent it. I've been lucky that I haven't had to deal with a lot of the "guitar is cool, keyboards are not" attitude that seems to plague a lot of the bands y'all have worked with.

January 8

1 minute ago, ProfD said:

They could use a track or trigger samples if it's a prominent part or drop the KB part altogether it's inaudible in the mix anyway.

😎

Well, what I'm saying is that there *are* songs in the catalog with prominent keys parts. It's just not every song. If the choice is between "only bring the auxiliary guy out for a few songs" and "sure, play all night, even on songs where the keys will be mixed under the guitars as more of an extra sauce," I'd personally prefer the latter. And I'd certainly prefer it to hearing a prerecorded track or sample! Pay a musician to be up there.

4 minutes ago, ProfD said:

it doesn't help to make KB players essential to the band.

In this instance, these are bands that had no keyboards for many years of their multiple-album history, choosing to augment their sound with an additional player because some songs in their catalog DO feature, or benefit from, keys. Blissfully, they have the budget to have a guy onstage all the time instead of playing to a track for four songs out of the set. Would it be cool for the keyboard player if a band like that reworked all of their arrangements to feature more keys? Sure, but that's not the gig. It's still a far cry from "let's hear Jump without the keyboards." And we've all heard what can happen when you perform Jump with a track instead of a live keyboard player... 😉

January 8

On 1/6/2024 at 9:52 AM, ProfD said:

I saw a performance by American punk rock band Green Day on a New Year's Eve TV show.

Sure enough, Green Day's touring KB player Jason Freese is set up behind a stack of guitar amps.

It's only by accident that the KB player was in any band shots as the camera pans. Every now and then there was a glimpse of his hat. He looked like an off-stage-hand. Any KB parts were buried in the mix.

I think we're looking at a different beast when a well-established band like Green Day, who rose to fame as a punk-influenced guitar-bass-drums power trio, adds a touring keyboardist so that they can play some of the more eclectic songs from their catalog. A lot of Queen or Beatles songs are entirely guitar driven, but you couldn't do Bohemian Rhapsody or Let It Be without a piano. If Billie Joe Armstrong can't drop his guitar and sit down at the keys, somebody's gotta do it, and if they're getting paid, they might as well be up there to beef up the sound on all the other tunes, even if it's way down in the mix. I'm sure, in this case, Mr. Freese gets paid well enough that he doesn't mind, much like Rami Jaffee in the Foo Fighters who is almost always inaudible behind their wall of three guitar players ... until there's a moment in the set that features piano or Mellotron strings and that just has to be there.

It wouldn't be my ideal gig (paycheck aside), but I understand and appreciate it. These cover bands some of y'all have played in where they seem to resent your very presence, that I will NEVER understand.

3 hours ago, Stokely said:

I've heard road stories from a drummer who was on tour with Nugent (with Rick Derringer iirc) that made anything I've ever read about him look tame. The thread will get locked if I say much about that "man".

If anyone is feeling particularly intense ire about Ted Nugent, there's a wonderful clip from the 70s floating around on the internet of Patti Smith punching him live on the radio.

January 8

22 minutes ago, CEB said:

Oh my … talk about sounding bad. … I played a bar gig a few years ago. A guy showed up with a video camcorder on a big tall stick. He walked all over the bar taking aerial video. We let him on stage once and told him “Don’t trip and fall”. LOL. It sounded bad. It did a lot of weird phasing stuff. Then he put it on YouTube LOL.

What the hell … I’m retired. No one cares anymore.

Oh mannnn love that subwoofer-adjacent camera audio!

I wonder if PoleCamGuy.com is in any way related to DrivingCrooner.com...? 🤣

"I gotta figure out how to make money on this!"

January 8

49 minutes ago, EscapeRocks said:

The only cell phone videos of us I don't like are the ones where the person is standing right up at the stage, so the phone picks up the audio of the monitor.

