GRollins

Music is often about politics. Look at all the protest songs about the Vietnam war and racial stuff back in the '60s for starters. How can you separate them without creating a gaping hole of music-we-can't-talk-about? Wouldn't that be a little conspicuous? Grey

I came across Yes by accident. There were some guys up the street who were into them...but they weren't the kind of guys you'd think would be the Yes sort--more redneck. However, they turned me on to the material available to that point (this was summer '71 to summer '72, then we moved away) and it stuck to me like glue. They were also into Jethro Tull. I don't remember that they were very big on ELP, and the other "prog" bands, such as Genesis, etc. weren't even on their radar at all. One way or another, Yes and Tull are still with me today. Grey

It's performance anxiety. The difference between recording and performing live is that with a recording you know that your mistakes will live on in perpetuity...and that's a scary thought. At least at a gig (assuming there's no one in the audience recording you), your mistakes float away on the breeze, never to return. Grey

I'll take all three. Grey

They did...it's called Yessongs... ...or Progeny, your choice. I liked Close To The Edge best of all...probably Fragile second, at least the full-band songs; the solos were mostly so-so. Relayer maybe third...or...The Yes Album? I don't know. I lost interest after Relayer. What might have happened if Moraz hadn't gotten himself fired? I can see different scenarios, some good, some bad. Topographic Oceans was difficult for me. I wanted to like it. I really did, but it just never gelled for me. It has moments that work, but a lot of it is just tedious. I think if someone had cracked the whip and told the band to take out the meandering stuff it would have made a decent single LP album. Not a strong album, mind you, but a decent one. (I feel pretty much the same way about Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti, but let's not start that conversation.) Bill Bruford said he didn't want to make "son of Close To The Edge" so he left Yes. Well, that's his right, of course, but I often wonder what would have happened if he had stuck it out. Would he have steered the others away from Jon Anderson's idea for Topographic Oceans? Apparently the basic concept was Jon's, who in turn sold Steve Howe on it, and the two of them talked the rest of the band into going along. In some alternate universe, that knife's edge (oops, wrong band...) decision might have gone the other way. They might have made Son Of Close To The Edge. Would it have measured up? Could it have measured up? We'll never know. I think one of the things that's wrong with Topographic Oceans is that Rick Wakeman has nothing to do. There's no pyrotechnic playing. It's just a bunch of pads. He's bored out of his skull and it shows...and so he left the band, too. Rick is one of those guys who needs to play something non-trivial, at least some of the time. To tether him to all that low-level background crap isn't fair to him and it did a disservice to both the album and the band in the long run; a Ferrari being used to ferry groceries. Every time it sounds like they might get up a good head of steam, it just kinda fizzles out and they go back to sleep walking through the music. Grey

I still feel that Emerson could have, should have started an online instructional course. His approach to music was sufficiently different from other keyboard players that I'm sure he'd have had a small tsunami of students signing up overnight. And there's always the possibility that some clever lad or lass will devise a cure for his malady, thus hypothetically restoring his ability to play. Should a cure be announced tomorrow, it would be so tragic. (Wasn't there a Star Trek episode where Bones's father had an incurable disease and Bones euthanized him...only to learn that a cure had been discovered the following week?) Grey

Without boring you with the path that led me to it, I pulled up Three Dog Night, Live At The Forum on YouTube this morning while I was baking bread. I had remembered the album fondly, though I haven't owned a copy since the '70s...gave mine to an old girlfriend. Over time, I had perhaps built it up a little too much, because the actual listen today was a bit of a letdown. Don't get me wrong, the album has its moments, but overall it just wasn't what I thought it was, back in the day. I kept wanting to hit fast forward to get to the good parts, only to get to the end and realize that, well, the good parts weren't as strong or as plentiful as I had remembered. Yes, on the other hand, and let's take Fragile in particular, has stood the test of time with me. I am just as delighted while listening to it as I was years ago. Given that the Three Dog Night album is roughly the same age as Fragile, you could say that they are both expressions of the same era. I know which one I'd rather listen to today. I'm certain that there are people who would come to the opposite conclusion--they would rather listen to Live At The Forum. But...I think I could make a solid case that Fragile was the more important album, musically, in that it broke new ground, whereas Three Dog Night's effort was just "more of the same." It was a pretty good same, but it wasn't, by any stretch of the imagination, a trailblazing album. Okay, okay, it was a live album, and live albums are, by definition, nearly always a "best of" kind of compilation, but still... Grey

