SamuelBLupowitz
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Posts posted by SamuelBLupowitz
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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!
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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).
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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:no, Sam, I won't be selling the Juno. One of the few things I'll be keeping.
But it will stay a studio piece for now. -
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]
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Can I ask a practical question at this point?
...does this mean you decided to sell the Juno?
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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.
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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.I wonder how much of this spec will be taken advantage of by the major manufacturers. Look at their advertising; young kids making beats. A lot â maybe most â of today's commercial music doesn't need MIDI 2.0, imo. Of course I'm happy to see the progress and expanded possibilities, let's hope we see some cool hardware and software soon! -
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?
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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.
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...which brings me to the question I came back here to ask!You'll get mixed reviews depending on the quality of the mix. If you can manage to get a better mix in your ears, then you can't beat the isolation, IMHO.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!
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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?
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It's been a rough few weeks for legends of all kinds.
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So no telephone then! :wink:^ that"s a GX-1indeed.
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But will it come with a rotary telephone? [video:youtube]
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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.
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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!There was a huge leap from classic straight ahead jazz to the post bop era of Herbie and Chick on to the modern funk jazz, rock jazz and smooth jazz of Marcus Miller, Pat Metheny and many others. There are a whole lot of classic jazzers with their heads stuffed with concrete too about that including my best friend the sax player who I won't name here...We've had many discussions about that and it's like politics. Forget it just let it go, ya know?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.
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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.
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I always love the challenge of "how much of a studio arrangement can I reproduce live," but I definitely think of them as different animals. For my original bands, I've arranged and recorded the occasional string section or horn chart for a track -- then the challenge becomes whether to a) cover the part (i.e., Mellotron strings), b) ignore the part (it's just icing for the record, but it's like a double-tracked vocal -- no one will miss it live), or c) rethink the part for the regular instrumentation (those harmonized guitar leads were great on the record; I can use a synth and an organ to fill out that section instead of just playing electric piano).
It's all about personal enjoyment, I think, at least for me. It is, of course, easy to go overboard in the studio, so I try not to go out of my way to come up with extra stuff, but if I'm hearing an idea for one of our songs that hasn't been part of the live arrangement, the studio is a great time to try it out. If it sticks, you find a way to work it into your live performance, and that's how the songs evolve.
The thing I love about this is there's no right or wrong -- it's all about setting up deliberate limitations, challenges, and/or opportunities for yourself to let your creativity (and chops) flourish!
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As one of the younger active members (though I did recently cross from "teens and twenties" into "thirties"), I really appreciate your thoughts and your sentiment. As a mostly-original-music performer who is now hovering between the crowd of weekend warriors and pros who had been active in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and the current college kids who pour into the bar ten minutes before my set is over so that they can crank the house music while we pack up, I welcome any opportunity to build musical bridges between generations and locations. For my part, I'll look for opportunities to share more new music I come across (not just that I'm involved in), and investigate more of what is shared here.
This forum has been a helpful and very welcoming resource for me, and something I am very happy to have outside the oppressive confines of the big social networking sites. This feels a lot more like what the internet was meant to be for me. I feel like the internet could be doing more for musicians, but much like social media, business interests often cut off a truly open environment. In this forum, I see an opportunity to dodge that trend a little more.
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I"ve been playing the same 2004 Mexican Fender Jazz since I was a teenager, and though I"ve done a few mods over the years (hipshot tuner, Badass bridge, and, uh, black replacement pickguard) it really does everything I need. Since most of my gigs are on keys these days, I haven"t been able to justify any other purchases.
That said, I"ve wanted a Rickenbacker since I was a young lad. I stumbled on a fretless Japanese Fender at my local guitar store that really connected with me. And, for the love of god, a P-bass.
Actually, there"s a local luthier in my town that makes 'Ithacasters,' which as you might surmise are Fender clones. My local shop had one of his p-bass models in that I fell in love with â turquoise finish, metallic gold pickguard, flatwounds (as is my preference), and a tone knob that took it all the way from pillowy Jamerson to gritty Entwistle. A little too rich for my blood, though, seeing as I just bought myself a new organ...
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If I start driving from New York now, my car still won't be big enough when I get to California...
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One example is a synth that comes with a patch editor built in. Plug it into your computer and boom, up comes a screen with the editing software ready to use, no need to install or authorize or update. On a simpler level, imagine never having to document all your hardware synth data separately as part of a DAW session any more: a synth's full state is saved with your project and instantly recalled when you fire it up, without having to send a bunch of carefully prepped SysEx to each box.
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Ditto.I have sometimes read some longer-lived threads, only to see that I had already made the same comment I was about to make, just several weeks later. -
Here"s what I love about using the iPad for music: it"s much more immediate and inexpensive to make great sounds.
If all you"re using it for is extra sounds for the Electro (like synths, perhaps?) I think you"ll be in great shape. There are some fantastic synthesizer apps from big names like Moog and Korg that cost under $20. Even though my MacBook has become the heart of my software instrument rig, I continue to use the iPad as a sound source because everything I"ve heard that sounds as good as Moog Model D costs over $100. I think I got it for $15. There are lots of terrific options for electric pianos and various other samples too, though Nord has a lot of that pretty well covered (Neo Soul Keys lets you customize those vintage keyboards much more than Nord does, though).
Here"s what I dislike about using the iPad for music: It"s not intended to be used that way, and Apple doesn"t care that people use it that way. Every advancement for making music on the platform is due to the Herculean effort of DIY developers, and at this point there are some truly impressive ones. Apps like Keystage can take the iPad close to the kind of setlist-based, complex routing and splitting that Mainstage is capable of. But MIDI compatibility and different app formats make the usability of various apps in one place challenging. And iOS doesn"t allow for the creation of aggregate audio devices for more complex output routing, which probably won"t be an issue for you, but wasn"t enough for the way I was trying to route synths and electric pianos to different outputs. Needed my MacBook for that.
And if you"re using it for heavy lifting like, say, piano sounds for solo performance, it can"t do the same work as a laptop... not yet anyway.
I have a 2017 iPad mini, so yours will probably have a little more RAM than mine, which will mean better performance. And the camera connection kit (or something comparable; I have a great dongle that has USB-A, headphone out, and Lightning so I can connect it to a keyboard or interface over USB and still charge it) isn"t so expensive that you"d feel bad if you try it and it"s not for you. If you don"t want to use it for music, you can still use it to connect to a printer or something more 'practical.'
Personally, the day my iPad closes the gap on what my MacBook can do, it"s a no brainer â I"d much prefer to just use the iPad. Just be careful with those apps... there are a lot of cool, fun music apps, and they"re cheap. Before you know it, you"ve spent a lot more money than you planned!
EDIT:
I didn"t address your question about the Electro"s compatibility or ease of use. I also have a 4 and it does indeed suck as a controller; this weekend I can hook it up to my iPad and see how easy it is to make it work.
But it will stay a studio piece for now.
Would you let your kid major in music performance?
in The Keyboard Corner
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