GRollins

I don't know that Kurzweil is to blame. They bought keybeds that they thought were decent quality. After all, Fatar has a good reputation (setting aside people who complain about the action, etc., I've not heard anything bad about their reliability). Granted it's old, but you certainly don't expect a keybed to self-destruct at any age. This wasn't, for instance, an adhesive or lubricant drying out. That I might be able to accept. For the frame to simply mechanically collapse on its own is something I never anticipated. Still mulling over options, but I must say this is disappointing. Grey

In the usual way that my life works, I'm just now getting back to this, only to find... ...yeah, it's a design flaw. Okay, it goes like this: There's a black plastic piece that comprises the frame of the keybed. There are notches along the back to receive the ends of the springs (the other end fits into the back of the key, natch). There are triangular braces that reinforce the protruding bars on either side of the springs; they fit from the bar back to a short vertical wall. Peachy. Looks like decent engineering...except...every 12th reinforcing triangle is missing. No, they didn't break away, they were never there to begin with. So that bar's weaker, right? But wait...there's more! That's the way they did it for the lower keys. For reasons unknown, they skipped two of the triangular braces in a row at the last two skips towards the upper notes. Why? No reason that I can discern. They just did. Guess where the breaks occurred. Righto, mate! The places where they skipped two consecutive braces. In case you were wondering, the skips are near--but not at--the legs, between the B and C keys. No, the skips don't appear to be related to the legs, structurally; there's no reason they couldn't have continued the bracing scheme all the way up the back. The keybed does not appear to be modular in the sense that you could take an octave out and drop in another. Looks to be monolithic. The PCB with the diode array is certainly all of a piece. Yes, I could in theory take the keybed back off the bottom and double check this, but the front part of the frame appears continuous from one end to the other and I don't remember noting modular construction when I was building the keyboard. So where do I go from here? Dunno. I'm looking about for heavy plastic (~1.5mm thick--might be able to squeeze in 2mm) that I can use to fashion after-the-fact braces to reinforce the weak bars. Clamping the broken piece accurately back into place is going to be a booger because it's got little thingys sticking out here and there and there aren't any decent flat places that are wide enough to brace against. AAARGH! Just needed to vent. Go back to what you were doing. I'll meditate on this for a while and see what I can come up with, but it's a doozy of a problem. It also chips away at my impression of Fatar as a reputable manufacturer of keybeds. It was just flat-out dumb to design a keybed frame this way. Grey

As soon as I started reading this thread people started talking at me, so apologies if this point was made above and I missed it. So...you have some time to play/practice. You pick up/sit down at/lay hands on your "main" instrument, only to find that you don't feel inspired today. It's just not happening. Yeah, you can push through and play/practice that instrument anyway, but my feeling is that it's nice to have a Plan B (and a Plan C and a Plan D and...). If your keys aren't talking to you, pick up your guitar. If your guitar isn't talking to you, pick up a flute or a viola or a whatever else is within reach. The important thing is that you're doing music. It will exercise the same part of your mind, regardless of where/how the notes originate. And should you come up with a cool riff, you may find that the melody leads you to think that a certain other instrument would fit in like this thereby possibly leading you right back to where you "should have been" from the git-go. Through an unlikely chain of events, I find currently find myself looking at tabla drums. Don't ask. It's just me being silly. I've already got at least seven different kinds of instruments and I'm probably missing some. They're everywhere. It's friggin' wonderful. Never feel guilty about playing music. It's one of the few unalloyed pleasures we have in life, and it's one of the few we can directly share with others. (Those with dirty minds should keep their thoughts to themselves regarding pleasures we can share with others...DM me instead...<ahem>) Grey

This might be a good time & place to ask this question: There's a picture of one of the jazz greats, black guy--possibly Duke Ellington?--seated at a piano. He's turned away from the keys, towards the camera, looking troubled, obviously having trouble with a composition. The photo is B/W. I tried looking for the picture a while back and was unable to find it. Not having a picture to start with, I'm unable to use an image search. All I've got is a memory. You'd think that looking for pictures of Duke Ellington would bring it up, but...it didn't, so maybe I'm wrong about it being him. Any ideas? Grey

You mean like the monotonous wheedly little synth lines in rap songs? Grey

In the same vein, there was a study that showed that a guy carrying a guitar case was able to get more girls' phone numbers than the same guy w/out the guitar case. He didn't play music for the girls and I don't think it was even mentioned in the conversations (which were semi-scripted; he didn't vary his patter much talking with one girl versus another); the guitar case was just sitting there. The venue was a big public place...I think maybe the concourse at an airport? Something like that. Anyway, the conclusion was the same: Girls like musicians. Grey