AnotherScott, Sorry, but I backed away from this thread a page or two back when people started saying that anything and everything was prog. While I agree that a good, concise definition will be difficult to achieve, I fail to see how a vague, hand-waving, airy, "I feel like the wind was blowing from prog-land the day they wrote this song, so it's prog," approach accomplishes anything at all. In the absence of a rigorous test for prog, people are going to drag in pretty much everything under the sun...at which point I realized that this thread wasn't going to be productive for me. That said, your point about time signatures, etc. linking Tull and Yes makes sense to me. Grey

Honestly, I didn't expect much. Then I started watching. He earned a point or two for starting with Firebird Suite. Well, okay, maybe I'll watch for a minute or two. Then he starts in playing and I said to myself...well, maybe a few more minutes. And the more he played, the more I extended the time limit that I was willing to allot. Okay, it's official. That guy is scary good. Really scary. Thanks for the link. Grey

I, too, seem to recall hearing that there was some component that was in short supply for the Moog D reissue, but I don't know where I saw it. I don't recall that it specified what part it was, so it's not as though I can go look in my parts bins to see whether I have any. C3P0: "If any of my circuits or gears will help, I'll gladly donate them!" (On seeing R2D2's smoldering carcass after blowing up the Death Star. I may be a word or two off, but you catch my drift.) At least for me, I'd be quite all right with using modern 1% metal film resistors, rather than 5%, 10%, or worse yet, 20%, carbon comp resistors. Upgrades like that wouldn't offend me in the least, although I'm sure they'd be anathema to a purist. Capacitors? Oi! Now, there you'd be opening multiple cans of worms. I'd have to make part-by-part decisions on that. My guess is that the real booger is the semiconductors, though. Even if you find a supposed cache of NOS transistors these days, you have to worry about whether they're counterfeit. Grey

I've heard these doom-full pronouncements about Oscillator 2 on the Behringer Model D before, but never seen them backed up with the schematics in question, both Moog and Behringer, side by side. I've got two Behringer D's and both behave quite nicely, thank you very much. It's all just Behringer-hate as far as I can tell. As for price comparisons between the Moog D and One...it seems to me that the Moog D is priced rather dearly. Not arguing that. Separately, as I said in a thread a while back, I spent an hour or so with a One and was unmoved. It wasn't magical. There's no doubt that the polyphony is nice--love that part--but the sound never grabbed me...not even a little bit. There are people who will chime in and say that they have a One and love it and worship it and couldn't live without it. That's okay. If you've got one and it works for you, then that's good. But it doesn't have that certain je nais se quois that the D has. Or the Voyager, for that matter. It was clear that the One was coming; Moog was dumping Voyagers and telling people that something new was on the way, but I'm glad I sat tight on my Voyagers. I think I would have been pretty unhappy if I had gotten rid of them and gone with a One, sight unseen. Kinda like when I heard that there was a New & Improved cut of Star Wars on the way--I got rid of my trusty VHS set. Bought the newfangled DVD set, only to find that...WTF?...Greedo shot first??? WHAT??? Gawd, I wish I had my old VHS set back. My boys have never seen the cantina scene properly. I think the Voyager/One thing would have been the same for me. Grey

On the "what's the Model D bring to the table" question, I'll say that I've got more hardware than I deserve, and I know and admit it. Disclaimer out of the way, it's the Moog sound (also in this context to include clones) that keeps me turning back to them instead of other items I happen to have. Everybody who plays music has favorite instruments, but the sound of a Moog ladder filter is--at least for me--'bout near perfect. The only other filter that I've had experience with that ranks near it is the (Eurorack) manhattan analog SVVCF. Others need not apply. There's just something about That Sound that soothes my soul. A lot of people go for this oscillator. Others get chills over that oscillator. Fooey. At the end of the day, it's the filter that defines the sound most completely and Bob Moog did a really, really good job of designing a musical sounding filter. It just plain sounds good. You can buy another filter design. You can buy the Moog. Or you can buy a clone of the Moog filter. The first option hasn't worked out for me (with the arguable exception of the SVVCF). Getting a Moog VCF as part of a full synth is an option that I've tried three times: A Voyager keyboard, a Voyager RME, and a Little Phatty. All three times have worked well. (Let's not start splitting hairs about the differences in their VCFs compared to the Model D.) Getting a copy of the Moog 904A is something I've just tried for the first time; got the Behringer 904A. I haven't had it long enough to render a definitive review, but it seems good enough. Note that I don't have a full 5U Moog 904A to compare it to, it's just going to have to sound good or not on its own. In short: Why buy a Moog? Because the son of a beach sounds good--better, in my not-so-humble opinion, than 99.99% of the competition. Someone remind me to rob a bank or win the lottery so I can afford the real thing. Grey

