GRollins

I began my original post with, "I think I know which way this will trend..." so I'm not surprised. I did make at least a token effort to steer it back on track. Isaac Asimov wrote of a future in which people eventually became so isolated from one another that they could no longer stand to be in the physical presence of another human being. He did not address the problem of live music performance, but I imagine that it would be handled much the same way his characters interacted with each other--a sort of telepresence technology--but note that people were uncomfortable even with that. Disembodied audio-only music reproduction would still be an option, I suppose, though the economics would still have to be worked out, regardless of performance format. Parenthetically, I and my wife spent a delightful evening with Isaac and his wife, Janet. Absolutely charming man, and smart as a whip. I wish there were more people like him. For that matter, he might even be enticed to put his mind to the problem I posed in my original post. If anyone could come up with a practical solution, he could. Oh, well...back to statistics and fretting... Grey

I know I'm a little weird, but the name of the device is "telephone," which translates as far-sound. That's what I use it for...to talk to people. The only other thing I do with my phone is take pictures. I've got a Facebook account, but I never answered any questions that were not necessary to start the account; I needed at least a rudimentary presence on the web so people could find me as an author...and they have done so from time to time. Interestingly, even without me telling FB things, they've figured out quite a bit on their own. However, they're not able to figure out what I like (other than music) and they're not quite sure where I live, although they've got it down to the general area. They're still hunting for me, though, make no mistake. I'm not going to make it easy. Grey

I hear the Beatles are going to sue over similarities with Yellow Submarine... Grey

It was said above that older folks don't go out. Not so. One word: Church. Perfect transmission venue with lots of people in close proximity, and older people are statistically more likely to be the ones going to church, in addition to being the most vulnerable portion of the population. And if someone starts sneezing, no one is going to leave. They're going to stay until the service ends, come what may. Sitting ducks. Then there's Walmart (Walmart employee discovered to be infected today in Kentucky). How many people does an average Walmart employee talk to in a single day? If they're at a cash register, it's potentially a huge number. I don't know about where you folks live, but there are scads of old folks in every Walmart I've ever been in. Grey

I just listened to Taurus again and still do not hear any resemblance between it and Stairway. To me, it's just a descending arpeggio on an acoustic guitar. Big whoop. The notes don't align in my ears, no matter how many times I listen to it. Don't get me wrong, Taurus is a nice tune and I like it, but similar to the Stairway To Heaven intro? Nah... It takes more than "descending," "arpeggio," and "acoustic guitar" to make a match. Grey

Aye, we know all that, guys and gals, but the intent of my post was to brainstorm about ways to make money from music if public gigs are not an option. Grey

I'm behind on my periodicals and just read--in the March 2018 Scientific American--that they had discovered coronavirus hiding in bats in China (they mentioned SARS, as the current version hadn't happened yet) and were hoping that they would soon have a vaccine. Yeah...that was two years ago. Grey

I love that you started with Flash Gordon. I remember how deliciously evil he was in that movie and I thought he was perfect. (And I remember Ornella Muti, also. "I want him, Father. Give him to me." Take me, babe, I'm yours...) I make no claim that I saw every movie he made--or even a significant fraction--but every time I saw him in a movie, I thought he was wonderful. It offended me greatly that he was killed off in the first ten minutes in Star Wars. I would like to have seen his role developed far beyond the few lines he was given. Grey

It was just northern Italy, but I saw this evening that all of Italy has been shut down. Most working musicians aren't going to have fat enough wallets to last for long if they're not able to bring in money from gigs. That's going to be hard on some folks. Not that this will be easy for anyone, but I'm thinking that working musicians will be hit harder than many. The question I'm asking is how to make money in adverse circumstances. Even for big names, the majority of the money is in touring, not release of albums. But what if that dynamic changes? What if albums or streaming or something (what?) were to become the preferred method of communication between musicians and their fans? How might that work? Obviously, the balance of the revenue stream would have to shift in favor of the musician, but by what percentage and are there any other mechanics that would have to change? Grey

I think I know which way this will trend, but I want to throw this out for discussion, because it will--even if only temporarily--change things... Let's assume there are no more concerts... Let's say that coronavirus shuts down all large gatherings for an extended period of time. Or perhaps it's something else. Whatever. So...how do musicians--particularly those who put food on the table by playing music in front of live audiences--make money? What are the alternatives? Grey