Walter Piston--Harmony I won't bother you with how erratic my musical education has been, just understand that this is a laughably out-of-sequence book for me to attempt at this time, but hey, I'm brave. I'm about half-way through. The chapter on Harmonic Rhythm seemed to me to be rather opaque--to the point of being useless--but the rest of it has been pretty good. It's slow going because I've been hammered incessantly by a dying house and one of my sons has got me reading the Pendragon series by MacHale. Assuming that I can get things settled (if you listen hard enough, you can hear the gods chuckling as they quaff mugs of mead and plan their next chess moves to thwart me...), I intend to move on to Piston's Counterpoint, then Orchestration. At the rate my life is flowing, it'll only take me another twenty years to knock those bad boys out. I've got some other musical books on hand that I'd like to read, but I'll have to live quite a lengthy life to even joke about where they'll be in the reading queue. Grey

I am particularly raw on this topic at the moment because I'm attempting to come up with a drum track for the tune I'm working on and...I ain't no drummer...and I know it. But there's no one to call on. Hell, I would dearly love to turn the keys (in this case, piano) over to a real keyboard player and get my butt busy on strings, where I'm supposed to be. Yeah, like that's gonna happen! Grey

This is the kind of thread that makes me cross-eyed. Post after post, I see: "If you want it to sound real and you can't play that instrument, get someone in to play it." Easy for you to say. Apparently you guys live where there are people who can/will do that. Some of us live in impoverished wastelands where there are no musicians to fill in. As I've noted elsewhere, for all the fact that the aggregate population in my area is on the order of at least a quarter million, perhaps as high as a half million, there is zero...and I mean ZERO interest in doing original material. Worse yet, even if I was to persuade someone to break out of their little bubble of Southern rock/Top 40/religious music...they just ain't got the chops. A guy I know recommended a drummer to me. The drummer was useless. Totally. His entire mindset was 4/4 time. 3/4 was exotic to him. WTF peeps! I need someone who can grok 5/4 to 7/8 to 4/4 and back again in the same song. Right now I'm working on something that's 11/8 (shades of Mussorgsky). The guys around here simply can't hack it. Period. Might as well ask them to sprout wings and fly. So...like...when someone airily waves their hand and says, "Get someone else to play it," I get pretty flustered and frustrated. I desperately want real people playing real instruments, but there are simply none to be found. I'm jealous. The musical resources that you take for granted are not available for some of us. I have no choice but to use hardware to fake the parts I can't play. Sigh... Grey

Two nominations: Jimi Hendrix/ Band of Gypsies: Machine Gun Grand Funk Railroad/Closer To Home: I'm Your Captain (Closer To Home) Machine Gun is an amazing tune. Strong. Moves. Then...I dunno what happened...everybody fell asleep? Left the stage in search of a joint? Got beamed up by the mothership? I'm Your Captain works just fine until...until...THAT ending. "I'm getting closer to my home," six thousand, five-hundred and thirty-three times in a friggin' row. WTF guys? Maybe they were all high and it seemed like a good idea at the time, but...nah. Like Lucky Man, it didn't stop the song from being a huge hit. I distinctly remember it being on the juke box in the Pizza Den (Pizza DEN, not Pizza Hut...are they even still around?) near where I lived. It played non-stop. My father, who was of the "Rock and roll is just a fad. It'll never last," mindset, didn't even seem to mind that tune too much. It's not like he'd burst out singing the song while driving--perish the thought--but he didn't get all steamed up when it was on, either. Go figure. Incidentally, I happen to like the Lucky Man ending. Yes, it's somewhat of a musical non sequitur but that's okay with me and apparently enough other people were okay with it that the song developed some serious legs. Now, if we're allowed to suggest other parts of songs, I want to nominate Monster, by Steppenwolf. That DUN, DUN, DUN, DUN part in the middle goes on for waaaaay too long. Otherwise it's a good song and quite appropriate for today, if only people were into protest songs. Gawd knows we need 'em. I've been working on one, but that'll have to wait its turn. I had another candidate in mind, but it slipped away as I was typing the above. Grey