A few thoughts on comparing the Behringer Model D with the Moog Model D 1) There are about ten gazillion people who have bought the Behringer, versus a few thousand who own a Moog. Let's say that in any given year 1% of the respective owners decide to sell their synths. As a simple application of math will show, there will be a lot more Behringers on the market than Moogs, simply as a function of there being more in the field. 2) I suspect that a fair percentage of the people who bought--and are buying--the Behringer are members of the "beep and boop" crowd. A lot of them are just getting started in music and don't really quite understand the whole synth thing. They've just watched a few YouTube videos and think cool sounds will simply leap out of the D on their own. When they buy a D (along with a sequencer and so forth), they may be overwhelmed and give up, having bitten off more than they can chew. The people who buy the Moog Model D are more likely to be knowledgeable--they know what they're doing and have a game plan. There are people in the middle, like me, who play Behringer Model Ds using a keyboard, thus creating a "Moog Model D" for a fraction of the price. It would be interesting to know how many Behringer Model D buyers even own a keyboard, whereas the Moog comes pre-equipped with one and that's the way most users will play it, even though the reissues now have MIDI. 3) At $261.75 (Behringer Model D current price on Sweetwater), the eBay used "sold" prices of $150-250 ain't so bad--especially at the upper end of that range. And that's with a bunch available, mind you, so supply and demand isn't being badly tilted by a lack of supply. They're selling like hotcakes, both new and used. 4) I'd love to own a Moog, but the price is prohibitive. I've got two Behringers--one bought new, one bought used--and have far less money committed. Setting Rick Wakeman aside, I daresay you'll search long and hard before you find many people who own more than one Moog. For someone such as myself, a firm believer in "deep oscillators (tm)," I'm having a friggin' blast with my Behringers. If I was to come across a Moog D cheap enough, hell yeah I'd buy it...but at current pricing, I'll manage with the Behringers. I know it's popular to look down on Behringer. I get it. But there's a lot of music in those little Behringer boxes and that's a good thing. Grey

I hate computers sometimes. That smiley face was supposed to be #8, but apparently I ran afoul of some sort of keyboard shortcut for an emoji. <sigh> At least it didn't post the turd emoji, right? Grey

Okay...I stole a few minutes when I should have been doing other things and did a little research on that yellow bass... The story is tangled. I will try to summarize it thusly: 1) There appears to be a YouTube guy named Jared Dines. I've never heard of him, but that doesn't mean anything. I'm sure he's justly famous. 2) He commissioned a beast-instrument from someone. 3) That someone apparently attempted to screw him over. 4) Someone named Ormsby stepped in and said, "Don't worry, we'll build that guitar for you." 5) And they did. 6) A Chinese company made a POS copy of the Ormsby beast-guitar. 7) Somewhere in this same general time frame, the ZZ Top gang happened to see a photo of the beast-guitar and started making jokes about it. The bass player thought that was the end of it, until... 😎 He shows up for practice one day and that yellow thing is sitting there. It's the Chinese POS, but they had another good laugh about the matter and decided that maybe it would be fun to take it out on stage once or twice. 9) They did. It went instantaneously viral. The bass player has a sense of humor about it, admitting that he could play the bass line for the entire song on one string and that the 17-string guitar is just a gag. What the Chinese knockoff is made of is anyone's guess, but the Ormsby's neck is Tasmanian blackwood and mahogany. The body is Tasmanian blackwood with a stone(?!?) front. WTF??? What, that thing's not going to be heavy enough already? I have never worked with Tasmanian blackwood and know nothing about it, but I have reference books that may shed some light on the matter. My opinion on mahogany, at least for bass necks, I've already made known. I've yet to find any information on tuning. I watched the video of Under Pressure. He does fret the upper (lower pitch) strings a few times by reaching over the top. He also plays them open, a la harp guitar. I don't recall him doing much of anything with the inner dozen strings or so, but maybe I blinked. Nevertheless, he admits it's all just in fun, so my hat's off to him. No, the sight of these guitars, either the Ormsby or the Chinese one, does not inspire me to recreate such a thing. I have some ideas that I might want to try for an 8-string bass (four courses of two strings, not eight individual strings), but I've got a number of other things I want to build first, so it will be a while before I get to that, if ever. Now, an electric harp guitar...that has tempted me ever since I first saw a picture of an old Gibson Model U. Do not be surprised if I pop out one of those, time permitting. Grey

