SamuelBLupowitz
-
Posts
1,938 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Blogs
Events
Articles
Downloads
Gallery
Store
Posts posted by SamuelBLupowitz
-
-
Dude, the instant I open up one of my pieces of musical equipment, we"re on a one-way trip to disappointment and regret.I always watch these projects in awe, because if I ever tried this it would end up cheaper for me to find a stranger in the street, hand them $1000, and walk away, since at least then I'd still have a working keyboard afterward. -
I own exactly one. I bought it when I got my used set of Roland PK-5 pedals a few years back. Since then, it"s also been used to connect a Motion Sound head to a lo-pro cabinet (because, as one member of that band sarcastically put it, 'what analog-purist musician who wants to play through a real rotary speaker doesn"t have MIDI gear lying around?') and to connect my Privia to my Sennheiser audio/MIDI interface for Pianoteq and Mainstage.
I know I could just use USB for the latter, but one guy on the Mainstage group in Facebook is a real crusader about how MIDI-over-USB is an unreliable hack. I haven"t had any problems myself, but I figure as long as I have the 5-pin DIN in/outs in my interface, it can"t hurt to use them for piano instead of plugging more stuff into a USB dock.
-
Yeah, Anthology has some live-in-the-studio performances with Lennon"s bass loud and, uh, proud. Makes me understand better why Phil Spector smothered The Long and Winding Road with an orchestra. I"m surprised nobody thought to have Billy Preston cover the bass on organ; he was certainly capable. George was a much more adept bass player, and I went many years without realizing that he played bass on large chunks of Abbey Road, but Let It Be needed his guitar solo.OT but I believe Paul overwrote John's bass with an overdub for the single release. John Lennon is one of the best reasons for not assuming guitarists can play bass.Apparently John played bass on Helter Skelter, which is a bass part I really like. But that"s not a song that requires the same kind of taste and subtlety.
-
My wife and I just re-watched the Beatles Anthology doc, as we do every couple of years. The Let It Be period is rough, but I"m always struck by how tremendous Billy Preston"s contribution is musically (never mind interpersonally). He gives the song Let It Be some real gospel character, which takes it to a much grander place than it would have gone with just the four of them (especially with John Lennon playing some of the worst bass parts ever put to tape). It spills over into Abbey Road, too â imagine I Want You (She"s So Heavy) or Something without Billy"s B3!
-
I hear you on getting drowned out when things get loud. Gain staging is something I have to play with all the time on organ because drawbars alter volume as well as tone, so a reasonable range on the swell pedal on a song where you go from one drawbar out to screaming full drawbars is tricky. One of my bands, Noon Fifteen, covers CSN's "Wooden Ships," and the drawbar settings range from all drawbars out/Leslie fast/C3 chorus in the intro, to 8' drawbar only in the verses, and everything in between. Sometimes I just have to tweak the master volume and gain on my Nord from section to section, no matter how much I'm working the swell pedal. Or I'm just screaming in the loud parts, and I start getting looks from my bandmates...
I gravitate to the the stereotypical first four drawbars out for a basic "rock" sound, sometimes with C3 to give it a little excitement without having to have the Leslie on fast the whole time. That same band just started doing a Deep Purple-esque original where I'm basically playing heavy metal rhythm guitar on the organ, and it's a mix of root-fifth voicings and a lot of rhythmic key slaps to simulate palm muting. I do that on 888800000, with the overdrive turned up on my Nord. When I'm rehearsing with the built-in sim, it's just the turn of a knob; what I've started doing onstage where I run through a Motion Sound rotary speaker is turn on the Marshall amp sim on the Nord and get the drive there, pre-rotary). Too much overdrive can muddy it up too, of course, but the right amount helps it cut. But I can still run into issues when things start escalating, and/or I start soloing; I very often wind up with all the drawbars out before I want to hit the ceiling (or, conversely, I try to get all John Medeski and do aggressive drawbar manipulation during a solo, but just lose too much volume and power by removing harmonics).
Key click is your friend, too. If I'm not mistaken, you play a Mojo 61 -- does that have the continuous control knob for click like the dual Mojo? I know some people find too much distracting, but I love it.