This is part of my conundrum. I keep wanting to find an absolute, iron clad best layout. The reality is that "best" seems to shift according to the project I'm on. Still, I keep hoping that I'll find some sort of optimum that at least kinda-sorta gets me by, regardless of what I'm up to. I should have known this from the beginning. Why? Because the entire reason I started looking into modular is that I needed to rearrange the functional modules on my Moog. Instead of A-B-C-D, I needed A-B-D-C...but couldn't, because the Moog was hard wired in a certain sequence. I'm not criticizing the Moog--nine times out of ten, the stock work flow is just what the doctor ordered, but that tenth time needed something different and I couldn't do it. So why would modular be any different? Well, it's not, of course. And, in truth, with long enough cables and a little dexterity, you can reach around the patching to get to the knobs you need to get to. It's just that...sigh...I want it all. There is a solution--and I've already gone partway down that path. Get multiples of critical items and have one over here and another one over there and...oh...what the hell, let's put a third one right here so it will be closer to the other whatsit. Obviously not a good policy for expensive units, but for smaller items like the little Doepfer mixers, it works like a charm. And yes, I still find myself wanting bigger knobs and a more relaxed layout. I saw a review of the Behringer (aka Moog) 914 filter wherein they were whining about how big the thing was; they wanted it smaller. I wanted to scream at the screen, "You idiot! That's one of the best things about it! You can reach the bloody knobs without hitting twelve other things!" Everyone wants smaller, smaller, smaller... Nitwits. At some point, you really should consider the ergonomics and quit obsessing over the HP count. Don't be surprised if I start a thread about 5U modules at some point. Grey

I have said in numerous threads that I believe that what is now called Prog will come back. Today's music is boring. It's mindless. It's too simplistic. Eventually, the pendulum will swing back towards music with more meat on its bones. It may or may not be called Prog (or Classical Rock, as I grew up calling it), but sooner or later the thirst for something more challenging will need to be slaked. Howzabout this? https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230113-gen-z-and-young-millennials-surprising-obsession I love classical and I'm not shy about saying that it influences my music. Perhaps this the first step towards fulfilling my prophecy. Grey

And another one bites the dust...Norton LifeLock goes down in flames: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/nortonlifelock-warns-that-hackers-breached-password-manager-accounts/ I told you so. I think I missed posting one last week. Saw it. Meant to stick it in here. Forgot. Do. Not. Trust. Password. Managers. Period. Grey

When people say, "Humor is out there, you just have to look for it," my response is always...look for how long? It's not worth my time to sift through endless quantities of crap in order to find one tiny little thing that's actually funny. A lot of the shit that's supposed to be funny these days is just plain offensive. I don't mean that in a puritanical way, I mean it in a way analogous to the way horror movies are no longer about fear and suspense, they're about grossing you out with blood and entrails. That's not horror. That needs to be in a different category, with its own label. Same with "humor." Take out "mind-deadeningly stupid" and put it in its own category. Take out what is currently called "edgy." To me it's rarely funny; it's generally just meant to offend. Take out "endless, pointless insults to anyone and everyone." Take out "this isn't funny, this is just someone telling a boring story." Take out...never mind, you get the idea...or if you don't, I think it's safe to say that we're on very different pages as to what constitutes humor. George Carlin and Robin Williams knew how to be funny. Triumph the Insult Dog (to name just one example) is not, was not, and will never be. If you take out the categories I mentioned above (plus more), it would be a lot easier to find truly funny material. But that's not going to happen, is it? We're just going in deeper and deeper. I, for one, think it would be nice if we turned around and quit trying to hurt other people and calling it "humor." Don't we have enough rancor in the world today? Sorry...what was I thinking? Of course not. The evidence is against me. People want to dive to the very uttermost bottom of tastelessness and wallow in it. Phooey. I avoid today's soi disant "humor" at all costs. It's negative input and I don't need it. I'd rather keep my head clear. Rant over. Feel free to laugh if you found this post funny. I'll be here through Thursday. Be sure to tip your waitress well. Grey

I may have missed something in your list of requirements, but you might want to look for an Edirol UM-880. Hot MIDI switching, 8-in, 8-out, any or all. It's been a life saver for me, because I'm always wanting to use something to run something else. I only have one complaint, but it's small enough that I'll just sit on it. Oh, and they made a smaller one...4-in, 4-out? Don't remember. I went for the 880, though. Motu made (makes?) a MIDI switcher, but you have to program the stupid thing, you can't just make a decision on the fly that you want to try this or that and poke a button. Grey

This is something I have grumbled and debated and argued with myself about...whether to put like-functioning devices together in the same area or to mix things up. On the one hand, I've got all my conventional oscillators together, but on the other hand, I've got my two sequencers far apart. The Eloquencer is smack-dab in the middle of the percussion section (Intellijel Plonks, Tip Top One, etc.), which makes sense to me, whereas the Metropolis is with, well, a whole hodge-podge of miscellaneous things...not a well thought out layout. I need to go through and reorganize stuff, because the top two rack adapters were actually pretty much populated in the order I bought the modules, rather than according to any rational plan. The question is...what's the best layout for what I want to do? This will require more grumbling and mumbling... Grey

