GRollins

Why dey pickin' on po' widdle us? Grey

Rubbing alcohol works fine and is what was recommended to me by Moog. Note that it can take some elbow grease, so keep at it. Paper towels and alcohol. Be prepared to spend time on it. Once I got mine good and clean the problem has not returned (so far...we're talking several years, though). I did not remove the wheels. I'm sure you can do a better, more complete job by removing the wheels, but I only care about the parts I touch so I didn't think it was worth the trouble to disassemble the unit. I did the end caps in place, too. Grey

I'm waiting 2 minutes or more for page loads, as of Sunday evening. Grey

Behold, your wish is granted: Led Zeppelin's plane, with keys (sorry, not a grand piano) The second photo is the one you want. Grey

Some may recall my theory of "deep oscillators*." I see that this thing has twelve. In the abstract I approve of twelve oscillators on a synth, but I just started counting and I've got at least 17 oscillators...and for a heap less money. I'll have to go downstairs and do a more complete count. For what they want for one of those things, I could go hog-wild on oscillators. (...and VCFs, and VCAs, and...) Grey * For those who missed the foo-for-aw, I have this crazy notion that Mother Nature doesn't limit herself to one, two, or three oscillators. She has an infinite number of oscillators at her disposal. I feel that, well...the more oscillators, the better, assuming that you want to create rich tones that even begin to approximate the complexity of sounds that you hear in the real world. Some here feel that three oscillators are enough--perhaps more than enough to do anything a mere mortal might want to do. My response: Mother Nature ain't no 'mere mortal.'

'Cuz it ain't got no real keyboard like a p-nanner does! Grey (The music in the background of the video didn't strike me as all that remarkable sounding--sounded like sounds I could create here for a bunch less money...and with keys that are actually playable.)

I'm sure it's wonderful, but I think I'll stick with my rig, thanks. Grey

I wish you luck. I've been having trouble finding anyone over here who will even say the word "prog" out loud. I found one guitar player (I'm bass, guitar, and a little keys...would love to turn the keys part over to a real keyboard player so I can concentrate on learning other instruments) who claimed to be real excited about playing together. He's the sort who always says, "I'll call you next week, once I see how my schedule's shaping up," but never calls. Other than that, nada. And you'd better not mention original material at all. Hope things are better on your side of the country. Grey

I have debated Keith Emerson vs. Rick Wakeman with myself over the years. Sometimes I'd think one was better, then the other, back and forth. I eventually decided that Emerson was probably the better player, but that I happen to like Wakeman's style better, subjectively. Fortunately, I don't have to choose either/or on a permanent basis...I can listen to either one depending on my mood. If Wakeman's face got chiseled on Mt. Keymore, I wouldn't argue. Grey

The same could be said of Chick Corea. Never the same twice. I'll add another vote for Rachmaninov, although I confess to liking Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto, too. However, Tchaikovsky wasn't known as a piano player the way Rachmaninov was...so, yeah, Rachmaninov. Keith Emerson. Not sure who I'd nominate from the jazz world. There were some stellar players, but none of them stick to me the way the horn/reed players do. I'm almost exclusively rock, jazz, and classical, so I'd be hard pressed to nominate someone from another genre. Might have to do two from the same genre. Have to think about this. Grey

Well, then somebody needs to get organized and do like they do out Hollywood-ways--tell 'em to start choosing stage names...and not to choose names that are so similar to one another. So, there! Grey

I just posted in another thread and it took foreeeeeeeever... Grey

I'm assuming that you mean Tony Kaye on keys (as opposed to Peter Banks [guitar]). Wakeman and Kaye were both on Yes's Union album and toured together. ...or did Tony Banks play keytar? I forget. At any rate, the album was not necessarily a 100% happy scene, but Wakeman has said on numerous occasions that the Union tour was his favorite tour, ever, so I'm assuming they got along well. No idea if Kaye knew Emerson, but I'd be surprised if he didn't. It's a small world and gets smaller still when you're talking a few hundred members of active bands. Kinda like being in high school where you're on at least nodding acquaintance level with about that many people. Were they buddies? No idea. Grey