Josh Paxton told a great story on the forum after Art Neville died about playing Art's B3, where the percussion was so loud it tore his head off. Apparently it was so he could be heard over Leo's guitar. The struggle is real.
-
Sure, to make a living and not get screwed, it's a necessity.I would argue that artists need to learn more about business, not the other way around. -
I remember that article also; I'd love to see that again.Sam I have some scans of the rig from 2008 if that will help you? I remember the videos you mentioned. -
Should, yes. CAN, yes. But if history has taught us anything, it's that the relationship between artists and businessmen is, to say the least, fraught.At a bare minimum, the digital age should make it easier to pay artists based on actual streams of their material, instead of the formulas used by the likes of ASCAP and BMI. -
Zombie thread! Been looking for the video of this rig rundown, since it's not on the Keyboard Magazine site anymore. The David Rosenthal one with Billy Joel from a couple of years later is still up on YouTube, but I can't find this one, though I know I saw it at one point.
My tenure on this forum began when someone (Dave Bryce, maybe? Forgive my memory) dug up the 2009 Benmont Tench videos and re-uploaded them to YouTube. Boy, do I love that.
-
Dr. Mike, I've really enjoyed having you around the forum lately. Thanks for sharing your knowledge and insight in such a friendly, community-minded manner.
-
I wish you could have seen my face in real time while you were demoing the Pigs organ on the XK5 and the Kurzweil... I was all perplexed as to why you wouldn't just use both manuals of the Hammond, and then in came the synth strings!
-
Do you have a setup with a real Leslie that works this way, or just using a sim? I've always been a footswitch guy for reasons stated above, but there are times when having my left foot free would be more useful than my left hand, and I've never figured out how I would rig up my Motion Sound to respond to both the included footswitch and some sort of hand control. It's easy to do it that way using the built-in sim on my Nord, but I only use that at rehearsals these days.Both. Half moon and a swell pedal kick switch. -
The sad thing is, all the technology could be utilized for the true benefit of musicians. As technology could be used to truly benefit everyone on the planet.
But as George Carlin pointed out long before I stared to hear it discussed by my peers, the table is tilted.
-
Dayne, I think. :wink:Taylor who? -
Wouldn't want to have to untangle those cables at the end of the night.
-
Definitely want to take you up on that for my more songwriter-oriented material.So...nursers and I are the mods down below on the Songwriting and Composition Forum. If you feel inclined, please share some of you music there and help us get it going. Each of us have things to share and it's nice to discuss the "how to's"For now, here"s a tune my funk band has been working on for our upcoming studio release. Some fun (deceptively tricky) clav stuff!
[video:youtube]
-
There are a couple of guys in my area who do. Both have chopped B3s and a van (or at least the band has a van). Personally, my Wurli and my Clavinet are as heavy and big as I want to lug around.How many of you will still bring a console organ to a gig? -
I think we can all agree that Kristen Wiig's tabla playing is really stealing the show.
-
Of course, there are always exceptions. :wink:Keyboard players will usually consolidate with a stage piano that covers the gig or even a second tier board but guitar players seem to bring a full metal jacket of guitars ... -
Much more directly instructional than the Booker T video -- this is cool for me to watch, particularly since I'm enamored with gospel organ, but have very little understanding of how it's actually executed, because I've only really investigated it when applied in a rock or soul setting, where the pedals don't come into play. If I'm playing a Faces song, I'm more likely to be playing a chord in my right hand while using my left to adjust drawbars and occasionally gliss or slap the keys percussively. Or comp on the Wurlitzer.As a supplement to Samuel's Booker T video, the author here deals with the crawl technique in the first part of this video. The rest of the video gets into more advanced information about drawbar settings vs register and voicings. As a sidebar, I do notice that the gospel guys tend to double chord voices a lot more than I was taught to do. The dense sound seems to work well for them.[video:youtube]
But now I'm gonna spend a little time with that voice leading exercise. That's what I want to work into my playing!
