OT: "About Your Avatar or User Name..."

[stoken6]

12 hours ago, MathOfInsects said:

My name is Mat Hofinsects.

Interesting fact - the name is of Irish descent: Matty H. O'Finsects

 

Cheers, Mike.

[Canoehead]

I was an avid listener to CBC Radio in the 80’s.  The comedy troupe, The Frantics character Mr. Canoehead struck a chord with me.  At the time I joined the forum I was also a very active canoeist.  

[wineandkeyz]

When I moved to the Chapel Hill, NC area 20-some years ago, I read that Sam Cassell of Florida State had accused the local UNC folks of being a "wine and cheese crowd" (he may have actually said "cheese and wine"?). So I twisted the phrase a bit because I like to play keys and, well...

[stillearning]

I’m getting on in years (68 this summer) and feel there’s always something new for me to learn, and grateful I’m still able to do so, although I do feel my memory slipping as I age. 

 

I’m retired, but teach music two evenings a week, mostly to kids 8 to 16. Sometimes I’ll need help navigating a new function of my latest smart phone, and they’ll grab the phone from me to just do whatever needs done. I always take it back with the admonition “Don’t just do it for me, teach me how to do it for myself!” And hopefully we both learn something from that exchange!

[nadroj]

13 hours ago, AUSSIEKEYS said:

 

Hah ...I always remember you as the "AIRkeyboard" guy

 

I know that's some sitcom guy (probably famous) but i can't put my finger on what sitcom as we didnt get as many US sitcoms over here 

 

I think he has the name of Joey??? Every sitcom seems to have a Joey on it?

 

I try to work it out everytime you post hee hee

 

Oh just read your thing backwards

 

"Made it my avatar. There was an episode of frieds where he played keys. I also like paul rudd"

 

So is this someone called Paul Rudd?

 

I did a google now and i know that guy ive enjoyed some of his stuff..obviously this shot is a very young version of the photos i can find . God im hopeless with names. Truley.

 

Anyway your avatar always stuck out Jordan

 

nadroJ tuo kcuts syawla ratava ruor yawynA

 

 

edit:  i can see its on the Friends set now (we are bombarderd with 2 sessions everynight around dinner)

 

..whoo thats a weight off my feeble mind finally. Its definately not the character i thought it was who was in a band on the show  (played keyboards or was it guitar) on another sitcom that we rarely saw.  A shmaltsy sitcom. More for the 17 to 20 year old demography.

Aussiekeys, im impressed you went through the effort to decipher my post. You nailed it. Kudos! 

[nursers]

Nursers was my username with Res Rocket Surfer, the first internet band / collaboration software, add a PhD recently and you have my current handle.

[BluMunk]

I think I came up with this name for this board. I had/have a user name I used  on some forums based on a Lord of the Rings character. I wanted something a little more musical for this place, and so I picked a song title out of the Real Book, stylized it in a way that I felt might help it be unique so I could be consistent website to website, and there you have it.

 

I use this user name in most music-centric places online.

[conundrum]

18 hours ago, ElmerJFudd said:

I dialed into the bizarre World Wide Web sometime in the 90s. A place of both strange names and common names ending in many digits.  I chose Elmer J. Fudd and my signature on forums read, “I am Elmer J. Fudd, millionaire.  I own a mansion and a yacht” referencing an iconic Loonie Tunes episode.  What I found was a barrage of frustration by those unfamiliar with the cartoon who felt I was bragging and didn’t need to tell them how wealthy I was.  🙂  

 

I hope you replied with something like this:

 

[analogika]

analogika hamburg has been the name of my studio and various endeavours since the late 1990s. 
 

For reasons to do with the nature of the equipment I collected. 
 

The avatar is from a gig with my trio, The Drawbars, back before I added the Odyssey to the setup. 

[Adan]

My name is my name.  The picture, which has been up for years, came about while playing a solo piano gig in a bar in Little Italy, San Francisco.  Some random lady was sitting at a table doodling and gave me this rendering of me at the upright.  There are still people wandering around SF who did too much acid in the 60's.  She may have been one of them.

[JohnDoe]

"John Doe (male) and Jane Doe (female) are multiple-use placeholder names that are used when the true name of a person is unknown"

 

I know my name is John, today is friday but......that is all I know.

[Iconoclast]

Iconoclast being one of the movements in Tarkus, and Tarkus was already taken.

The picture refers to my old job. I was an F-16 pilot in the USAF from 1989-2011.

[Polychrest]

The etymological explanation:

 

A polychrest is “a thing adapted to to many uses”.   Most electronic keyboards today are polychrests in that they offer multiple instrument choices to players.  Players who are polychrests offer a degree of competence on multiple types of keyboards.  In my dreams I still aspire to be a keyboard polychrest.

 

The real story:

 

Back in the early ‘70s, I was offered a gig backing up a gifted singer-songwriter.  But there was a catch:  he wanted electric piano in his band, not the Hammond that was my main axe at the time.  I agreed and signed on.

 

The shiny new toy in the Toronto L&M keyboard showroom back then was an RMI Electra-piano.  It was said to be multi-functional:  part piano, part harpsichord, part organ.  It sounded cheesy to me, but my new band leader liked it, so I bought it.  I hated playing it.  The action was muddy, incapable of nuance, and running it through a guitar amp made it a sonic bludgeon.  I missed my battered old M3 and Leslie 145.  But the guy’s tunes were good and he was happy with me….

