SamuelBLupowitz

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!

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.

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...

If I start driving from New York now, my car still won't be big enough when I get to California...

Ditto.

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.

The number of units sold that I heard (can't remember the source, so I will say unreliable) is very low I mean, it's cool I guess, but I sure wouldn't want one. Reminds me of this gem: [video:youtube]

I believe Bruce Hornsby still gigs with the (now-discontinued?) Moog Piano Bar. Or it may be a variant from Roland, but I couldn't find any info. He uses it to layer pads and such over his grand in concert.

I think that's a significant part of it. People are mixed about whether the modeled pianos sound as good (or better) compared to sampled pianos, but there seems to be near unanimous consent that they play very well, and so the appreciation from the player's perspective may differ from the appreciation from the listener's perspective. The way tone varies very smoothly from ppp to fff and the way those changes respond to your fingers is part of what modeling may get you. Roland really was the pioneer in this approach, with the original MKS-20. For my own gigging experience, I know I've started to feel like the audience tends to not care about (or notice) the specific sonic quality of my patches -- they can't tell the difference between my real Wurlitzer and my Nord, or the different organ clones I've used over the years, or anything like that. So the gear isn't for them, it's for me, and my physical connection to the sound being produced matters a lot more to my enjoyment than the specific authenticity of the sample or model. The more "playable" and expressive the sounds are, the more fun I have, the better show the audience gets. That's why I've been using Pianoteq rather than my Privia's onboard piano samples, even though I'm sure no one except for my wife (who is also a musician) notices the difference from the back of a crowded bar. That's also why I gig a Wurlitzer, and go to a chiropractor.

I can't tell you how helpful that will be to know. I really appreciate you taking the time. This interactive review situation is so useful. Yes, I realize I didn't specify that. The latency is low enough that I like to use the Bluetooth MIDI so I have fewer cables, more flexibility over where the Seaboard sits in my rig, and the opportunity to do silly things like walk out into the audience during a keyboard solo (Herbie Hancock, eat your heart out). But thank you for confirming that the Yamaha *will* do audio over USB. Great to know, thanks! Tremendously; thank you so much!

I had a moment of tremendous guilt when I couldn't find the computer lab too -- I was just saying how I keep forgetting to check the non-KC forums, even though I've been active on a few. Glad to see we're growing and developing, rather than haunting me, Jacob Marley-style, from the digital afterlife.

Wondering if anyone has played with LEAP Motion's controllers, and the third-party GECO app that translates gestures captured by the LEAP device into MIDI data. [video:youtube] I believe LEAP has gone through some changes in the last year or so and I don't know if GECO is supported or even still developing. But it still works enough for me to adjust filter cutoff on a softsynth by waving my hand like a wizard, so I'll avoid updating the software and forge ahead. I'm hoping it's reliable enough to use onstage, if only for the flash factor. It certainly seems like it would be useful to the producer crowd as well; there are a lot of demos of people using it with sequences and beats in Ableton. My interest is more in, essentially, a no-touch pitch/mod "wheel" or XYZ "pad" -- sort of half a theramin (though come to think of it, paired with Mainstage I may be able to make it trigger notes as well as adjust parameters). I have a sentimental reason for wanting to make it work, as well: I stumbled on the LEAP device cleaning out the office of a friend and coworker who passed away last year. I didn't know what it was for months, until I realized it was part of a project he had been working on involving using hand gestures to trigger lighting cues while he played guitar. It would be an excellent tribute to him, I think, to use The Force to bend pitch and tweak parameters during gigs.

I'm going to chime back in too; I've been interested in your opinions of the ROLI gear and others, so I will encourage you to talk a little more about what bugs you (or what you like) about the ROLI stuff compared to some of the others.

So... many... pretty... toys... Pretty sure that circular controller was first developed for Lady Gaga's touring keyboardist. Glad (?) to see it's available for consumers now (well, the ones with deep pockets, anyway). Also, at first I thought the Ukeys stuff was flash, sparkly keyboards, in the vein of ROLI's new LUMI model, but it's frighteningly tempting now that I know it's just overlays for whatever keyboards you have on hand...

LOL........no real secret........I play barefoot in summer (in socks in the colder months). Seriously. I couldn't imagine playing bass pedals, or feeling the kick switch on the expression pedal, with shoes on! Lou Yeah, any time that I have the bass pedals on a gig, I can't even wear chucks. I've taken to buying more fun socks for the stage.

It's a struggle, especially when I'm using my computer, phone, or iPad for sheet music/chord changes/songwriting notes. I've been trying to practice out of some actual books again for that reason.

Now that I've finished listening: thank you for the in-episode shout-out, man! Ooh consider this a vote for Josh Paxton!

MY HEART!

Great to know. I've heard good things about Crumar's long-throw pedal anyway; it would be handy to be able to switch speeds without lifting my foot. Do you just move your foot against the "tab" switch on the Hammond pedal? Of course, I'd also have to make sure that the fast/slow/stop TRS application works on my Motion Sound. When I use the motion sound pedal directly into the Mojo, fast/slow and run/stop are reversed. I imagine I could jury rig a polarity swap with some cables, though.

Between my Macbook and my iPad, both of which have worked their way into my various gigging rigs, I can access zillions of sounds and softsynths, which I can route and instance in nearly infinite ways. So why do I want all these synthesizers so badly?

I will now forever describe DX7 sounds as "mullets," thank you very much. For real, though, thank you so much for the excellent coverage of these instruments. I'll throw in a few questions that maybe are super specific to my potential needs, but I haven't seen them addressed on the Keyboard Corner thread about these axes, and I could see them being useful to others... Talking about MIDI and how it behaves with the different sound sections. Let's say I wanted to play a phaser Rhodes across the entire keyboard of the CP73 or CP88, but also connect an unweighted controller and use that to play the Yamaha's onboard clav sound simultaneously, so I can cover both keyboard parts on Peg (there's your Steely Dan right back atcha). Doable? I know the Rhodes and Clavs are technically both in the "e piano" section, but I'm pretty sure I read that you can move patches around if you so choose... In addition to the stereo audio inputs (fantastic), I know these boards also function as audio interfaces via the USB port, correct? So I could attach an iPad to the Yamaha via USB to lightning, control Moog Model D for iOS with my Seaboard, and have the audio come through the main outs of the Yamaha? Seems too good to be true!

I love this (especially since the CP88 has been giving me the kind of GAS I haven't had for a digital/stage piano for a long time -- life is tough, yeah?). Really appreciate having yet another great resource here! Thanks for the bump, dB -- as much as I want to keep up with the other cool MPN forums, I find myself checking Keyboard Corner reflexively, then forgetting about the others.

Ooh, I can't wait! I love what Eric's been doing.

Yeah you definitely won't lose that guy if the lid is open. You know, my wife got me the Gator file bag at the top of this thread for Christmas. She was worried it was too practical a gift, but I was thrilled with it -- it's a tremendous timesaver.