-
I agree that the source of a lot of the differences in process between keyboard players and guitar players stems from what started them playing. In the 60s through the 90s (at least), most guitarists picked up the instrument with the goal of playing what they heard on the radio, and most keyboard players started by taking classical piano lessons. This even held true in a lot of popular music; Rick Wakeman trained heavily in classical music, while Jimmy Page taught himself blues and folk and rock 'n' roll. My journey was different. I took a few years of the requisite piano lessons and lost interest until I got into the Beatles, and then my teacher showed me how to figure out chord progressions and play inversions. So I had a cool hybrid of self-discovery and coaching, where I was learning to play more the way your typical guitarist would, but I also learned to play bass and played some jazz and took theory classes and such.
A lot of my rock piano tricks just came from listening and figuring out how Elton John and Billy Joel and Paul McCartney would dress up their chordal playing, and I would figure out little licks and stylistic movements to build around my right-hand-triad, left-hand-octave-bass-note foundation. No joke, the book "Piano for Dummies" gave me several crucial "aha" moments in my early days (blues scales!). Organ and synths have been the same sort of process of trial and error for me (particularly through playing with other musicians and figuring out what works, and what doesn't, and how to achieve a certain affect that I've heard other bands do).
After spending most of my teen years as a bass player, using piano mostly as a writing tool and for solo performance, I started up playing in bands again in my 20s, leading a Ben Folds-esque rock piano trio -- keys, bass, and drums. My two best friends growing up were both guitarists, bless them, and I got really tired of being drowned out as a bassist and a vocalist (never mind trying to translate what I wrote on piano to two guitars -- one of the guys in the band described our sound as "piano-driven rock without the piano").
But in the years since, I've found and latched onto brilliant guitarists, and one in particular who is in all of my bands now. He's musically sensitive, always thinking about the big picture, and we're great at sharing space and complementing each other. He's also a wizard with extensions and creative harmonic decisions; he's always pushing me into new directions. He's far from the stereotype that gets kicked around here a lot: "classic rock diehard who plays really loud power chords and pentatonic scales and has no understanding of theory." I've played with those guys, but I don't run into it as often anymore. I think that might be a generational thing too, since BIG GUITARS haven't been as overwhelmingly dominant in popular music over the last 10, 15 years, even in a lot of the successful-but-not-household-name touring bands that include or are even led by guitarists. The reduced cultural emphasis on the "guitar hero" means that guitarists are just as willing to be ensemble players and do what's best for the song as everyone else, only melting faces when called upon. Not that there haven't always been sensitive players like that (and not that there aren't plenty of self-obsessed keyboardists out there too), but I think the ego-trip-oriented guitarist is less common than it used to be.
-
Yeah, after seeing some similarly-priced listings online, I was relieved when I found my Wurli (with legs, sustain pedal, and road case) for $1200... the action's always been a little chunkier than some that I've played, but I know I'd spend at least that much again to have Vintage Vibe do a restoration job. I bet that one on eBay sounds and feels REALLY nice... but too rich for my blood. :wink:Just came across this post while doing a bit of Wurly research. To put your $600 trade in perspective: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Wurlitzer-200A-Electronic-Piano-w-Warneck-Research-EP200A-VariVib-Serviced/273819559357?hash=item3fc0eae5bd:g:U5UAAOSw~HJcwlsy -
That looks pretty cool! But I wouldn't have wanted to lug it either.
You're saying that you would gig with TWO Hammonds onstage? Must have made quite an impression!
-
I"ve been on a similar hunt recently. On another thread it was pointed out that Elle King"s keyboard player is using a single-manual Mag while opening for Heart, but otherwise I don"t see them much. Out of my price range new from Divisi; they"re a little expensive even by dual-manual-clone standards (XK5 excepted). But the little I"ve heard about them has been very positive, so I"ll keep an ear to the ground and this thread with ya.
"Don�t Let Me Down", Rhodes part
in The Keyboard Corner
Posted
But George Harrison was an accomplished and innovative player who created and recorded plenty of iconic parts (that Rickenbacker 12 string, the sitar, the guitar-through-Leslie of the later albums, and so many wonderful parts and solos that are deeply embedded in the DNA of those songs). I don"t think George ever felt like Paul"s contributions were more important than his, but I imagine he felt like PAUL felt Paul"s contributions were more important than his!