GRollins

In eBay's defense: I bought a Hafler DH-220 back in September. The seller packed it poorly and it arrived partly crushed. To make a long story short, he agreed to give me a partial refund, then...did nothing. At noon today, I received notification that eBay had resolved the case in my favor and I will receive more money than the agreed upon amount. Note that I didn't have to do anything. I didn't even know they were watching my situation, as I hadn't brought them in yet. They just up and fixed everything for me. I've had several problems over the years, but eBay has (bwess their widdle hearts) decided in my favor every time. Note that I also deal with Reverb and have only good things to say about them, also. My assumption is that ALL businesses are vulnerable to hacking, including Reverb, eBay, etc. If you're going to deal with anyone online--and clearly things are trending that way for all of us, whether we want it to be that way or not--then we will be vulnerable at some point. Your credit card info is already out there, it's just a question as to who gets hacked first, then who's second, then who's third... You can like eBay or dislike them, your choice, but Reverb, Amazon, Sweetwater, Musician's Friend, and all their cyber buddies are just as likely to be attacked. Grey EDIT: They need your credit card info to cover incidents like the one I just faced. Ebay is paying me out of their pocket, then they're going after the seller to get their money back...meaning they'll charge his credit card. Simple.

Look at it this way: Assume for the moment that it does not sound like the original--complete failure to reproduce the sounds the ARP 2600 was famed for. Then it's likely (at least for me) to fall into a category where it is its own thing and is a lot of fun for the price. That said, I doubt that it will be a complete failure, although there will doubtless be a cadre of folks who complain because it doesn't have the built-in speakers and thus it's a lost cause. I played with a guy who had a real 2600 back in the '70s. I got to play on the thing several times and liked it. However...that was friggin' forty-odd years ago and I'm not likely to sit down with Behringer's rendition and bitch because it doesn't match my long term memories of the way the original sounded through my old Ampeg SVT. Although the demo videos I've heard so far aren't exactly exhaustive, they seem to indicate that Behringer's 2600 sounds pretty good. It's not as though I have a real one on hand to do a side-by-side critique, so I'll presumably be happy with this one and count it $600 well spent. Grey

Thanks. I've been trying to remember to watch for the price announcement and keep forgetting. With luck, they'll be included in someone's (Sweetwater, Guitar Center, et. al.) Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale and I'll try to nab one then. That's what I did for my Model D. Grey

If they're not careful, they'll end up summoning a sandworm... Grey

I managed to keep everyone amused (okay, okay, two or three people...) by starting a thread about the Behringer Model D shipping dates and how they kept "slippin', slippin', slippin'...into the future." Except when they slipped closer, then further away again, then nearer, then further. I popped popcorn and munched away as the ship dates did their little do-see-do dance. I considered starting a similar thread for the 2600, but I guess everyone learned a lesson about the ship date thing and I wasn't seeing the back-and-forth that I was seeing for the Model D. In fact, I wasn't seeing anything at all, even though the 2600 was supposed to be officially released six months ago...then that fell into a Covid black hole along with everything else. Glad to see that they're shipping, as I would like to order one at some point. I can't say that I'll be first in line, especially with no pricing yet. Grey

Don't get me wrong, if I won the lottery I might consider going for the Model D or something, just so I could touch something that Wakeman had touched. Maybe some of his DNA would infiltrate my fingers and I'd magically become a better player...or at least I could imagine that I was a better player. Or something. But I haven't won the lottery, so all the goodies will go to Silicon Valley bajillionaires or actual lottery winners. Grey

It says they've been in storage and will require service. Factor possible/probable repairs into your pricing computations. As much as I love Rick Wakeman, I'm going to sit this one out. Grey

One of the reasons I joined this forum was in hopes that I would be able to meet a like-minded keyboard player and turn over my keys parts to them. Alas, the idea was a non-starter. However, I have a list of people that I've been able to identify as living here in the Southeast. When someone mentioned the name BluesKeys, I frowned, thinking, "That name sounds familiar." Unfortunately, I was right. There aren't many players in this corner of the country and now there's one fewer. Music isn't--or shouldn't be--a high-risk occupation. Only...now, with the virus, it is. Grey