A fun variation of this is when they're close enough to the stage that they're only getting a little bit of the mains, so they mostly pick up the onstage sound rather than the monitors -- usually that translates to DRUMS DRUMS DRUMS (and sometimes guitar depending on who you're working with).

January 8

My high school band director, who was a professional trumpet player before he went into education, once told a story about how he and some colleagues were offered a gig recording samples for some synth or ROMpler library (not sure what company he was doing it for). Apparently he and his friends were torn about how it might impact them to get paid for one gig something that would potentially take gigs away from horn players in the future. Ultimately, they decided to take the gig, but ask for more money.

So the company hired different horn players instead. 🤷‍♂️

Independent musicians could really use a functioning union right now. My friends who play in the theater scene in New York City have some help making sure they have gigs, but outside of that scene there's not a lot of help. Between streaming rates, low gig wages, venues taking merch cuts, and the general high price of touring, it's looking pretty grim out there, and we're all so splintered -- it would be nice to have someone doing the kind of advocacy that the Writer's Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA and United Auto Workers are doing for the working folks who don't have their foot in the door at the highest levels where they don't have to stress about the day-to-day nickel-and-diming.

United Musicians and Allied Workers seem like they're trying to do some of that, and I've been meaning to do some more research into them. I don't usually play at the level where they would be intervening on my behalf, but that kind of advocacy would help all of us in the long run.

January 8

Since part of why I got into playing music was for another way to ham it up for people, I love seeing photos and videos of myself playing. Certainly, sometimes a video will capture a clam or otherwise less-than-pro moment in a show, but I enjoy getting to rest on the laurels of Having Done the Thing, and often I learn a thing or two about what does and doesn't work onstage. Every now and then you get something that looks professional, which I love, but there's something about having DIY audience phone videos floating around that lends its own air of legitimacy ("people like this, it's not just savvy promo") when employed properly.

One of the most helpful lessons I learned happened in the last few years, actually. I've always had a bit of a reputation for being an animated performer: throwing big cues as a bandleader, grinning big, swinging my hair around behind the keys. But as I had been developing my chops and beefing up my rig prior to the pandemic, I started to notice that those things were not reflected in the photos and videos I was seeing after gigs. Even though I was working really hard onstage to flashily cover the many parts and textures I had put together for my bands' recordings, most of that effort manifested in me staring really hard at my boards and gritting my teeth. The intensity was *internal,* and not really translating to the audience, even if the mix in the venue was good enough to hear the piano lick in my right hand, organ pad in my left hand, and sample triggers I was cueing with my foot pedals (as I scrolled through patches in Mainstage with my other foot to make sure I had the specific sound for each section of a tune).

As I got back to gigging after the lockdown break, I decided to streamline my rigs and arrangements a fair bit and focus on playing Crucial Parts with more energy and intensity, rather than trying to multitask to the degree where I felt more like I was solving equations onstage. I might miss some of the textures from the recordings, but I was looser and more relaxed, which meant I looked like I was having more fun, and it seems like audiences respond to *that* much more than they ever did to me using three or four limbs simultaneously to frantically do a middling job covering everything I overdubbed in the studio one part at a time.

I don't know if I would have come to that conclusion if I hadn't been seeing what I looked like performing after the gig -- though I might have burned out on it eventually anyway, it saved me some time!

January 4

The Wurlitzer on "What'd I Say" by Ray Charles.

The "steel drum" synth on Billy Joel's "All She Wants to Do is Dance."

I'd argue that the Mellotron on "Strawberry Fields Forever" was a huge "what's that?!" moment for that instrument, but after the intro it sort of falls back (appropriately) into the mix, so, debateable.

For a more recent, lesser-known track -- my pandemic favorite band, Dawes, broke out of their typical vintagey "piano, electric piano, Hammond" keyboard approach for 2016's "We're All Gonna Die," and the track "Roll with the Punches" is dominated by a heavily distorted Hohner Pianet hook. Lee Pardini always played it on overdriven Hammond on tour, but it's definitely a pianet on the record.

January 3

When I gigged more often with my Wurli, I had a Fender Hot Rod Deluxe with a spring reverb that I ran it through. I still record it through that amp fairly often.