Nobody's mentioned ultraviolet light. Excellent germicidal properties and nowhere near as fiddly as wiping down the keys every ten minutes. The only downside I can see is that UV will attack plastics over time. Then we're back to the "How long will we have to do this?" question. Days? Weeks? Months? A year or two? As a days to weeks approach, it's a no-brainer. If you're looking at months, possibly years, then...yeah, you're going to see some yellowing and maybe some shrinkage, over the long haul there's the possibility of cracking. Note that some keys may be made of more resistant plastics than others, so UV might be a better option for some keyboards than others. Grey

Deterioration of plastics due to solvents is, in part, controlled by exposure time. Isopropyl alcohol (aka isopropanol) isn't going to stay on the keys long enough to be a problem, especially given that you're not going to be doing this every day for years--probably more like a month or two. The problem you'll be facing is that the sheer surface area/nooks and crannies in a keybed are going to be a bitch to keep clean. For instance--you have someone who is sick (with any germ--doesn't have to be Wuhan/coronavirus) and they sneeze. Some of the aerosol of droplets goes into the gap between the keys and settles on the side of a key. The next person comes along and wipes the surfaces of all the keys (nuisance enough), but does not depress each key to wipe the sides. The next player comes along and the side of their finger brushes against the contaminated key. Then they have a tickle on their nose and...they scratch. If it was a wide, flat, smooth surface like the lid of a grand piano, you'd be in good shape. The keys, however, are going to be a bear to clean effectively, especially every day, possibly multiple times per day. It'll be an annoying job and sooner or later someone will get sloppy and that will be all that it takes. Grey

Just for comparison, my Ampeg SVT 8 x 10" cabinet was 160# by itself. The head was another 90#. I also carried an Acoustic 371 rig (played stereo), but don't remember the weight; lighter than the Ampeg, though. I don't remember ever getting help moving the stuff. Like the posters showing how many groupies the various members of the band got--with bass players getting zero--bass players are also at the bottom of the totem pole for help with gear. On the plus side, both cabs had wheels and were pretty easy to deal with on level, hard surfaces. May the gods have mercy on you, though, if you had a gravel parking lot to deal with. Might as well be quicksand. 24" doors were a bitch. You had to turn the cabinets sideways and unch them through before getting to use the wheels again. And, yes, my old enemy...stairs. (Quoting Po the panda, there.) Grey

Phil Collins Nicholas Collins (Phil's son) Tony Banks Mike Rutherford Daryl Stuermer Only thing I'm seeing about play dates is for the UK. Grey

I buy non-cheap stuff for several reasons: 1) It has a particular voice/tone/sound that I like. 2) I get really annoyed if my equipment is limiting me. The only limiting factor I want to have to deal with is myself. If my gear is getting in my way, I don't put up with it, I replace it. (Cases in point: my first bass was a Danelectro, a cheap POS thing with a fifteen fret neck and you could only get to twelve of them. [No, NOT an exaggeration--this was a deadly limitation for a Chris Squire devotee.] Or my Yamaha MM8, which has some severe MIDI oddities.) Now Danelectros are all the rage and original ones bring in crazy amounts of money. Doesn't matter. I still hate 'em. 3) And this is a biggie: Once I decide I'm going to stick with something (e.g. keys), I go directly for top flight gear because the alternative--stair-stepping up the models--costs a lot more in the long run, and I'm going to want to go up the line sooner or later anyway. 4) I have a chance to get something at a really amazing price (cases in point: my Hammond A-100 or my second Behringer Model D or the free Kurzweil K2500 that supplied the keybed that eventually became my MIDI keyboard or...). 5) It has more keys. Don't laugh, I'm serious. Being a bass player, I expect to be able to hit low notes. One of these little toys with a three octave keyboard? Not me, man. I need my low notes. Yes, a lot of little keyboards can be transposed down an octave, but then you loose the mids. I will grudgingly make an exception in the case of, say, my Little Phatty, if I've got a riff that's all in the bass, but that doesn't stop me from wishing for more keys. Yes, I can use another keyboard to drive the Little Phatty, but then I lose that keyboard for other uses. From this, you can (correctly) deduce that I'm trying to figure out a way to upgrade my Voyager to an XL without spending a minor fortune. (If you hear of a rash of little old ladies being robbed of their lunch money...uh...it wasn't me...nope, not me...) Still...none of this means that I'm better than someone else. It just means that I'm foolish enough to spend stupid amounts of money to get something that I've rationalized in my head...and I'm very, very good at rationalizing things. Ask my wife. When she comes to me wanting to do something, I oblige by providing her with a bespoke train of thought that conveniently supports the notion that what she wanted to do in the first place is, in fact, the one and only logical conclusion, given certain starting conditions. She thanks me and goes out to do what she wanted to do. I should probably start charging for my services... (might make enough to pay for a Voyager XL) Grey