I just saw this elsewhere and came here to grieve. Easily one of my top five guitar heroes and now he's gone. Not good. Grey

A Winter Modular Eloquencer is up on eBay if anyone is brave enough to tackle the learning curve. I swear these things are semi-sentient--smarter than some musicians I've known--but I'll leave it up to you. Grey

If I had to choose between the D (Behringer, in my case) and the Voyager, I'd probably go with the D, driven by a wide keyboard (> 73 keys). I don't have a real Moog D to compare to, but the Behringer units sound pretty rich and creamy and I like them. The Voyager? It's a little less...organic?...but I like the way it sounds as its own thing and I have to be honest, I like the presets. For me, though, it's nice to have both. I don't have to choose. And comparing a Voyager to a One? Huh...gimme the Voyager. Arguably the D would win over both, but it also depends on what song I'm working on. Price? Roughly 20 Behringer Ds per One, depending on this and that, so there's that to consider, at least for me. How badly do you want polyphony? No, I haven't played the Behringer paraphonic doo-dad. I have no opinion. Someone with actual experience will have to take up that argument. Disclaimer: I'm so tired I can barely see. This post may not make sense. Read at your own risk. If I look at it tomorrow and it's too non-linear, I may try to revisit the notions herein. Grey

How do you spell dumb? I spell it E-u-r-o-r-a-c-k... Yeah, at first I thought I'd get by with one or two of those 19" 84HP rack adapters. Now I've got six. Okay, things have been pretty stable for the last eighteen months or so, but I'm no longer foolish enough to say that I'll absolutely never need another two or three adapters. Or four. Or whatever. Don't get me wrong, these things are more fun than the law allows, but the racks do tend to fill up fast. I've got a spreadsheet that I use to keep track of space and current. It also serves as an inventory list in case I have a brain fart and can't remember how many VCOs or VCFs I've got. I think you can do something similar on modulargrid (is that what they call it?), but I'm happy with my roll-my-own approach. Grey

I'm sure you'll get a bunch of glowing reviews...here's your dissenting one... Take this with any sized grain of salt that you wish because I'm primarily a strings guy, not keys, but I played the One in Asheville a while back and found it to be uninvolving, verging on boring. Generic. The polyphonic part is undeniably cool, but the sound left me cold. I started a thread on it at the time. I imagine that you can find it via the search engine if you want more words that express "meh." No, I'm not anti-Moog--I own four, two Voyagers (keyboard and RME), a Little Phatty, and a theremin. (And two Behringer Model Ds as stand-ins for the real thing.) I want Moog to succeed. I went into the Moog store super-excited to have the opportunity to lay hands on an actual One. Stoked. I left the store and told my wife not to worry, I wouldn't be dropping the money, not even for a (presumed cheaper) used one. It's just...screw it, buy a used Voyager, if you want my advice. Yeah, I know, it's not polyphonic, but it's got magic. The One doesn't. There...I said it...that's good for a couple dozen posts in response to this one, telling me (and you) that I don't know what I'm talking about, that you have to take time to get to know the One, that I'm deaf and don't know good hardware when I hear it, etc. In preemptive response I'll say this: You don't have to go through a learning curve with a Model D or a Voyager to know that there's something good there--you can tell almost instantly. The One? If you've got to spend six months to get anything out of it, my view is that it takes the buyer that long to rationalize the fact that s/he put down that much money for something that doesn't really move them, emotionally. It's hard to admit that you're dissatisfied with a high dollar, high prestige item. Imagine buying a dud Ferrari model. Would you be willing to admit that you wasted your money? Most people wouldn't. My advice: Find one. Play it. See what you think before plunking down your money. [Grey scoots off to his closet to put on his asbestos suit, 'cause it's about to get hot 'round these parts.] Grey

My phone has a couple of friends' phone numbers on it. Nothing else. Period. The risk is just too high. Grey

It's not that one password service is flawed, it's that the whole concept is flawed. Just don't do it. Grey

Give up. Just assume that you'll need more space. Darth Vader: "It is your destiny." Grey

From the I Told You So Department: LastPass has been hacked and is in a mad PR scramble to reassure everyone that everything is just peachy. Spoiler alert--things are not peachy. Don't say you weren't warned. Don't say, "Oh, I'm safe because I use [competing service]." Don't say that it won't happen to you because you're so sweet and adorable and pure of heart. I told you so. Grey