I confess that I really went head over heels for Kansas when they first came out, but over time I just...I dunno, just kinda lost interest. Not sure why. Toto, Foreigner, and Supertramp never really got off the ground for me--they belonged to a special class of music (along with Charlie) that I would put on while I was vacuuming and scrubbing my bathroom, etc. Sonic wallpaper to give my ears something to do while I did yukky, boring sorts of things. Led Zeppelin, Yes, and Jethro Tull (no particular order) are my main guys, with a small army of others crowded into a really jumbled tie for fourth place. The order of the list changes according to my mood. The band I "miss" most is Zeppelin. I will always wonder whether we could have had another Kashmir if they'd chosen another drummer (and maybe patched up internal tensions within the band) and soldiered on. Occasional rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, I don't think it'll happen. The three surviving members are getting on in years and if either Page or Plant die there won't be anything to put back together. I don't mean any disrespect to John Paul Jones, but Page and Plant were always the main engine of the band. Yes, JPJ came up with No Quarter, etc. but without the others I don't think the JPJ tunes would have jelled. Grey

PLEASE: Do not do business with Webstaurant. They are unethical, bad people. I'd rather do business with the Grinch or Darth Vader. If I might make a slightly sideways suggestion: What about Metro-style wire shelves? Apparently their patents have expired and everybody under the sun makes that sort of thing now--some quite cheaply. You can build to your own spec if you search "wire shelving" on Google and find a place that sells individual pieces-parts. The posts can be had in differing heights and you can screw either adjustable feet or casters into the bottoms of the posts (3/8"-16 thread, if I recall correctly). The shelves will support stupid amounts of weight...like, 500# each or more, depending on which brand you buy. A heavier option: I use 80/20 extruded aluminum to make all kinds of things. (URL = 8020.net) Note that they have differing grades, so you can go lighter or heavier, depending on what you want to do. I think it's likely that even the lightest grade will be heavier than wire shelving, but you can park a car on the stuff and it will just yawn at you. I use one stand-alone rack to support my mongrel Kurzweil keyboard, Eurorack, and some synth stuff, and another to support my Little Phatty and Voyager keyboards. I can post pictures if you want. Grey

At least some of it is my kids being home due to lockdown and burning crazy amounts of bandwidth (Minecraft being a major culprit, but also their streaming video for school). That affects all sites, not just this one. Grey

Oddly, I'd been watching his recent flurry of albums wondering if he was in failing health and trying to get as many things done at the last minute as possible. I saw today that he had cancer, discovered "recently," but that's a relative term, so perhaps my suspicions were correct. That said, I saw Chick twice, the first time being entirely accidental in that I was desperate for something to entice a young lady out on a date. It turned out that it was Return to Forever on their Romantic Warrior tour, and that evening shook my world (though sadly, not with the young lady in question...I, like a cad, ignored her the entire evening, totally riveted by the music). RTF was a completely shattering experience for me. Prior to that I'd only been dimly aware of fusion jazz. Post RTF...big fan. Damn, this hit me hard. Even though I'd been wondering about his health, getting a text from my oldest step-daughter about it completely took the wind out of my sails. All I can say is that the man was a giant in my estimation, and I'll miss him. He was the sort of guy I've always said should receive special dispensation to live, like, I don't know...maybe two or three hundred years? At least? We need more like him around and they need to stay around longer. Seventy-nine years sure isn't long enough. Grey

I get slowdowns. I'm also still getting random logoffs--are those part of the same problem or is that a separate issue? Grey

I don't see that as a problem. After all, the orchestra recording the music for the film has to have sheet music and the conductor has to have a full score. Ergo, the music exists in written form. All that is needed is to channel that to a printer, either a professional printing house or a printer in the office at the music hall. Poof. Problem solved. Grey

There seems to be some confusion about what I meant regarding education and music that people gravitate towards naturally. To me, education and exposure are not necessarily the same thing. Yes, education involves exposure...after all, it would be difficult to talk about Bach's music without listening to it or playing it or at least reading the sheet music. At that point you've been exposed to Bach's music. However, education is more than mere exposure. There will be lessons about the structure of the music, what the composer meant for the music to convey to the listener, or at a bare minimum some biographical material about the composer. Then you were tested. Then came the mid-terms, then the final exam. Ugh. To my way of thinking, that's a recipe for turning someone against music. Exposure can take many forms. As RABid pointed out, there used to be a lot of classical music in cartoons. I know I absorbed a lot of classical music that way. I had no idea what the name of the piece was or who composed it, but the music itself was there and I was left to decide for myself whether I liked it in a low-pressure environment. Some I liked. Some I didn't. But the seeds were sown and allowed to grow naturally. Rock, for me, was pretty much the same sort of thing. There was one rock station in town and there were stations that played a lot of other styles. My mother liked Glen Campbell and the soundtracks from musicals like South Pacific and The King and I. By definition, I was exposed to Glen Campbell, etc. I didn't much like it. It was easy to sing along with, so I learned the words and would try to mimic his delivery, but I didn't care for it. It was better than no music at all, but not by much. But the rock station was another matter entirely. There were bands I didn't like (even though I was "exposed" to them) and bands I took to immediately, as though there was something in my DNA that primed me for their music. No one droned on about the meaning of the music or the lives of the boys in the band or the reasons for the chord changes. It either worked for me or it didn't. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young worked. The Turtles didn't. The Yardbirds were a near miss. The Stones didn't work. Cream was another near miss. Santana worked, and how! On and on and on. And no, there was very little to no peer pressure involved. No one I knew was as into music as I was. Not even remotely, faintly, a tiny bit. If anything, it was the other way around. I was pestering others to try to get them to see what I saw in the music I liked. Not one single person in my circle of acquaintances had the slightest interest in learning to play an instrument. It wasn't until my family moved to another town that I found people who were as passionate about music as I was, but by then my course was already set. And it wasn't due to "education." That came later when I chose to delve more deeply into the music that I loved. It was my choice; something that came from within. It was not imposed from without. To me, that's a large part of the distinction: Does the impulse come from within or without? Grey