Uh...did this thread get moved from one forum to another? Damned wobbly-assed forums...all these weird resonances that you can't predict! I could have sworn this thread started in the keyboard section....and guitar, rather than bass? Er...I'm confused, but that's not all that unusual. Having an 18" doesn't mean you're going that much lower than, say, a 15" or even a 10". Look at, say, the Eminence website and find their suggested cabinet designs, then check out the frequency responses. All things being equal, an 18" driver will have more mass in the cone, which will cause the driver's resonant frequency to drop, but...then you have to add a stiffer suspension to maintain control, which in turn drives the resonance back up. After all, you don't want the voice coil sagging or slamming into the back plate of the magnet structure. Etc. etc. etc. As a rule of thumb, you're not going to get useful response below the free air resonance, and in the real world won't really even approach it in a lot of cases. There are exceptions--for instance, you can pull some surprising low end out of a driver with a transmission line enclosure, but they're inefficient and huge and heavy...not characteristics likely to endear them to your average musician; they're a hard sell, even in the stereo world. In real world terms, you might move your -3dB point down by a few Hz by going with an 18"...maybe, 3-5Hz...? Look around. Compare apples to at least oranges, though it will be difficult. It doesn't really gain that much low end. So why use an 18" versus a gang of 10" drivers? Well, maybe you really want those few Hz, even if you're still nowhere near 30Hz. Or the weight might be worth the tradeoff--one 18" has more or less the same Sd (cone area) as four 10" drivers. Depending on the relative sizes and weights of the frames and magnet structures, it could end up being a lighter cabinet. And naturally, there's the sex appeal of this massive driver staring at you...after all, bigger is better, right? Oh, and distortion goes up as the cone excursion increases due to non-linearities in the suspension. For musicians, "that's not a bug, that's a feature!" What will change is the mid and high frequency response of the driver. A lot of people mistake lack of treble for increased bass (look at the tone control of a Fender Precision), but now we're trending into psychoacoustics, so let's not take that fork in the road. Once you work your way through all the Thiele-Small math, you can have any two of size, efficiency, or low bass, but you can't have all three. If you cheat and boost the low frequency response electronically, you're still going to run into problems. Since cone excursion quadruples with every falling octave, you're going to have to play at lower volume to keep from destroying the driver. To get your volume back, you'll need more cabinets and heaps of amplification. It's all rather expensive, unfortunately. And your roadie's going to hate you. Don't have a roadie? You're going to hate yourself. Don't forget the larger truck to carry everything. Those don't come cheap. For the record, I own two 18" cabinets: An SWR Big Ben and a Bag End with the Infra Bass module. Love them both, but they're playing games with the math. I used to own an Acoustic 371, which included the 301 cabinet with a Cerwin-Vega 18" in a horn-loaded enclosure. Horn enclosures are a different breed entirely. All you have to do to get the low end cutoff of a horn is look at the mouth area and a 301 is only (roughly) 2' x 4'...it's actually a midrange cabinet in disguise; a sheep in wolf's clothing. That's why the Acoustic 18" cabinets had that distinctive midrange honk. Go listen to John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin) or Jaco Pastorius (Weather Report) to hear "that sound." The cabinets are loud as hell, but deep? Not on your life. Same set of tradeoffs as Thiele-Small. This could be a really long discussion and we're getting away from the OP relating to the custom bass. I'm assuming it was custom built, or at least special order...ain't seen one in Walmart... Grey