I saw Van Halen on the 1984 tour. Good show. My ex-wife "fancied" David Lee Roth and I was interested to see if Eddie could do his thing live, as opposed to using studio wizardry. He delivered by the truckload, and then some. Didn't hurt that Valerie Bertinelli was on the side of the stage, behind the PA stacks. Ran out and gave him a kiss, mid-show. Back then, she was seriously hot. (...whew!...) Although I don't count Eddie as a direct influence on my playing style, he influenced people who did influence me (e.g. Billy Sheehan), so I got an indirect dose of his style. Man, I confess that I'm 'bout near tired of 2020. Grey

Oddly enough, my name really is Grey. The format of my forum handle is a carryover from the days when userids were limited to 8 characters, max, and spaces were not allowed. GRollins is 8 characters and avoids the pesky no-space problem. I've used the same handle for years on nearly every website and platform I've ever been on. Except for C0430, but I didn't get to choose that one... There's a bit of a story behind my first name, but we'll leave that for another day. Just know that my parents weren't the sort to name a boy something unconventional back during the '50s. Proto-hippies, they were not--particularly my father. The name Rollins, I saw somewhere, meant "wolf" in...I think it was Old English . The name Grey is a surname that means...gray, as in the color. Thus, taken literally, my name means "gray wolf," but again, my parents weren't the sort to code that sort of meaning into their son's name. I doubt it would have occurred to them to research the meaning of their last name before choosing my first name. Grey

A while back someone posted a YouTube video comparing all the Prophet models through the years. I'm sure it was old news to some, but for this bass & guitar-playing newcomer to keys it was an invaluable guide to the Sequential sound. Back when I was a kid, they would release a new Cadillac every year and everyone would go "oooooh, aaaaah" because the tail fins were longer. I looked at them and thought it made the car look stupid, but kept my opinion to myself. No one cares what a kid thinks. Well, along comes the Prophet and every new model that came out elicited its share of "oooooh, aaaaah" responses, but to my ear, they just kept sounding worse and worse. The YouTube video was wonderful for me in part because it allowed me to identify the point at which my tastes and everyone else's diverged: the Prophet 5. That was the last model that I liked the sound of. Thereafter they became thinner and tizzier and to my ears, they just no longer worked and eventually became actively offensive. No worries. The 6, et. al., sold just fine without me and will continue to have their devotees, I'm sure. Will I buy the reissue? Sadly, no. I can't justify that sort of money. I bought a used Gibson EDS-1275 (the double neck 6/12 of Jimmy Page fame) a few years ago and swore that that was the most money I would ever spend on a single instrument in my life--and that's an instrument I can play half decently. When it comes to keyboards, I freely admit that "I am only an egg," as Valentine Michael Smith would have it. It would take a lottery win for me to reconsider my monetary limit. That said, in a couple of years the used price may be something I would consider. Grey

My problem with ginormous ships is the resources required to build them. Some of those larger ships would require multiple planets-worth of metal to build. The only efficient way to go at such a thing would be to become a predator--snarfing up smaller ships and smelting them down. That way other people's planets would be gutted...not yours. On the other hand, that's a kinda warlike posture to take towards other races. Not the sort of folks you'd want to invite to your block party. Still...pretty cool video. Wonder where he got the dimensions and images. Grey

The more successful bands of the era managed to meld their influences seamlessly. Carlos Santana poured blues, rock, and Latin rhythms into a pot and stirred until he'd formed a smooth blend. Led Zeppelin began as a blues/rock experiment and quickly found a formula that worked. I'm listening to the album link provided above and I keep getting whiplash. One moment I think I'm listening to early Grand Funk Railroad (particularly the vocal style). The next it sounds like Uriah Heep. Then perhaps a fleeting touch of ELP before veering back to generic rock, followed by movie soundtrack music. Then guitar-less Deep Purple. When there's singing going on, I think the most apt comparison would be Grand Funk, but with Jon Lord playing Hammond instead of Craig Frost or Mark Farner. Farner's heavily Motown blues-influenced vocal style is often overlooked by those who prefer to mock his guitar playing. As a vocalist, he was wonderfully expressive--hard to beat. I don't know how much air play Grand Funk was getting in the UK, but they were the biggest band in America prior to the rise of Led Zeppelin. If Quatermass was paying any attention to American music, it would have been hard to miss Farner's singing. I think an argument could be made that the drummer in Quatermass was taking cues from Don Brewer. For those who might not be familiar with Grand Funk, start with their first live album, the one with the black and white photo cover. The performance was recorded at the Atlanta Pop Festival in...1969, I think. For me, that's a desert island album. Energetic, take-no-prisoners, power funk-rock. Doesn't hurt my feelings that Mel Schacher was one helluva bass player--one of my earliest influences. I'm about half way through the album and they just lapsed into instrumental ELP mode, even as I type. (Later note: I'm about 3/4 through and they're in some sort of blues-funk free form jam--it's not working for me.) The problem I'm facing is not that they're changing musical styles, but that the transitions are often clunky. From what I'm seeing, they only did the one album (discounting the '90s version with different personnel). I wonder what might have happened if the band had stayed together and matured. After all, early Jethro Tull (just to name one example) was pretty weak tea compared to what they were doing by the time they recorded Aqualung. Grey