My feeling is that if you have to be "educated" to like something, it's not got enough appeal on its own. I'm not saying that music education is a bad thing...far from it...but people don't have to be "educated" to like rock. It succeeds on its own merits. Likewise, people don't have to be told to like movie soundtracks--the music reaches them viscerally and they want more of it simply because it speaks to them on an emotional level. Grey

While I know that it's not likely to happen, I think classical music would be a more healthy segment of the musical market if there was new music being written that didn't sound like trash can lids being beaten together. The classical concerts I've been to have largely trended towards the "classics," by which I mean established pieces that have stood the test of time...Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, et. al. Okay, that's good. I adore Tchaikovsky, for instance. But...how many times do I want to hear Tchaikovsky's 4th in a row? My ears ache for new music in that same vein. Will that happen? Not bloody likely. Instead, I get new compositions that are atonal and do not develop musical themes in the manner that the older music did. We get a theme--let's call it a riff--that gets presented, then it's discarded, only to be replaced by another riff that's also discarded, then another, then another, then another... No thematic development. No theme and variations. Just the musical equivalent of a child with ADHD who has no ability to concentrate. Don't tell me it's "the style" of this era. That's a trivial observation. I already realize that. But if concert halls want to fill seats, they're going to need new material that works for the audience. It's not the function of an orchestra to write music--they're there to play it. There have been cases where pieces have been commissioned for orchestras, but that's not the usual flow. Composers write and offer their music for public performance. But the vast preponderance of new orchestral music sounds...well...nasty. Am I just being a curmudgeon? Maybe. Maybe not. Note that the public are staying away from music halls in droves,so maybe it's not just me. The audience trends older and older and then they die off, leaving empty seats. Meanwhile, popular music (let's ignore Covid for the moment) is very successful. Why? Because bands release an new album, say, once a year, and the people who like that band's music have something new to go listen to that's in the same vein as the band's previous music. Where's the equivalent in classical music? Film music. Every year or two, John Williams would "have a new album come out" in the form of a movie soundtrack and there was at least the potential for a "tour" of the major musical halls that would draw crowds. And yet...the most that happened was that you'd go to a concert, say, a year--maybe two--after the movie came out and they'd play maybe 10 minutes of music from a given film, then go back to the golden oldies. The lush romantic scores work. People love that music. Still. Today. The style is there, but many composers are ignoring it. Instead, they hew to the harsh sounds and people clap half-heartedly at the end and wipe their brows, saying, "Whew! Glad that's over." The music is never heard again after its premiere. Why? Because it wasn't worthy. There's a disconnect somewhere. On the one hand we have concert goers who consistently support a certain style of music. There are at least some composers who are willing and able to provide music that will scratch that itch. But it's not making it into live performances in more than minimal amounts, and late at that. I would suggest that if film music is the only current expression of the "right" sort of music, then perhaps classical orchestras should be ready to upend their published schedules as soon as a movie's music proves popular. "Yes, we had Brahms and Schumann and Berlioz on our concert schedule for March 18th, but instead we're going to play a suite of Howard Shore's work from the new movie." Strike while the iron's hot, dammit! People saw the movie last week. They loved the score. Give it to them NOW. Right the fuck NOW! While it's still in their minds and hearts. Don't wait to schedule it into the middle or latter part of next season's performances. Hit it NOW. I mean, really. How stupid can people be? There's a market. Meet the market today. Yes, you'd get ticket cancellations. Upon learning that seat J12 is open, put it up on your website IMMEDIATELY so that the starry-eyed woman who cried as the hero and heroine finally kissed at the end of the movie can buy that seat ASAP. She wants to hear that music badly. Give it to her, live. Let her feel the swell without compression and without the limitations of the theater sound system. Tug those heartstrings! Let the guy who thrilled to the brass crescendo as the X-wing fighter pilot blew the hell out of the enemy flagship against impossible odds have his adrenaline fix! Change the damned market model! Get the hot music into the concert halls and the people will show up. I daresay that if my model proves successful, more composers would write music that actually sounded good. The supply would increase. Things might even get to the point where composers start composing for concert halls instead of movies. ...And if you don't mind, yes, I'd like to hear Tchaikovsky's "Little Russian" once again after Howard Shore's latest music...after all, Led Zeppelin would always play Stairway To Heaven after they played the new stuff, right? Grey