Oh, and lack of definition on low B also gets into problems with amplification. Usually bass amps can go low enough (though not always...look at the bypass caps across the cathode resistors and the coupling caps between stages in tube amps), but bass cabinets typically start rolling off around 50-60Hz; an average cabinet is often down 6 - 8 - even as much as 10-12dB by the time you get to a low E at 41 or 42Hz. Low B? Ha! You're kidding, right? Response in the 30Hz range is down an additional 10dB or so, leaving the speaker cone doubling in a vain attempt to reproduce something it should never have to reproduce, particularly at high volume. Time for subwoofers. Another topic. Another day. Grey

My previous post should have been submitted about eight hours ago, but the phone rang and it was important and I had to get busy with other things...only to turn around and discover the post waiting patiently, unsubmitted. Lower notes require increasingly stiff necks. If you treat the neck and body as a resonant system that can have interactions with the strings as they vibrate, sometimes reinforcing, sometimes cancelling, you soon find that you've got the potential for mud. Lots of people blame the humbucking pickup on the Gibson EB-0 (and similar models) for the poorly defined low notes. Well...yes...and no. There's more to it that that. Gibson (who should know better) chose to use mahogany for the neck. Bad idea. Mahogany is on the lower end of the stiffness scale as far as potential neck woods go. For a bass, it's disastrous. The EB-0 pickup is wound very heavily and has high resistance, inductance, and capacitance as a result--some people call it a "mudbucker" and blame it exclusively for the EB-0's lack of definition. They should direct at least part of their ire towards the tonewoods chosen--particularly for the neck (the body was also mahogany). To make matters worse, the neck is narrow, which gives it a relatively small cross section, so not only is the wood comparatively flexible, but there's not enough of it to make up in bulk for what it lacks in stiffness. Note that I am not criticizing mahogany as used in a guitar neck, just bass necks. Not knowing anything about the instrument in the OP--what woods, construction details, etc.--I'm not in a position to speculate as to how stiff the neck is. Clearly, there's going to be a butt-load of tension with that many strings. Even details like whether the truss rods are mounted free in the slots in the neck or if they're imbedded in, say, silicone can become important. A few years ago, Fender released the Elite Series. Few now remember that Fender had an earlier Elite Series back in the '80s...their first attempt at active electronics. I owned two, a Telecaster and a Precision. Mine was a true Precision, with a single, split-coil pickup. They re-released the Precision a year or two later in a two pickup format...but I'm digressing...to get back on the trail, my Precision Elite had a bad resonance problem. If you held the bass by the top of the head and thumped the body, the entire bass would start going wooba-wooba, back and forth at about 3-5 Hz. I've never seen such a strong resonance. It made for some odd response in the low notes. I ended up getting rid of the poor thing. The neck wood? Maple. Normally a good choice for a bass. Which goes to show that there's more than just the choice of wood involved, but this could easily go off in other directions and I don't want to bore keyboard players with sordid guitar/bass things. I'll try to find some details on the bass in the OP so as to have less guess work and more solid facts, but it'll have to wait, it's been a long, hard day and I'm running on fumes. Grey PS: I'm currently building a double-neck guitar and bass. That'll be a total of ten strings, but they'll be divided over two necks in the usual configurations. So, no, it won't be as unusual as the 17-string above. Sorry.

I don't claim to know what happened behind the scenes. All I know is that the first one was tidy and cleanly wrapped; it gave every appearance of being brand new. The second and third ones were clearly retaped and the second was was defective in a similar, but not identical way to the first one. I didn't take pictures of the second one--should have, but didn't. I photographed the third one...some of which I posted above. I have more pictures if you want. The second unit's packing was similar in appearance to the third. So far, the third is working okay. I have to admit that this episode will be in the back of my mind the next time I want to buy gear. Grey

If I may venture an opinion... Speaking as a bass player and guitar player and luthier, my first thought on seeing the instrument was to either: a) Use it as you would a Chapman Stick -- or -- b) Use it as you would a harp guitar, using the upper strings (presumed lower pitch) as drone notes and play over that Disclaimer: I have not watched any videos or done any research as to what's going on. I could be wrong on one or both of my suggestions. The most strings I've ever played (on bass) was six. (Okay...okay...I've played an eight-string bass [four courses of two strings each], but I didn't own that one.) I eventually traded the six-string bass as part of a deal for a Martin, so I don't have it any more. Honestly, I feel more at home on four strings or maybe five; I don't regret letting go of the six. Well, not often, anyway. Speaking as a luthier, it doesn't look like all that difficult of a project, but I would expect the instrument to be neck-heavy and very prone to sympathetic resonances between strings that you're actively playing and the ones not being used. I've got a 6 & 12 double-neck that you can play that way--play the 6-string neck with the 12-string neck live and it produces a cool "playing in a cave" sort of echo effect. Grey

