JamPro

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Does the Behringer mixer channels receiving the output from your MS have input trim controls? At what level are the input trim controls set?

In classical theory, the rule is always: to get to a new key, you first go to the V dominant (of the new key), then to the tonic of the new key. This is because when hearing the V dominant, our ears/mind expect that V dominant to be followed by the tonic. Composers use that expectation to smoothly switch between keys. Given that you are in A, and want to go to G lydian - which is essentially a D scale and is simply an A scale with a flatted seventh - you might not need any fancy tricks to make that transition. And don't forget about the tri-tone substitution: instead of doing I (old key) to V7 (new key) to I (new key), you can do I (old key) to bII7 (new key) to I (new key). Now your job is to go to your keyboard and experiment a bit, and then tell us what works for your situation.

I have car and home-owner's insurance in case of accident, fire and/or other contingencies. When asked by the sales-people if I want to purchase supplemental insurance for a given item I am buying, I always ask: "Is that thing I'm buying made so poorly you expect it to break soon?" The answer is always a hurried "no". Consumer Reports tells us such point-of-sales insurance plans are little more than a way to get more money out of consumers, and most consumers never need to (or worse, forget to) file a claim, and often find they do not get the benefit they expected if they do file a claim. I try to buy stuff I think will last; if I don't think it is well made, I buy another brand/model. For accidents, I have car and home insurance, which handles the big stuff. My calculation is that any insurance that covers "drunk guy spilled a beer on my keyboards" is not cost-effective.

There was a period in college when I listened to that Compared To What recording every day.

Bruce Hornsby's AP on The Way It Is Joe Zawinal's Oberheim on Birdland; Joe Zawinal's lead synth sound on Black Market Stevie Wonder's clav on Superstition. Keith Emerson's Moog on Lucky Man. Micheal MacDonald's Rhodes on What A Fool Believes Jan Hammer's Moog on the Miami Vice soundtrack title music.

And woodenchaknoit? The F blues scale is related to and the relative minor of the Ab blues scale - and can be used as a substitute for the Ab blues scale (mostly). To my ear, the Ab blues scale sounds more bluesy and "downtown", and the F blues scale sounds more jazzy and "uptown". Try using that F blues scale where you have been playing the AB blues scale: see how that works for you. Using both a blues scale and its relative minor will definitely expand your solo vocabulary. It certainly makes perfect musical sense to add an F note to a blues scale - don't let theory hold you back when you think the sound is right.

BattleBots is great fun - it is painless destruction and no one should feel guilty watching it. I love it when the crumpled and broken robot bursts into flames while the victor is dancing around it. My guilty pleasure is watching the "1st Amendment Auditors" on YouTube. Most of them are bs, but I guiltily enjoy watching someone loudly criticizing cops.

Opera is one of the few styles of music for which I change the channel when it comes on the radio. As a keyboard player, funky Clav style is the kind of playing I dread the most: I think I sound like I am stumbling, instead of funky. Weirdly enough, those around me end up saying "I want to hear more of that".

From where I sit (on stage), I have no way to know what the PA sounds like to the audience. I can only know what it sounds like in the spot where my two ear are - where I sit. So I don't worry about the PA or how it sounds to the audience. These days I monitor the keys with either a powered speaker (Yamaha DXR) or IEMs. I don't imagine changing that whether the PA is a line array type or a point-source type. I don't imagine changing that if a band member starts using a personal line-array monitor system. I have worked to EQ some piano sounds in my live rig to roll off the bass response, and to minimize reverb. What kind of PA we are playing thru has little impact on my rig.

When playing chords, don't get caught fingering a minor.