But I've fallen in love with the sound of it through my wife's Vox AC10. I tried that for a little variation when I was making my pandemic solo record, and just loved the focused, bitey sound it got out of the Wurli (especially since the voicing on mine is a little darker than some others). Sometimes it's exactly what it needs to sit in a track without having to cut the lows and low mids as aggressively as I often do with the Fender.

January 3

I do enjoy messing around with the stop setting for color every now and then, though I will take @Mitch Towne's comment that it makes your technique sound more exposed as a reason I *like* playing with a Leslie... 😉

I only ever get to play with it on my clones, though; my real Hammond is hooked up to a 147 that only does chorale and tremolo, no brake. Well, except when one of the motors is acting up! My most frequent use of Stop is when I'm trying to get more of a combo organ sound, like if I'm covering The Doors or something. But the more Hammond I play, the more I'm trying to coax out more of the tonal palette from song to song, section to section.

December 20, 2023

Agreed, the Ultranova was my main gigging synth for a long time, and I loved how deep and flexible it was! I've mostly replaced it with my Korg Prologue at this point, but I still bust it out when I need to track a vocoder part (which isn't often, but sometimes you get the hankering) or I need something with a little bit more of a 90s/2000s character to it.

The Mininova is such a great compact package for such a big sound, and you can't beat that price. 😉 God bless us, everyone!

December 18, 2023

A few folks have mentioned Chick Corea's Rhodes tones with Return to Forever; I was particularly grabbed by his overdriven wah-pedal Rhodes on the second RtF record. I especially liked how it blended with the more overall acoustic sound of that lineup of the band, with Stanley Clarke on upright and Joe Farrell on sax/flute instead of the full-on fusion that the band would become with the later "classic" lineup.

I like a gritty EP, which is probably why I wound up being more of a Wurli guy overall. There's room for all of it in my book, though.

December 17, 2023

1 minute ago, CyberGene said:

Hey, thanks for the very detailed information. I actually know they are a band and I have listened to them a few times, it’s a pretty good music 👍🏻 I was rather wondering where their name Vulfpeck come from. As a non-native English speaker, to me it sounds like a quasi-Germanic way of saying wolf pack but I may be missing some American context that explains the name. Not sure if @jazzpiano88 was asking about the band or the name though.

Yes, this occurred to me after I initially posted my lil Wikipedia article there, and I updated it to mention that it is in fact a silly phonetic spelling of “wolf pack” in somethjng resembling a German accent. They’re a funny little bunch of guys.

December 17, 2023

5 hours ago, CyberGene said:

So, what is it? I didn’t have patience to watch more than half a minute to hear if he explains it. Probably a fancy way to say “wolf pack”?

Vulfpeck is his band. They’re a funk group that became famous for their quirky live-performance YouTube videos about ten years ago, starting out as a mostly instrumental act and eventually featuring vocalists as well as high-profile guests like David T. Walker, James Gadson, Mike Viola, and other session aces. The name does come from using a silly German accent to say “wolf pack;” the original fictional backstory of the band was that they were a sort of German session musician team a la the Funk Brothers (in reality they’re all music students from Michigan and they dropped the premise after a few years).

Early on in their career, they got some press coverage for financing a tour by creating a “silent album” on spotify and asking fans to stream it on loop to generate revenue for the tour. They then were able to make all the shows free for entry, because they’d generated enough cash to cover their expenses through the streaming of … nothing. Spotify changed their rules to prevent this not long after.

They’re incredibly successful for an independent band with no label. In 2017 they played multiple sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden. The members and associates also have some very high profile solo- and side-projects, like the Fearless Flyers and Theo Katzman.

December 12, 2023

My new-ish organ trio, Pocket Bandits, opened a show for a local composer's jazz/rock/avant-garde ensemble this past weekend, and I was pleasnatly surprised to find that a local videographer livestreamed the whole thing. Comes in about halfway through our first tune, and gradually adds different angles as our set goes on.