There are numerous comparisons of the Behringer Model D and the Moog. I imagine that the limited edition ARP2600 is being compared to the original somewhere--I haven't looked. Once the Behringer 2600 comes out, there will no doubt be three-way comparisons. I know some people seem to be losing their noodles over the idea that the Behringer 2600 prototype doesn't seem to have a built-in spring reverb. Reverb as an effect is nice in its place, but it's not necessarily the first thing that springs (ahem) to mind when thinking about a 2600. That said, reverb--or the lack of it--will clearly change the sound of the instrument. Assuming that the Behringer unit is cheap enough, there's no reason not to add an external reverb, but that seems to be verboten, for reasons which I am unable to fathom. Not that reverb tanks are necessarily the same sort of thing as resistors, capacitors, transistors, and tubes, but they're a component. Grey

Oh...something I need to put in...I enjoy the hell out of having the toys I've got and I like to talk about stuff like that...but that doesn't make my gear (or me) better than something (or someone) else. Interesting observation: I finally sold that cheap little Yamaha PSR-200 that had been hanging around for years, but the thing is...I liked the Pan Pipes voice better than the ones on the higher priced Yamahas (MM8 and MOXF8) and Korg (Kronos X). The downside was that the signal to noise ratio was terrible, so it wasn't going to be worth keeping it around just in case I might want a pan pipe someday. Sometimes the cheaper stuff has its charms. If the S/N ratio had been better, I might have kept the PSR-200, as humble as it was. Grey

I don't fuss at people about the gear they have. I freely admit that the keyboards I've got are better than me. I am the limiting factor in the keyboard/me realm, not the hardware. I've got some good stuff and I've got some average stuff. (And the relative ranking of which is good vs. which is average will change depending on the ranker...grounds for another discussion.) I don't even claim to equal my "average" gear. I've only been playing keys on a piecemeal basis for a few years. Give me a while and I'll get to the point where I can hopefully justify the lower priced stuff I own. Grey

Unless the caps were bad I wouldn't expect that a recap would clean up dirty rails. I'd look at the regulation. If there's no regulation, I'd check the diodes in the bridge. If they're okay, I'd start thinking that the designer used either too small a power transformer or too little capacitance in the power supply (likely both)--either would lead to too much ripple. Where to go from there is up to the owner. Protestations that [fill in the name of a famous designer] is a genius carry no weight with me. Famous people are just as likely to scrimp on power supplies as no-name people, either thinking that power supplies don't matter (a surprisingly common attitude) or that it's a good place to save money. Whether or not to recap a piece of gear is something I approach on a case-by-case basis. I've got an old Hafler pro amp that's humming--clear candidate for caps. It's sitting on the floor here next to me, waiting for me to go through with calipers to work out the lead spacings so that I don't have trouble fitting new parts on the PCB. On the other hand, I've got old stereo amps about the same age that are silent as the grave. I haven't messed with them. Carbon comp resistors bother me. It's bad enough to see a 20% tolerance part in any circuit, but to see a 5% or 10% resistor that's drifted 50% or more from its value over time? Uh-unh. That does not make me happy. It's not a matter of vintage vs. modern, it's a matter of "this thing doesn't sound the way it did the day it was made." Here in the southeast, the humidity creeps into the resistors and they are waaaaaay off. I had a big box full of random value carbon comp resistors that a professor gave me back when I was in school. Leftovers from a circuit they had built for the lab. A mere five or six years later I started going through the box testing them, trying to match pairs for a filter I wanted to build. I could match 'em, all right. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that I could scarcely find any that were still within their rated tolerances. I ended up throwing the whole box away. Note that these were brand new (Allen Bradley? I don't remember--it was a good company.) 5% and 10% parts when I got them. By the time I wanted to build the filter, they were well on their way to being 20% parts. Ugh. That made a believer out of me. Carbon composition resistors cannot be trusted. Grey