Is it just me, or are a disproportionate number of these tunes from the '80s? Grey

I don't recall ever hearing of Quatermass before. Granted, this isn't necessarily the best way to form an opinion about them, but it seems that they're not sure whether they're blues, prog, or rock. That said, I'll try to dig up some of the original stuff and see what I think...it's promising. Grey

Lisa Bella Donna's promo piece (The Mothership II: Night Flight) sounds rather like an outtake from Oxygene. I think it's the first thing she's done that I actually like. For an album that could easily have become dated, I find that Oxygene still works for me. I picked a used copy on CD a couple of years ago and listened to it for the first time in ages. I have it on vinyl, but hadn't played it since...the '80s, maybe?...but for $1, I couldn't turn the CD down. Yeah. It's still fun. I'm sure that there are arguments to be made about the sequencing or cheesy-sounding patches or whatever, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that I still like it. Grey

Dern tootin'! Actually, I don't mind color, but I don't care for the pastel colors they chose. I'd rather have something more...what's the word I'm looking for, saturation? chroma? hue?...anyway, something bolder. Like EscapeRocks, I have a negative visceral reaction to the neither-fish-nor-fowl colors. Under the circumstances, Lavender, in particular, I've never liked as a color. I think I'd go for the throw-back black if I were looking for that sort of instrument. Grey

I would think they would lacquer it to prevent oxidation, but then I'm about full-up on lacquer thinner fumes at the moment, just having come in from spraying wash coats on a bass neck and an entire bass. I might not be thinking straight. I've got a guitar coming along, but it's not far enough to be thinking lacquer yet. Grey

Showoff! Grey

Part of the disconnect between people who are serious about high end audio and people who approach things from...let's call it the "studio" approach...is that "studio" people obsess over flat frequency response. Yep, that's important, but...if you're from the high end realm you also want qualities like imaging and imaging (as well as other things) tends to get fucked up by technological band aids. This is what led to the deletion of tone controls on high end gear. Some people rant about it being about some sort of philosophical thing about the people who made the album knowing what the album should sound like and the user was not supposed to mess with their artistic vision...bullshit! It's much simpler than that, folks. Tone controls introduced unavoidable phase shifts in the signal, which made the image blurred and unstable. Solution? Delete tone controls. Now, those of a "studio" mentality complain because they can't EQ to get flat(ter) response. From their point of view, they're correct, but it's a totally different approach to a totally different problem. Grey

Re: Rhodes and guitar not working well together. Hog feathers. Note that Chick Corea and Al DiMeola made rather a fetish of doing precisely that. Fusion jazz, yes (see my above comments about blurry lines between fusion and prog), but they proved that it can work brilliantly. It's all in the mix. Grey

A bit more brutal than I was putting it, but... Question: Okay, so people have sheet music in front of them and they're playing the music encoded thereon. There's a fork in the road, mentally. Are they playing the piece just to be playing it or are they trying to learn it? Well...that's the problem. The notes come off the page, flow through the fingers and they're gone. The brain is engaged, but only on a superficial level. It's possible to "learn" music from pages, but I would suggest that it's not as easy. I have a dim recollection of a classical musician (piano or violin? can't remember) preparing for a concerto, saying that they practiced the piece, reading it, but then they went and listened to every recording they could find. I didn't think about it at the time--at least not in the current context--but what if the actual listening was the part that cemented the performance in the brain? Music is, by definition, an auditory experience. Maybe it takes hearing it to make it "real" to the brain. Yeah, yeah...Beethoven could supposedly hear the written notes in his mind...blah, blah, blah...I ain't Beethoven and I strongly suspect that none of the members of this board are on his level. Besides, being deaf, he had no choice. I want to make clear that I'm not trying to run down written music. I'm just exploring the notion that it's not an ideal system for learning (in the memorization sense) a given piece of music. Or, to put it in other words: The map is not the terrain. Grey

