SamuelBLupowitz

+1. "Powerboard as performance aid" has potential as a revolutionary new movement I reckon. It's not quite as cool as turning a Hammond off and back on to get a pitch bend effect, but in a digital world, there's something satisfying about a musical application for "turn it off and turn it back on again" (which is a large percentage of what I do in my day job).

At my recording session this past weekend, we were looking for something a little offbeat for the organ sound, since the track we were working on featured a mix of Deep Purple-inspired heavy metal "rhythm guitar" organ playing, and some English prog-type sections that called for something more pastoral. The owner/engineer of the studio we've been using had recently dug up an old Wurlitzer Spectratone rotary speaker (photo is attached; the quarter-inch jack is the "Put In," get it?) Here's a video of some guitar players using one: [video:youtube] I ran my Mojo into an overdriven US-made Vox from the 60s with a little bit of trem on it, and that speaker output drove the Spectratone. It created a really cool overdriven-Leslie-but-not-quite sound that fit really nicely into both the heavy and ethereal sections of the track. I actually used a power strip as a "speed change" switch for the Spectratone, while the Vox functioned as a constant low "rotor." It was a lot of fun! Track is forthcoming, but below is a little video of us playing with tones for a section of the tune. You can't hear the coolness of the spinning effect particularly well, but you can see me kick in the rotary with the power strip a few seconds in. [video:youtube] Anyone else messed around with one of those speakers before? I think it must be pretty old; the few I've seen online are all from the 60s.

It's really nice when the day gig actually gives you a lift, isn't it? Been there. Congrats.

I wish I had EVER had those days. Of my high school and college friends who got excited to come to my gigs, only four or five weren't already in bands with me...

When I got my first bass â a Rogue VB-100 Violin Bass, which should give you an idea of who inspired me to pick up the instrument â my younger brother had been playing guitar, and I"d expected I could just plug into his Laney practice amp. My dad was a little annoyed when it turned out he"d need to fund another amp purchase, but we went to a music shop and bought a used 75-watt solid state Peavey combo. I still have both the bass and the amp (the former is in much better shape than the latter, but they still make sound, even if the gain knob on the amp doesn"t kick in until about 10 o"clock). After my musical tastes expanded to include Led Zeppelin, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Rage Against the Machine, it became pretty clear I was going to destroy my little Beatle Bass if I kept tuning it to drop D and slapping on it, so I looked for something a little bigger and sturdier. Given my limited budget as a 14-year-old, I was looking at cheap knockoff Music Man type basses for awhile, but fortunately my love of John Paul Jones prevailed. A trip to guitar center put a standard Mexi Fender Jazz Bass in my hands and I knew that was it. It"s still my main axe, some sixteen years (and a few minor modifications) later. In high school, I absconded with one of those giant three-channel Peavey keyboard amps that everyone had in the late 80s and 90s (my middle school was going to throw it away, along with two Rhodes Piano Basses that wound up in the back of the family minivan). That hilariously became my amp through high school (it was convenient for gigs where I doubled on keyboards, since it had enough inputs for a bass, a digital piano, and one of those Rhodes fellas). Then before I went to college, I got a little Line 6 studio 12 combo, so that I could walk across campus with a bass and an amp in one trip. That little thing still serves me well for pit band playing, small gigs, and rehearsals â it"s kind of amazing how beefy and loud that little 12' speaker can get. It"s funny, since getting out of college, I"ve been working as a keyboard player so much more; my only rig upgrades have been from other bands" bassists unloading old amps and DIs on me (not a bad position to be in).

I think you've identified the difference, and who it's better for: it's less for you to manage during the set (though it hasn't really been a big deal for you); it's making the sound guy's job easier, and your setup/teardown messier. Which isn't to say it's worse, it just depends how much you trust your sound guy! I'll almost always submix my keyboards when we're doing our own sound, or just rolling up to a club -- I was in a band once that encouraged the use of vintage gear but played small clubs, and the drummer/leader was always going up to some underpaid teenage sound engineer and explaining to them how to mic a Leslie, and that we needed a fourth mic for the electric piano amp, and the synth needed a DI, etc. I didn't want to deal with that on my own, plus I trusted myself to balance my keys more than a rando who had never heard the band. But when we play a show with our Sound Guy of Choice, I do whatever he wants, because I know he knows the music well enough, and I can trust him to mix properly, so balancing the synth leads with the bass pedals with the organ with the electric piano in the middle of a song is one less thing for me to be distracted by during the set. But that also means I'm bringing more gear. It's because I love him. Also I love my gear. :wink:

Yeah, it's like Jerry Lee Lewis and Thelonious Monk got drunk and got each other pregnant!