If we're down to something as arbitrary and elusive as "spirit" to define prog, then we're sunk. This will soon turn into, "It's prog because I say it's prog," which isn't a definition at all. Actually, I think we've already reached that point. While I'm sympathetic to the idea of true orchestral classical composers (Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, et. al.) being mentioned in a discussion like this, it's a dead end because they don't fit the other half of the term: Prog Rock. They were definitely direct influences for at least some of the musicians in question, but they weren't writing rock music. ELP did direct interpretations and Yes constantly referred to classical composers (in addition to using Rite of Spring over the PA to start their shows), but no one has said that Yes and ELP were classical composers...yet... I and a couple of others have made attempts to define prog as a genre, but others seem to want prog to mean anything they want it to mean. 1910 Fruitgum Company? Sure! Sly and the Family Stone? Of course! Melanie? Why not? Neil Diamond? Three Dog Night? Grand Funk Railroad? ...and so on... Eventually, you've added every band that ever existed because someone, somewhere said so. Once you've reached that stage, there's no point in continuing the discussion because prog rock, as a term, has become so watered down that it's meaningless. In like fashion, hard rock, heavy metal, punk, etc. will all come crashing down for the same reason. The next bastion to fall will be the overarching term rock, itself, along with jazz, classical, folk, country... Where does it end? Yes, it's all music (except maybe rap and its offshoots...but let's not open that can of worms) and it's difficult to categorize something that has so many sometimes subtle gradations. And yet...it's still possible to set apart a red oak (Quercus rubra) from a white oak (Quercus alba) in spite of the fact that they both have leaves and trunks and roots and acorns. Somebody took the time and trouble to think it through instead of waving their hands vaguely in the air and saying that they're clearly pine trees because they grow in the same climate... Grey

When people start saying ZZ Top and prog in the same sentence, I get cross-eyed. This is why I say prog lacks a definition. I cannot see a single prog molecule in the ZZ DNA. Lengthy solos do not, for me, make a band prog. If you're going down that path, you're going to be adding the Grateful Dead and every other jam band that's ever existed. Hell, Black Sabbath did some pretty lengthy soloing back when I saw them on the Master of Reality tour, lo, these many years ago. No, I don't think Black Sabbath qualifies as prog...it was just drug-induced noodling. As I expected and predicted, people keep throwing out examples of bands without advancing the definition. And some of the bands mentioned seem to be a bit of a stretch to me...a whole lot of rationalizing going on. Trying to claim that so-and-so was "influenced by prog" doesn't impress me. Everybody is influenced by everybody, to some greater or lesser degree. We all hear classical music, whether we go and seek it out of our own volition, afterwards. We all hear jazz. We all hear country. We all hear opera. Etc. There's an awful lot of straining going on as folks try to attribute characteristics to musicians and bands that...well...I think they're imagining things. Again--I don't claim to have a 24 carat definition for prog. I'm the guy who says (tongue only partly in cheek) it's a label people put on music that doesn't fit anywhere else. Even now, after all these years of people insisting that Tull belongs in the same bin as Yes, I cannot for the life of me hear common ground between those two bands. I love them both, but similar in any way? Nah. The only explanation is that prog is the receptacle for unclassifiable music. If I'm right, then by definition a definition is impossible, which makes it difficult to include or exclude a given specimen; prog is in the ear of the beholder. So, I submit that some of the following are necessary, but not sufficient. The rest are simply highly probable: --At least semi-skilled musicians, who at least some of the time play at or near the limits of their abilities. There are scads of very, very good, technically accomplished studio musicians who never cut loose. How they keep from exploding, I'll never understand. A prog musician has abilities and friggin' uses them. --In the process of cutting loose, a musician or band may push back the boundaries of currently accepted practice, but this is not a requirement. It's just them following their muse. --There's a statistically good chance that sooner or later they'll use something beyond the standard major and three minor scales. Ditto modes. --Likewise, there's a good chance that they'll go beyond 3/4 or 4/4 time. --Harmony is important, otherwise it's all too easy to descend into experimental noise. This doesn't have to result from formal training, a good ear will suffice, but a good internal editor is imperative. You have to have the courage to say this is garbage...start over. --Counterpoint isn't, strictly speaking, necessary, but it helps. --Instrumental sections are understood to be more extensive than just the typical lead break from guitar (or keys) at least some of the time. --Keyboards are a requirement, as far as I can tell. --All members of the band get to play non-trivial stuff at least sometime of the time, not just the guitar. --Eclectic, oblique, or abstract lyrics are fair game. Ordinary, mundane pop lyric themes are avoided, e.g. heartbreak, "lie down, I think I love you," etc. --It's not required, but it's not unusual for at least one member of the band to know how to play multiple instruments. --It's not required, but it's not unusual for at least one member of the band to use multiple guitars (I'm looking at you, Steve Howe), keyboards (Rick Wakeman), drums and sundry percussion (Carl Palmer), etc. during a single performance. Tones and varying musical textures can be important. --Standard I-IV-V, 12-bar format is avoided. Note that this still doesn't properly define prog, at least to me. Each point is merely a stake, driven in the ground, in a (probably futile) attempt to fence in the beast. Grey