So this event happened in 2022, so I am able to tell how I handled it and how it all turned out. My first thought was to do the gig with my melodica. I have one, but I never practice it, and I never worked on any of the band material with it, so that seemed like a bad idea, even if it nicely solved the logistical problems. I wasn't going to risk my keyboard by leaving it on stage. Given that this would mean setting up the keyboard in the immediate minutes before the performance, I told the band I was willing to do the show, but I would not do the soundcheck. I made it clear this was because I was not willing to move my equipment twice for one 40-min set paying $50. I suggested an alternative: I will do both soundcheck and show if someone else is willing to wrangle their keyboard on that stage for my use. They told me no they were not going to do that. So I arrived at the venue at 5:30, found a parking spot roughly 500 yards from the stage, moved my gear next to the stage steps, and set up on stage as the previous performance was leaving the stage. The place was chaos. This was a typical small-town, hastily-organized, poorly-managed affair. The stage "crew" was the sound guy and his one assistant. The stage surface was packed with all kinds of band gear, with only a narrow strip cleared up front for performers to set up. More band gear was clustered all around the stage, on the ground and under the stage. There was no security, and anyone could have walked up on the stage and take any piece of gear and walk off to disappear down the street. The performance before our band was the local "band-camp" group: 30 or so teenagers on and around the stage, switching on and off the stage with each song, some of them sitting on the music gear packed up on the stage. I very glad I decided to skip the soundcheck. Our performance was exactly what I expected: way too loud and way too fast. Fortunately, it was over quickly, and I humped my gear safely back to my car. Everyone in the band was furious with me (with the exception of the drummer, who seemed somewhat diffident - perhaps he remembered all the times I had helped hump his drums on and off a stage). One band-member told me "You have to do what we tell you to do". The guitarist told me to my face "I don't care if your gear gets damaged during one of our gigs". For my part, I felt no obligation to apologize for having a limit or a boundary, and felt no obligation to apologize for saying "no" when my limit or boundary is being pushed. I never thought of myself as their employee, but rather as a collaborator. And I felt when you tell your collaborator "You have to do what we tell you to do", it's no longer a collaboration. A couple of months later, they told me they wanted to hire a different keyboard player (they couldn't fire me right away because they had a couple of high-visibility corporate gigs coming up). I didn't protest: I wasn't having fun, and I felt that productive collaboration was no longer possible. For me, the lesson in all this is "don't get yourself involved in a situation where you have to fight over a soundcheck for a stupid 40-min gig paying $50" - something I hear in the comments here of others. I get asked often, but so far I have refrained from jumping back into regular gigging. I've done a few one-off gigs. This experience has changed how I look at gigging and what exactly I get out of it.

I got myself in a band "situation". I made my choices and took the action I felt was correct for me. And sometimes I second-guess myself. I would like to describe the situation and see how others would have handled it. So I'm playing keyboards for a few years with a band doing what I think are cool songs (a lot of Stevie Wonder; some James Brown; some Meters; some N'Awlins funk, etc.). The band does roughly 40 gigs a year, so pretty steady work. The BL tells us we have a gig in a few months at a local "street festival". We are told the event will have a stage and a PA. Forty minute set, drum set provided by venue, no need to bring our PA, $50 for each bandmember. Cool - I agree to the gig. Five days before the gig, the BL tells us we must show up for the gig at 2pm for sound-check, and we perform at 6:30pm - this info was not presented to us when we initially talked about accepting this gig. There are eight different groups scheduled to perform. Me: "what happens on that stage between 2pm and 6:30pm?" BL: "The other bands are doing their sound-checks or their performances." Me: "So I can't leave my keyboards on the stage after the sound-check?" BL: "Oh, sure you can." Me: ???? I'm thinking if I leave my keyboards set up on stage, it will get knocked over, or have drinks spilled on it, or some other horror. That seems like a really bad idea to me. The alternative is to move my gear onto the stage to do sound-check, move it off stage after sound-check (if possible, back to my car for safety, but I have no idea where I will be parked), move the keyboards back onto the stage for performance, and then move gear off the stage after the performance, all while scores of other musos are moving their gear on and off the stage. I had planned to go light for this show: my Nord Electro in soft gig-bag, folding metal keyboard stand, keyboard bench, pedals and wiring, music stand, and book of band charts. At least two trips each way. When I suggest to the band that this is a logistical problem for me, they are unsympathetic: the drummer is already catered to, and the guitarist, horn players, and singer can all easily move their gear onto and off the stage. The BL tells me these are the venue requirements, and I simply have to go along. It is now three days before the gig. I think I have some band/stage experience, but I know others here have more experience than I. So I wonder how you would handle such a situation. I'll share how I dealt with it later in the thread.

Peter Martin has some great instructional material in YT; I make a point of watching when I see them. If you don't mind my asking: what do you pay for this course?

What Mr. Tusker said: DP will have a way to remap the CC numbers coming from your YC to the CC numbers needed by UA B3 If you are stuck, try Googling "Digital Performer how do I remap midi CC numbers". Let us know if that works for you.