This a thousand times! Thoughtful, critical, creative people don't make good drones, but they do ultimately make everything better for everyone.

As part of the demographic that's most loaded down with student debt right now (I have paid off my student loans, something I was able to do because of, yes, hard work, but also a not-insignificant amount of good luck and family support), I have mixed feelings about the higher-ed "industry" in the United States (I'm assuming you're talking about college in the US, though that may not be the case). I'm a strong believer in education, and I feel that no education is wasted. But I made different choices in my life, and took fewer risks after graduating, because I wasn't starting from zero, I was starting out with loans to pay every month. I'm sure you'll have to have conversations about that regardless of your daughter's chosen major. That said, it sounds like your daughter has a much clearer vision of her path, and more focused commitment to her craft, than I had when I was 16. Life is short; men make plans and God laughs, as they say. I wish the best to your daughter and your family, and I hope she can follow whatever path helps her reach her fullest potential!

Cool little box! Would be useful for my Mainstage control, though at $399.00 US it's considerably pricier than the $69 Behringer X-Touch Mini, which has served me well. Where it would really come in handy for me is doing deep edits on the Mojo (though again, at that price point, I could just get the Mojo Editor box, plus some other gadget).

Relieved to hear it. I couldn't afford to take it off your hands right now, and I would want to be certain it was properly cared for. :grin:

Today would have been my friend Dan Gaibel's 46th birthday. As some of you know (I had a long thread going in "Shameless Plugs" for awhile, but those have an expiration date, it seems), he passed away last year after a ten-month battle with stage IV melanoma. He and I had spent a few years as casual local music scene acquaintances, but in early 2017, he hired me to work with him at his day job, and he became something of an older brother to me, a huge influence, musical and otherwise. I'm very grateful for having those two years of really knowing him and learning from him before he passed. In his honor, here's a performance from the tribute we put on for him last spring. It's Dan's old band, Spacetrain, with myself sitting in on keys and my almost-always guitarist holding down Dan's lead parts. The song is a segment from a "rock opera for children" that Dan masterminded, and I play a sample of Dan discussing its origins and narrative over the extended jam at the end. Hope you enjoy. [video:youtube]

Can I ask a practical question at this point? ...does this mean you decided to sell the Juno?

I don't think anyone on this thread has brought up my favorite scenario: coming up with keyboard parts for a cover song that doesn't have keyboards on it. I got to do this a lot at the Eagles tribute I played in November, since only about 50% of the tunes had keyboards, and of them, the only ones that required real time investment to make sure I knew more than form and changes were Desperado and, uh, the extra guitar parts I filled out in Hotel California. The previous year, the same group had done a CSNY tribute, and because it was right on the heels of my wedding I was a little more religious about laying out on the songs that didn't have keyboards. This time, though, I knew everyone in the band, and knew they trusted me to be tasteful (and would tell me if I wasn't), so I had a lot of fun adding some barrelhouse piano and Tex-Mex organ lines to the songs. The guitarists were neck-deep in super-specific three-guitar arrangements and I just had to go "cool, three chords plus a modulation after the third chorus, let's see what happens!" Having a similar amount of fun with the Rush cover my band is doing this weekend (a lot more fun than the bassist). In that situation, of course, I still had to do a ton of listening to make sure I knew the forms. Also the vocal harmonies, yikes.

On the other hand, since the Grammys a lot of folks have been making a big deal out of how the Billie Eilish record was made in a bedroom studio... maybe that means this is exactly the time to be expanding what's possible with control of software. ROLI certainly seems to be marketing heavily to the bedroom producer set, but their products are just as fun for me to apply to my life as a gigging/recording musician.

As millennials go, I came pretty late to the podcasting game, but due to the influence of a number of friends and relatives, including an incredibly enthusiastic coworker, I now produce podcasts both for my day job (for the language center at a big university) and my, you know, "other" gig (a behind the-scenes music/interview podcast for one of my bands). Creating things is second nature to me, so I fell into it pretty easily. Marketing myself has always been much more of a struggle. As much as I try to get the word out, I very often find myself shouting into the void, and shrugging my shoulders. Podcasters, how do you find an audience for your work? Do you start by seeking out sponsors, or do you have to know who your listeners are first? What has worked out (or failed) in trying to find an audience, and (more importantly) know that audience? And since many of the forumgoers are also musicians... how is it similar and/or different from finding the people who engage with your music?