I wanted a Novachord, too. Googled to see if there were any for sale...only to find that one had been sold, cheap(ish), right here in my home town, like, a year prior to my search and I had missed it, simply because I didn't know it existed. Boy, was I pissed. Grey

Looks like I’m coming in late on this. I'm short on time, but I’ll try to skim a few points on the fly... Tusker, I’m okay with your point about prog being a synthesis of rock and other forms of music, but I don’t see that it’ll get us far in defining prog. After all, rock itself is derived from blues, folk, etc., so it seems to me that the synthesis thing is redundant...of course prog is a synthesis of other forms...it’s rock. Now, your point about mythical themes and so forth strikes me as more useful. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a single “oh, baby, lie down, I think I love you” prog song. I’m not against that sort of thing, mind you—I adore Led Zeppelin, for instance—but it’s just not part of the prog mindset. On the other hand, a lot of prog lyrics are pretty random. Some are so abstract that it’s not clear what they’re about unless the person who wrote the song tells us what was on their mind—and frankly, even then I still have trouble seeing the putative message. It might be easier and more efficient just to make a much shorter list of what prog songs aren’t about: groupies and sex. Even then, I strongly suspect that there will be counterexamples. “...Move popular rock music further than its normal boundaries.” I, for one, have railed against I-IV-V, 12-bar songs on more than one occasion. Speaking as a bass player, they’re boring, repetitive, and soul-deadening. Breaking out of that mold is part of what I find attractive about prog. But more about this later. Prog vs. fusion jazz. Oi! This is a question I have wrestled with for years, nay, decades. Let me ask you this question: If you heard Return To Forever or Mahavishnu Orchestra without knowing that some of the musicians involved had jazz backgrounds (e.g. played with Miles Davis), would you still label the music as fusion “jazz?” I submit that the fusion jazz moniker was a back-formation by those who already knew that Chick Corea, for instance, had played with Davis. If Corea had simply dropped from the sky, would you still think of RTF as necessarily being “jazz?” Yes, possibly jazz influenced, but still… Think before you answer. Another Scott, You’re close to a point that I have made before—that prog filled arenas and got airplay because the economy was in the doldrums in the ‘70s. As the economy heated up, prog fell out of favor because people began seeking more frivolous music that they could dance to. Prog demands attention from the listener, dance music doesn’t. Old No7, “Keyboards.” Again, someone will probably pop up with a counterexample, but I can’t think of a prog band that doesn’t prominently feature some sort of keyboards. Synthesizers, specifically? Not sure about that, but keyboards, for sure. CEB, This has long been a source of frustration for me. At least where I lived, Yes and ELP were called classical rock, not prog. Jethro Tull wasn’t grouped with them at all, by anyone. While I can’t put a date on it, the first time I heard the term “prog” used to define a genre was, I think, in the ‘80s, more or less contemporary with the rise of “classic rock” radio stations. I always understood it to be a concession to those who were confused by the similarity of “classical” and “classic.” I distinctly remember being offended at the unnecessary rebranding of music I had known for years as classical rock. Some people claim to have heard the term prog earlier. All I can report is my experience: Han shot first. Shamanzarek, “Usually Prog implies a high level of musicianship.” Yeah, this I think I can go with. Prog ain’t for the guy who only knows three chords and plays all three of them badly. This ties with something I said in the Keith Emerson thread in that musicians with chops often like to stretch out and play at their limits. One of those limits frequently being speed, they might play fast once in a while. However, the high level might also indicate music theory, so you will also tend to find modes and unusual scales in prog and fusion jazz. On the subject of pushing boundaries, which several people have mentioned… This strikes me as problematic. The boundaries, however defined, were much closer and more confining back in the late ‘60s and ‘70s. The limits were easier to find. Now that those limits have been tested, the new boundaries are further away. What do you have to do in order to do something that no one has ever done before? A lot of the music I’ve heard that’s been suggested to me as prog is so far afield as to be literal noise. I don’t like it. Go back and listen to Yes or ELP. Melodies, carefully crafted. Counterpoint. Harmony. Whether someone likes it or not is a matter of personal taste, but you can’t deny that there’s music there. I am not persuaded that testing boundaries is necessary for music to be prog. If someone were to write something in the vein of Close To The Edge today, would it still be prog? I’d say absolutely. If someone says no, because there are no walls being broken down, then I have to question what they want from music. Just rule breaking? Is that really what prog is about? I remember when CTTE came out. I didn’t think, “Oh, goody, walls being broken down!” I thought, “Oh, holy shit! Will you listen to this music! Hear what Wakeman did there? Awesome!” Rap tested boundaries. Did that make it prog? No. For that matter, all rock was about breaking walls in the beginning. Does that mean that all rock was prog? No. I just don’t see boundaries as being a necessary condition for something to be prog. Similarly, I feel that a lot of “classical” music that was written over the last century is garbage. Just noise. People decry the lack of support for classical music—it’s because a lot of it was written purely to “push boundaries.” Well...mission accomplished, but the result is unlistenable. The best “classical” music written over the last century was created for movie soundtracks, but the music itself has legs. It’s beautiful. It just plain works. And it gets listened to far more often in concert halls because it’s real. Another thought I’d like to offer: In prog, all instruments get a chance to play. The long-suffering bass player isn’t shoved against the back wall. The keyboards aren’t restricted to one or two polite fills between verses. The guitar isn’t bound to playing only chords during the verses. Everybody gets a chance to do something non-trivial. I had another thought, but it slipped away before I could get it down. If I’m a Lucky Man, it’ll come back to me in a Roundabout way... Grey