Czerny - Practical Method for Beginners on the PianoForte - Op. 599. This a good book for beginners: a graded series of piano exercises written as songs. The easiest ones are note recognition, so useful for those learning to read music; the more advanced ones are intermediate level pieces. The pieces are short so students can learn the whole piece pretty quickly.

I love those window dormers in your studio. It looks like a great place to play.

I suggest the most important feature your new mixer will need is the ability to create six separate mixes (1 FOH + 5 monitor mixes for the performers), and enough physical outputs to output all those mixers. The X32 seems like a good candidate.

If you are on a budget, do not spend any money on new speakers until you are sure the speakers are the problem. And from the description, I am not sure at all that your current speakers are the problem. I'm going to suggest you look in Logic, and check the channel volume of each track or instrument. Does the Drum track play back robustly by itself? What happens when you try to play live with one Drum track? See if there is a limiter/compressor in the virtual signal chain. "But when I play multuple tracks/vst's, especially if one of them is drums, the sound from the speakers fades/low volume....." Do you actually notice the volume fading? What are the virtual output levels showing in Logic when you hear the volume change? Let us know what you find.

That Rheem Mark VII was my very first keyboard. I bought it, a red tuck-'n-roll Fender amp and a 15" speaker cabinet all for $300 from a pawn shop in Cambridge, MA., around 1976. I remember not liking it because it didn't sound like the organ on all those cool Allman Bros. records (which was of course a Hammond and Leslie). I sold it when I bought a 73-key Rhodes Suitcase. Occasionally, I peruse Reverb with fantasies of buying another one for the sake of nostalgia.

SoulLive - one of my favs

I think the keyboard is poorly oriented relative to the guitar body. Don't you want the white side of the keyboard where the deep guitar body cut-out is (i.e. black keys on the L side; white keys on the R side)?

I don't have any respect for "musicians" who require backing tracks to make music. I have a little more sympathy for solo buskers who use backing tracks, because it is so logistically difficult to get a functioning band down on the subway platform to play for spare change. At the 125th St. 4,5,6 subway station in NYC, there used to be a drummer, singing and drumming all by himself. He had pretty good chops and a decent singing voice. I never saw him use backing tracks. Much respect. I often felt inspired enough to wonder if I could manage to drag my Casio Privia down there and play with him.

You know that inner voice you hear in your head? The one that speaks to you in your own native language; the one you call "my thoughts", or "my inner monologue"; the one that sometimes is commenting on your situation and doings, sometimes praising and criticizing; the one that comes up with all those great replies 24 hours after you could have actually used them; the one that helps you compose say a post at the Music Players Network forum? We all have this inner voice which we call "consciousness". Is it possible that this inner monologue could speak to us with musical notes and phrases instead of with words? I believe that it is possible - and we can train our brains to speak to us with music instead of words. I think I can sometimes hear my musical inner voice, and I would like to develop this part of my brain further. Because I am also imagining that being able to focus on my inner musical voice - instead of my inner verbal voice - would change my task as a piano player: hear the inner musical voice and then play those notes on the piano. Of course, one would need a great familiarity with the piano to achieve this. In some limited musical circumstances, I think I can achieve this. I can solo over a blues - where the blues scale is a well-worn track in my musical consciousness - hear the inner musical voice speaking in that blues scale, and play on the piano whatever that voice is singing, in real time. Doing this, the music simply flows out of me, seemingly endlessly. I'm working on expanding this method to major and minor 2-5-1s with some success. Ultimately, I imagine playing standards such as Autumn Leaves this way. I'm wondering what other musicians think of all this. Do you have an inner musical voice? Can you use your inner musical voice to make music in the outer world? Do you try and practice this? Any other comments?

"It's really hard to find good players who just want to put a great gig on a few times a month,..." If you have spent some time trying to get local gigs in your area, you have probably discovered that getting any gig is a full-time job. That's why guys/girls out getting gigs will rarely stop at one or two: when putting in that much effort, you will want to get as many as you can. That said, there is nothing stopping you from going out to get a few gigs. The benefit here is with a couple of gigs in your pocket, you then get to choose the material and musicians to play them, and you can eliminate boring songs or frustrating guitarists. I think my "performing live" days are over. I quit the dance band I had been in because I was no longer enjoying the physical labor of setting up or tearing down a stage, nor enjoying being told what to play and how to play it by someone who only knows pentatonic scales and cannot properly count in a song. There are some parts of regular gigging I miss, but mostly I'm relieved.