The short answer is yes, that you can get more repeatable results, etc. etc. etc. But... There's repeatable and then there's repeatable. The devil's in the details. You can execute pretty good resistors and very good transistors on a chip, but the fly in the ointment is the capacitors. They're just not up to snuff. From a high end stereo point of view (a Venn diagram would show some, but not complete overlap with keyboard/synth design), you'd like polypropylene, or (better) polystyrene, or (better still) Teflon caps in nearly every part of a circuit. Electrolytics and ceramics have their uses in certain applications, but for the signal path, you want good film caps. For synth design...well... Then you start getting into arguments like the original Minimoog used carbon comp resistors (terrible) and ceramic caps (terrible in the signal path), yet it "sounded good," meaning that we grew up hearing "that sound" and it's baked into our DNA. It's vintage. It's analog. It's history. It's fill-in-the-blank, but the long and short of it is that in the case of the Minimoog (and other designs) it became part of the Mojo. And if you execute the same circuit with good quality Vishay metal film resistors and Teflon/tin foil caps...? Honestly, I can see both sides of that argument, but I'd come down on the side of better resistors and caps. If nothing else, carbon comp resistors drift horribly with time due to humidity and you'll see unpredictable results ten or twenty years down the road. There may be subtle differences in the sound between the original parts BOM and a more modern one, but I can live with it. My position is that the sound differences between an original Moog and a New And Improved one would be swamped by unit-to-unit variations of the original as they came off the production line due to 20% or greater tolerances in caps and 5%/10%/20% tolerances in resistors. Monte Carlo analysis, in other words. But that still doesn't change the fact that caps in chips ain't up to stuff. Better tolerances? Yes. More stable over time? Yes. Better sound quaility? Er...no. Styrene caps just don't fit into chips. So I'd say go with something like, say, THAT Corp. matched transistor sets, but use decent external resistors and capacitors. Grey

I tell people I'm "Sports Impaired," meaning I don't care a whit who wins which game in whatever sport. Call me sexist if you wish, but I'll root for the team with the best-looking cheerleaders. If the sport has no cheerleaders, then my interest level drops from very low to nonexistent. Frankly, I'd rather read a book, or write a story of my own. Or...uh...do something weird like play music... Grey

Consider one of the programs that slows down the music (but keeps the pitch the same), such as The Amazing Slow Downer. It costs money to buy the complete program, but if I recall correctly you can download an evaluation version that will allow you to work on the first three minutes of a song for free--should be enough to get you through the beastly part at the beginning. There's another program that's entirely free, but I can't remember the name of it and the audio quality isn't as good. By now there are probably more programs like that. It's been a while since I've looked. Or...you can do what I've done in the past and get the sheet music and pen in the note names on a hard copy. No, it's not "sight reading" and it's tedious as hell, but it'll get you there. I'm slowly learning to read sheet music, but I still can't sight read in the sense that I can just sit down and play something from a sheet of paper. All things in time--I just need more time to work on this. Grey

Nope. That's my job. According to J.Dan, I'm good at it. Grey

Watch YouTube videos or look at still pictures of Yes's Rick Wakeman back in the '70s. Count the keyboards. Note the Hammond, the grand piano, the Mellotron, etc. Tally up the pounds. Feel for the roadies... Grey

To be honest, I'm not sure what I'd do as a replacement/upgrade for any of the keyboards I've got. For instance, I've got a Kronos, so where do I go from there? Okay, it's a Kronos X 73, so maybe I could go for an Kronos 2 88, but still...it wouldn't make a big difference in my life. The main limitation is still me, not the Korg, and likely always will be. I've got a Hammond A-100. Could I get a B or a C? Sure. But to what end? What would it gain me? Nothing, really. I did get a Yamaha MOXF8 last summer. My MM8's still here, but its MIDI oddities were making my life more difficult than it had to be. I suppose that would count as an upgrade, but it's already over and done with. Wouldn't mind a Voyager XL as an upgrade for my plain-Jane Voyager, but dem things is 'spensive, and I'm not going to drop that sort of money on a keyboard short of winning the lottery...and that ain't gonna happen. (Hell, if I'd kept the money I've wasted on lottery tickets over the years, I could probably buy an XL.) That said, there are things I want, but in truth none of them rise to the level of Crash Priority One, gotta-have-it-or-die. That includes the 2600, mind you. I want one, but I'm pretty well set to cover the sounds I hear in my mind so my waiting is of the patient sort. Back when the Behringer Model D was coming out I started my (in)famous Ship Dates Keep Slipping thread, not so much because I was wetting my pants in anticipation, but because the ever-changing availability dates fascinated me. I was never able to fathom the reason for the changes. Obviously the D was going to be a runaway best seller and pre-orders were stacking up, so you'd think that the projected shipping date would keep slipping further into the future. You start with, say, 75 orders, then 125, then 360, 1100, etc., right? That's balanced against Behringer's production schedule but...Musician's Friend, where I had placed my order, had no way of knowing Behringer's actual production and availability--they would, at best, have knowledge of their allocation of (I think it was) 500 units. But that's a fixed number, which they should easily be able to map against their waiting list. Any new pre-orders should then go in the queue and the anticipated ship date would--theoretically--start moving later and later in the year. Only, that's not the way it worked. MF's delivery dates kept bouncing around like a pinball, sometimes sooner, sometimes later, with no rhyme or reason that I could discern. Weird. Grey