The point I was striving for is that if you're saying that the spirit of prog lives on in music by X and I don't hear that same spirit, then...er...we're not going to get anywhere. We need objective criteria. I've said elsewhere and will say again here that I think prog, as a genre, is the bin critics throw music in when they can't decide what it is. It makes it easier to hate. I've heard some stuff that people claim is prog where the label appears to be based on fast playing. Only on fast playing. This, to me, is problematic. Yes and ELP featured some fantastic musicians who frequently played fast, but Jethro Tull, for example, didn't really do a lot of that. If playing fast is a (the?) criterion, then Romantic Warrior gets through the gate, easy-peasy, as does a lot of Al DiMeola's solo stuff. But then we should consider Joe Satriani, who can tear off some blindingly fast riffs, and Eddie Van Halen...whoa, wait a minute...I don't think anybody's going to buy the notion of Van Halen as a prog band. So, to me, fast playing doesn't cut it as a defining element, at least on its own. Yet there are people who think "shred" is the veritable essence of prog. I think they kinda missed the point of what Yes and ELP were doing. Lest anyone get the wrong idea, I am very much for fast playing--if you have anything musically valid to say! A bunch of fast scales do not impress me in the least. Show me a damned melody, not just an Em scale at light speed. A lot of musicians deemed promising by others don't even get off the ground with me because they took lessons wherein they learned a bunch of scales, but there's nothing in their hearts. Go home, kid. You're disqualified. Come back when you can do something like Carlos Santana does with Europa. Or, for that matter, a tenth of what Joe Satriani can do...god, that guy can play fast, but there are melodies there worth listening to. Whatever prog is, I'm dying to find people who want to play it (I could really use a keyboard player), because I strongly suspect that a hypothetical critic would toss my music into the prog bin without a second glance. I like Belgian triples, British barley wines, cabernet sauvignon or other big body reds, single malt Scotch, and rum...which is still relatively affordable, not having gotten as popular as Scotch. Or tea. Grey