AROIOS

After decades of procrastination, finally got around to transcribing the Clav on this one. All the other instruments were extremely simple, so I laid them down as well. The mojo of this groove really came from the beautiful interplay among all the parts. And, of course, the beautiful voice of Michael McDonald I Keep Forgettin' 1.5.mp3

Our tastes on harmony align pretty well and I suspect you ran across some of the more boring Funk tracks like the one OP posted. Funk as a genre can be pretty diverse, ranging from James Brown to Parliament to Chaka Khan to Janet Jackson to Red Hot Chili Peppers. And they sound vastly different in 1)melody, 2) harmony and 3) timbre/instrumentation. The only common thread among all types of Funk music is 4) rhythm. Funk is one of the most interesting innovations in rhythm in the 20th century. Popular music would have been so boring if we didn't have the influences from Funk. This tune shows the more melodic and harmonically rich side of Funk, I would be surprised if you find it equally boring. 👇

For folks interested in Sax patches, YAMAHA has some decent sax sound on their arranger boards. The "Sweet! Tenor Sax" patch I used in the two quick demos below sounded amazing when they first came out almost 30 years ago. The TYROS line have added some beautiful "Super Articulation" sax sounds since. Sweet! Tenor Sax 1.mp3 Sweet! Tenor Sax 2.mp3

Founder/CEO Mr. Stefano Lucato is an excellent composer too. I love this demo tune he wrote. Brings me right back to late 70's/early 80's when this type of orchestral Sophisti-Pop was much more common.

Audio Modeling (formerly named Sample Modeling) has been on my radar for a while. The expressiveness of their instruments is simply incredible. And what a nice coincidence to have a room full of amazing Italian music nerds!

They've put out a lot of great tunes, but I've always found their signature machine-gun straight 16th bass notes the least Funky thing imaginable.

Avant-garde

Love Louis Cole but this one sounds like a contrived attempt at mixing Stevie Wonder's gravy with Moonchild's wine. Both are uniquely rich and strong, but I'd rather enjoy them separately.

Excellent Blues, but his time is sandpaper to my crude ears. Sounds like my DAW when the OS hits 110% load, I feel bad for the folks who ever tried to dance to this.

I love Debussy, Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Steely Dan, Duke, Yes, Parliament, The Struts... equally. And I've always found it idiotic to divide music by periods and generations. A Cmaj9 is a Cmaj9, whether it's played on a harp, Rhodes, or a Strat; a shuffle is a shuffle, whether it's played on an axatse, a set of Ludwig, or a TR-808. Folks who base their musical consumption on "timeliness" of a tune, are one of the biggest reasons so much annoying/idiotic noise fill our air, while tons of great music become neglected and forgotten.

Nothing to feel embarrassed about, brother. Music is a very personal experience. Don't ever let my (or anyone's) snarky comments hold you back from enjoying what you like.

Jazz aside, weren't Easy Listening (as a genre) way more sophisticated in harmonies and changes than what Beatles brought to the table? Edit: Never mind. I soon realized that Easy Listening was much less relevant to your particular situation playing in a rock&roll band at the time.

The vinyl revival and iPhone fetish are a big part of why I don't trust the average consumer's eyes, ears (or brain) at all. 😃

Looked it up out of curiosity, what a disappointment. If that's the kind of shit "the old system" has suppressed, thank God, it can stay in Sahara for all I care. 😆

Yes, it does have all of XV-5080's samples and patches. That said, some of the patches won't sound the same as they do on JV and XV, because of changes in effect routing design. Any JV/XV patches that have significant differences among EFX send levels at the element/partial/layer level will likely sound different on Integra-7, Zenology and most newer Roland romplers. If you're nerdy enough to dig into the details, here's my ranting about it a while ago.

Love the first song, thanks for the share. It sounds like John Mayer joining with Squeeze.

I blame it on Max Martin and the Backstreet Boys. 😃

For those of us who aren't oblivious to the decline of popular music (not to be conflated with the business/industry), what they discussed about certainly isn't limited to just Rock.

I'm glad to hear that. Unfortunately, most of the GenZ/Millenials I come across have boring tastes. It's not their fault at all, just a result of what they've been conditioned with from early on. He deserves a big hug from me. Even on a forum like ours, lots of folks just don't or choose not to see it.

Photography, reading, computer programming, gardening, crafting/tickering... These have all been excellent for recharging my musical brain.

First we'll have to define "music that Gen Z is enamored with". If that's measured by Top 40 charts, then NOPE. Music is about 1) Melody; 2) Harmony; 3) Rhythm; 4) Timbre (or sound design). Those who love non-instrumental music might add 5) Lyrics, which is really more Literary than Music per se. I'm a sucker for 2) harmony. And there has been zero advancement but plenty of regression in this area of the "music GenZ is enamored with". Rhythm-wise, 1/32 notes in HipHop and Dilla's "drunk swing" beat pushed the envelope, bu it's been mostly stagnant since the mid 90's. Melodies, again, stagnant since the mid 90's. Timbre, this is where most of the progress is. There have been some interesting sound design and mixing ideas in the past 20 years. BTW, folks who make claims like "you love what you grew up with" are blind to the fact that so many listeners love music that came out way before they were born.

Better yet, a Linux app I can run on a Raspberry Pi. I couldn't care less about supporting walled POSIX gardens like iOS and Android. But for the manufacturers, these type of decisions are ultimately about money, Roland and Korg obviously have very different cash forecast models about mobile revenues. Maybe one day Roland has a new CEO, and hipsters will be air-playing virtual Jupiter-8s in Vision Pro and Oculus Rift.

Yup, you found it!

I loved my XP-30 too. With excellent synth action, aftertouch, 3 built-in SR-JV cards and over 1000 sounds, it was a very well rounded song_writing/home_studio power tool. Roland made a great decision to package the "Session" card with it and the JV-1010.

I've had several JVs and a XV-5080 and a 5050 but never a 3080. IIRC, XV-3080s' had 32KHz samples, just like the JVs. JD-990 and XV-5080/5050 have 44KHz samples. As a result, JVs and 3080s can produce frequencies up to 16KHz, more than enough for our older ears, but missing some of the ethereal fairy dust young folks might catch. Many have suspected that this is the reason the JVs and 3080s sounded warmer. On the other hand, Eric Persing mentioned once that Roland did some "hyping" on the analog output of the 5080s, as well as their S-760 samplers. Korg did similar tricks on their TRITON STUDIOs (2nd gen in the family). A lot of people loved that kind of "hyped" sound. I remember preferring the slightly more "Hi-Fi" sound of my 5080 over my JVs on the same patches 20 years ago. Nowadays, with the plethora of saturation/exciter plugins out there, we can easily do our own "hyping". Those tiny sonic differences among models and sample sets within the same product family had stopped triggering my GAS/GIS long time ago. Even a JV-1010 has a DAC chip with flatter frequency response and wider dynamic range than what those early 90's samples could ever ask for. Once my attention shifted towards programming and re-programming patches, I got so much more fun out of these boxes. The core Super-JV software architecture Roland designed and coupled with their 90's state-of-the-art hardware remains largely unchanged even til today. Other than polyphony (which we can easily double given how cheap these boxes are), the only upgrade the JVs/XVs need is the ROM capacity. And even that can be solved with 3rd party "Pseudo" SR-JV expansion cards today. (Shhhh... don't let Roland hear that) Enjoy your XV, Eric. I'm sure it'll complement your Nord well.