My string playing style, both guitar and bass, frequently involves using an open string as a drone note while I play something else above it. In practice, that generally means E or A, or less commonly, D. G every third or fourth blue moon. Nearly always as the root. That tendency carries over to keys. I really, really want to hear a root and it's hard when I don't have one. Another point that never gets mentioned: Our low end speaker technology has not really progressed much in the last fifty years or so. Practical low end extension on a non-EQed speaker is still roughly -3dB at 40-45Hz, and that's a best case scenario. Usually it's closer to 50-60Hz for -3dB and -10dB at 40Hz. (Remember that low E on a bass is ~41Hz.) How is this relevant? If I'm playing, say, 5-string bass, then a low B is around 29Hz. Uh, okay...so what? Well, what happens is that the 29Hz is lost. Totally. Completely. Utterly. It simply isn't heard as a direct note because it's down -20dB or more. Yes, the ear can backfill to a certain extent, but that's not the same thing. Then there's the phenomenon of doubling, in which a speaker puts out a sound at twice the frequency of the signal you're feeding it. That means that a B0, ca. 29Hz, ends up being a B1 (whether because the fundamental is lost and we're getting the first harmonic, or due to doubling), so it can be a higher note than you intended. That means, in turn, that if you were expecting a low root note, you may not get it. It may effectively be an inadvertent first transposition of a chord, with the root above the third, fifth, etc. That ends up changing your aural perception of the chord. Ain't science fun! Grey P.S.: If I ever start over with my bass rig, I'll probably go with Bag End cabinets. They use EQ to go deep with some semblance of flat response. Okay, okay...then you get into phase shifts and things, but still...real, honest, deep low end is to-die-for. Most people wouldn't recognize a true reproduction of low E on a bass if it bit them on the ass. They've been conditioned to think that doubled notes are the real thing. Fooey! And B0? Huh! Beyond their imaginations. Show people a legitimate 29Hz note and they'll be bowing to the speaker like the proto-humans before the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Religions have been founded on less. P.P.S: Should you take it upon yourself to play bass or synth through a good high end stereo system TAKE IT EASY ON THE VOLUME! It's really easy to blow drivers. You have been warned. That said, it can sound pretty spectacular if you've got the right hardware.

That was something that surprised me when I started looking into keyboards. My hypothesis (and that's all it is) is that on keys, you're required to stretch your hands wider and wider to get to the root sometimes. On a guitar, you don't generally have to stretch--there's a root available somewhere within a comfortable fingering range, so you might as well drop a finger and add it to the mix. For example, an A barre chord gives you three easy options for the root note; sixth string, fourth string, and first string, for a total of two (inclusive) octaves. It's easy-peasy to hit those notes. It's not humanly possible for someone to cover two octaves on a keyboard with one hand--just a little over one octave. If you start fiddling with inversions and ninths or elevenths or whatever on a keyboard, you're going to run out of stretch sooner or later. Yes, there's likely to be one chance at a root somewhere in there, but the fingering might be awkward. I saw an interview with Jimmy Page wherein he said that he rarely played a full chord; usually just a subset of the notes that you see in a chord book. In a case like that, it's not unusual to see him playing chords without roots, but it's something that he does by choice, not out of necessity. Different instruments have different strengths and weaknesses. That's part of why I'm trying to add keys to my bag of tricks. It doesn't come naturally to me, so that forces me to think about my music in different ways...and that's a good thing. I'm more conscious of my note choices when I go back and forth between different instruments. Grey

We have convened the Committee for Wee Drams (read: my wife and I) and given this careful consideration. She has recanted regarding Aberlour. We are now nearly, kinda-sorta, almost certain that it was Edradour. "The smallest distillery in Scotland." I confess that I'm developing a bit of a thirst, so if you'll excuse me... Grey