There was a thread that touched on this same idea a couple of months ago. People were saying they wanted/needed sheet music to play. Others knew the music and played it without external aids. To be honest, I found the thread troubling because...I mean...how can you say you know how to play a song if you have to have sheet music? The conundrum stayed with me for weeks. I eventually came to a partial resolution by saying that there are people who approach music such as classical, where it's normal and expected to have the music in front of you at all times, and there are people who play rock or jazz or country who don't play with sheet music--memorizing at least two or three hours worth of music. What's the difference in mental process? Is the sheet music a crutch? Yes, classical musicians are perfectly capable of memorizing their parts, after all, the pianist featured in a piano concerto doesn't typically have sheet music in front of them. No matter how I approached the problem, I kept circling back to the idea that the sheet music (or laptop or whatever) is an addendum to the musician's internal memory. Nay, it's a replacement. If they've been taught that paper is where notes are kept, not neurons, then that's the way they approach music. Others learn to depend on their aural memory; they know in their gut what notes come next. I'm not sure that it's possible to take someone who was trained to use external aids and retrain them to feel it in their gut. It will never feel natural to them to play without something telling them what comes next. I want to make clear that I'm not entirely happy with this analysis. It's still a work in progress. But...it seems to me that there's a fundamental truth here if I can only get at it. Why are some people perfectly comfortable playing things from inside their heads while others are unable to do so? If you take away the sheet music, can someone not play that piece of music? Can they truly say they "know" that piece of music if they can't play it unaided? I'm not sure how to resolve this. I saw a YouTube video of Rick Wakeman & entourage playing...Journey To The Center Of The Earth, perhaps? Everyone was well rehearsed and in the moment, except for the vocalist. He had an iPad or something on a stand next to him and was clearly sight reading his part. Not only was there the visual of him not fully engaging with the audience, but his performance was perfunctory. He hit all the notes, but there was no there, there, so to speak. Stilted. He wasn't part of the flow of the performance. In short, he stuck out like a sore thumb. I remember scratching my head and wondering how it had come to this. Had the vocalist not been able to make rehearsals? Could Wakeman not afford a competent vocalist? Did the original vocalist fall ill and the replacement had to show up on such short notice that there was no time to learn the part? The guy just didn't fit for whatever reason. Then another option came to me. What if the vocalist was "classically trained" and simply couldn't get in the groove? There is no groove in classical. You sing what's on the page, period. But in a rock context, that sort of performance doesn't work well. What's the backstory? I have no idea. These are all suppositions on my part. Still, I couldn't help but feel that it was related to the philosophical conundrum I'd been trying to unravel. For my part, I just listen to a tune. I play along with it. Then I know it. If I'm in front of an audience, I want to connect with them. That means eye contact. That means reacting to their reactions, each feeding off the other. I can't see any other way of doing things, but clearly there are others who feel that external aids are normal. I'm still trying to understand this. Grey

I confess that I've never understood the distinction between fusion jazz and prog. I hear more similarities between Return To Forever and Weather Report vis a vis Yes or ELP (particularly when Emerson was in jazz mode) than, say, Jethro Tull vs. Yes/ELP. For that matter, I hear the piano intro to Locomotive Breath as jazz improv, not rock, per se. But then again, I'm the guy who keeps says that "prog" is the bin that they throw bands into when they don't fit into any other category. I'm surprised no one has thought to toss Santana into the prog pool. I mean, really, how is Europa not prog but Locomotive Breath is? I swear I remember Wakeman having a Rhodes in his arsenal when I saw Yes back in the glory days, but I'll be damned if I remember what he used it for. Maybe I'm just assuming that he had one because he had (at least) one of every other keyboard known to man. Grey

Any list where the guy includes Bose in a list of best speakers of all time just because he watched R-rated movies at his uncle's house...I...but...no way...really? What can I say, it's the internet. I tend to avoid "Best Of" or "Top 5/10/100/whatever" lists as they're nearly always a waste of my time. The only instance where I can recall willingly looking at such a list was "Top 100 Prog Albums." I thought it might suggest bands I'd never heard of. Sure enough, it did. They were pretty terrible. In a sense, that list was a waste of time, too, but at least I sleep better at night knowing that there aren't any undiscovered Yeses or ELPs that I had somehow missed. A list of audiophile speakers? Granted, he says he wants to generate discussion, so I guess maybe his goal is different than mine would be. If he generates traffic, then maybe he can monetize the whole thing, but that's not the same as compiling a serious, thoughtful list of good speakers. Grey