I got turned on to an amazing limited-series podcast called "Last Seen," about the largest unsolved art heist in history, of the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum in Boston in the early 90s. What starts as an investigation of what appears to be an inside job by some suspect security guards expands to include the Boston and Philadelphia mafia, and eventually, an international crime syndicate. It had me completely gripped from beginning to end. My wife is really into the whole true crime thing, and I can't stomach it, but this was perfect for both of us -- a true crime, investigative journalism podcast, where the victim was art! More on the comedy side of things, another variation on the true crime theme is "Murdertown," which is a bunch of improv comics doing deliberately bad investigative journalism. And for those who don't mind some not-at-all-safe-for-work humor, "My Dad Wrote a Porno" is devastatingly funny.

...which brings me to the question I came back here to ask! My main project, a five-piece rock/soul/singer-songwriter band with four (!) vocalists, is switching over to IEMs. It has saved our rehearsal process, and we're testing it out on a gig this weekend. Our rehearsals have been in a tiny room at the guitarist's house, and despite being a group of sensitive players, we had just hit a wall as far as improving the kind of close vocal harmony work and arrangement detail we've been aspiring to, because it was just turning into a big jumble of sound. The IEMs have fixed that. That said, we're still figuring out how to optimize our in-ear mixes. Our Behringer has six auxes, so everyone is monitoring in mono (ahem, except for that devious keyboard player, who claimed the extra aux so he could monitor his patches in stereo... cough cough...). Despite the increased clarity, there are times when four folks are singing in harmony, and the organ is wailing, and two guitars are... guitaring, when it becomes hard to distinguish what's what. The crunchier rock songs tend to reach that point sooner, but every now and then the combination of instrument and vocal tones on certain songs will reveal itself to be muddier and less distinguished than the previous song or song section. What recommendations do you folks have for optimizing the mix, aside from tweaking song-to-song? I think I need to spend some more time carving out space for everything with EQ (if only some judicious use of high- and low-pass filters), especially the voices, but I want to be careful with compression -- even if our monitoring situation sounds more like listening to a record now, I don't want to rob everyone of their dynamic range so that they just start playing and singing full-out all the time. But I also want to make sure that there's space to hear everything at the loud, all-in moments. Open to suggestions and personal experiences with this!

I'm not sure if my favorite part is that he's making the other band members laugh, or those two women to the right side whose dancing cannot be stopped by his atonal, arhythmic explorations. "We hope you enjoy our new direction." Anyone want to take on a transcription?

It's been a rough few weeks for legends of all kinds.

indeed. So no telephone then! :wink:

But will it come with a rotary telephone? [video:youtube]

Oh my goodness. A Craigslist post for the ages. As much as I want to laugh at this person, we all can have our tech troubles. A drummer I work with and I were trying to set up another drummer's electronic sample pad for a low-volume living room rehearsal. We got the green light to borrow the pad, but neither of us had ever used it before, so there was a lot of trial and error with which cable goes where, how to find a kit that sounded right, how to trigger crash cymbals, how to activate the attached kick trigger, etc. Then as we were scrolling through sample sets, one of them started looping a very loud montuno groove, with congas, guiro, salsa piano, the whole bit. The two of us, two grown men in our 30s and 40s, one of whom is a technology professional, could not figure out how to make it stop. We had to power the thing down and turn it back on again. It was truly a sight to behold.

Not to veer too far off topic, but my wife and I just re-watched the Ken Burns Jazz documentary; it had been close to a decade for me, and she had never seen the final episode. I love that doc but the way they turn episode ten into a "funeral" for jazz and never once mention Chick or Jaco, relegate Herbie ONLY to being a Miles Davis sideman, and talk about fusion as if it was just Miles' sellout period and that nothing else happened in jazz (or "acoustic jazz," as they start to call it, with the implication that that's the only "real" jazz) until Wynton showed up in the late 80s... VERY you-kids-get-off-my-lawn! To bring it back ON topic, we owe it to ourselves to be inclusive, rather than exclusive, when it comes to fostering a community about musical knowledge. Certainly you don't want just abandon your personal standards for excellence, but being dismissive of others can just keep you comfortable in your assumptions. It can feel good to be on a high horse, but sooner or later everyone is riding off without you.

My wife and I asked for directions to a jazz club when we were in Paris on our honeymoon back in May. We found a cozy little cabaret (well, "restaurant with an upright piano") not far from Notre Dame, but it wasn't so much jazz as showtunes and classical piano. Unamplified, though, and very impressive! If I can remember the name of it I'll edit this post.