This is only about the third gig with this project, and we decided for this show we would play all original material, so I'm stoked to share how things are coming along. A few arrangements are still coming together, but this has been a very exciting group to get off the ground. I loved hearing the bass synth through the house subwoofers, too.

Here's the link:

https://www.facebook.com/christian.brocard.47/videos/3159714517493626

December 8, 2023

20 minutes ago, Ivan May said:

Is Lee Pardini related, by any chance, to Lou Pardini, who was the keyboardist for Chicago?

I thought he must have been, but it turns out there is no relation. He’s from an otherwise nonmusical family in the Bay Area, I believe.

December 8, 2023

Bummer news today that one of my favorite keyboard players in the biz is leaving one of my favorite current bands. He joined Dawes in 2016 and, in my mind, elevated the band far beyond what their solid but somewhat unremarkable original keyboardist had brought to the table.

This came less than a year after the news that the co-founding bassist Wylie Gelber was leaving Dawes to focus on his luthier/contractor business (and, one imagines, relax in the comfort of being Flea's son-in-law). His permanent replacement has yet to be announced, as they've had a different bassist with them for every run they've played since the spring.

Lee's playing is creative, chopsy, thoughtful, whimsical, thrilling. He's one of those players who only ever seems to play The Good Notes. I first heard him playing keys with Theo Katzman, the singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist who also plays in Vulfpeck, and Lee's stunning playing there (especially the incredible piano work on Theo's record "Modern Johnny Sings") led me to Dawes, a band I fell absolutely head over heels for. Their music got me through one of the darkest periods of my life in the pandemic.

Lee has been playing as a sideman with Chris Stapleton for the last couple of years, which I'm sure is a cushier, more lucrative gig, something you can't ignore in this economic climate, especially given that he became a father back in January. I'll be fascinated to hear what he does next; he's also been coming into his own as a solo artist in the jazz/fusion realm. But boy, will I miss hearing him play some of the best-written songs I've ever heard in Dawes.

And I guess, if anyone knows anyone connected to the band, my efforts to get a call to audition on bass were for naught, but I wouldn't say no to auditioning on keys! A boy can dream. 😉

December 8, 2023

Great performance!

Related side note, and this is just a funny observation with zero disrespect meant to the acts themselves or their musicianship: I've always found it amusing that Pink Floyd has wound up with the least original names for its high-profile tribute bands. "Australian Pink Floyd," "Brit Floyd" (they were already a British band, so that one's extra funny to me) ... other bands of that ilk give us "The Fab Faux," "1964: The Tribute," "Get the Led Out," even "Almost Queen." Nope. The name of the country responsible, and then the name of the original band.

"Echoes of Pink Floyd" is a pretty rad name though.

December 7, 2023

It really looks sleek and super familiar with the drawbar/control layout and reverse "preset" keys. Also, though this might not be for everyone, I love the blue stain on the sides!

December 4, 2023

A classic instrument that is so sonically "of its era;" to my ears, growing up in the early aughts obsessed with music from the 60s and early 70s, it was always the definition of "cheese." But in recent years I've come to really appreciate it for how evocative the sound is, especially the legendary DX7 electric piano patch.

I almost picked one up a few years back, but the seller wanted more money for it than I could justify spending at the time. I think I was better served by the used analog synth that I bought instead, but it would certainly be a cool addition to my vintage keyboard collection!

December 1, 2023

That is an incredible home that I will have to be content to stare at.

November 30, 2023

1 hour ago, mcgoo said:

Love the rig and the pic! I dare ya to rename this thread "Let's see your 70's rig!" so the rest of us old farts can pile on with similarly awesome pics of nostalgia.

I have a collection of gear that could constitute a 70s rig, but my personal 70s rig involved two parents in school who hadn't met each other yet. 🤣

November 29, 2023

1 hour ago, AnotherScott said:

65, and as Elton would say, I'm still standing.

Of course, Elton has always performed seated, piano gymnastics aside. 🤣

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