 

Around the same time I was reading a great historical novel by Patrick O’Brian.  It was set in the Napoleonic wars and featured a freaky experimental British warship called HMS Polychrest.  The vessel had a set of strange sliding keels and was sharp at both ends like a Viking longship, among other dubious innovations.  It was designed “to sail against wind and tide”, but didn’t.  It leaked and handled like a floating bath tub.  It was known in the Royal Navy as “the carpenter’s mistake”.  It came to a bad end.

 

That’s where I first encountered the word "polychrest".  I immediately recognized that my RMI Electra-piano was the musical equivalent of HMS Polychrest—an ill-designed carpenter’s mistake that deserved to wind up at the bottom of some local harbour.  Until I learned the real meaning of the word, a polychrest to me was a clunky keyboard that tried to do multiple things but none of them well.

 

When I drill down deeply enough, I'm forced to conclude my user name here is a disrespectful salute to that horrible old RMI keyboard.

 

**********************

 

My avatar is an image of the late Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip on a goalie mask owned by Edmonton Oilers goalie Mike Smith.  A fusion of classic Canadian rock and hockey.

[marino]

Very simple: Marino was going to be my name. But at the last minute, my parents decided to switch to Carlo. (it's a bit more complicated than this, but I'll spare you the details)

I like my name, but I also like how Marino sounds, and its meaning too ("of the sea"), so it became sort of my ghost name, which I used as a pseudonym in a bunch of situations.

When the internet started, I had no trouble choosing a 'user name' for the various forums. 

 

54 minutes ago, Iconoclast said:

The picture refers to my old job. I was an F-16 pilot in the USAF from 1989-2011.

 

Wow. "My old job", he said casually...

 

 

[eric]

Cool thread! I'm Eric and for whatever reason when I signed up on here back in the early '00s, I chose the lowercase "eric" as my forum user name.

 

As for my avatar, all of the credit for that goes to a very iconic thread about a forum member on the quest for a Leslie, involving a trip to West Virginia. Somehow that thread took a turn towards Deliverance, and zeronyne created the avatar I've been using now for most of my tenure on this forum. For anyone not familiar, there's a '70s era movie called Deliverance, about an ill-fated canoe trip on a river in West Virginia (or may have been Georgia, I can't remember if it was filmed in one or the other). The avatar zeronyne created was based on a scene from the movie. Zeronyne very masterfully added a Leslie in the canoe and a Hammond B3 being dragged behind the canoe.

 

This avatar was offered to "one of us southern boys" and I claimed first dibs. I guess I'm a southern boy since I live in Virginia, though I've always felt like I'm a Californian at heart. I don't have a single bit of a southern accent, other than saying "y'all" because that has been a Virginia thing forever.

[AUSSIEKEYS]

8 hours ago, nadroj said:

Aussiekeys, im impressed you went through the effort to decipher my post. You nailed it. Kudos! 

 

Hee hee .  Thats cause 

 

"I live in a land down under

 

Where every thing is backwards

 

No wonder"

[Piktor]

The first recording that I heard from David Sancious was a piece titled Piktor's Metamorphosis. I loved David's approach to music and his creamy Minimoog leads and I like the idea of transformation. The song title comes from a Herman Hesse story, but I was not fancy enough to know that. My wife and friends laughed when I revealed my online name, because it makes me sound like a person who wears a tinfoil hat. Piktor is actually Albanian for "painter" and that feels right to me. 

Avatar: It comes from a plastic ID card sleeve that I bought in the gift shop in the Tate Modern Art museum in London. I think that it was made for children, but it made me laugh, so I had to have it. 

[cedar]

Picked my user name here as an homage to one of my favorite musicians: Cedar Walton.

 

I've done this at other forums with other favorites. 

[ElmerJFudd]

7 hours ago, conundrum said:

 

I hope you replied with something like this:

 

 

[NewImprov]

Years ago, my then girlfriend, now wife, and I were both jazz music directors at a campus radio station. We were playing some of the more avant-garde jazz stuff that was coming out at the time, and we managed to connect with a number of artists and labels. Eventually, we had a some opportunities to book some local shows for artists that were touring through the area, often they were in the region for the jazz festivals in Portland, Seattle and Vancouver BC, and would look for shows on off-nights. We created an LLC to use to put on shows, and my wife came up with the New & Improv Music for it, a pun on the fact that we were booking "new" and "Improvised" music. A few years later, I started releasing albums and used it as my label.

 

https://newandimprov.bandcamp.com/

 

My avatar is some old funny-looking dude in a studio surrounded by a stupid number of keyboards.

[Rod S]

No much to it - Rod was my nickname when I lived in the US (my name is Rodrigo). when I joined the forum (2001?) I was living in California (My user name actually started as Rod CA).   S is my last name initial.  When I started participating in forums sometime around 1995 I used different handles, after a while I realized I just rather use something close to my name.  

 

Since my daughter was born I usually have a picture of her.  

[Floyd Tatum]

I was one of the first subscribers to this forum (Oct 2020 I think), which I hold dear, and I have great respect for Dave Bryce and the other wonderful people that make this possible.

 

Anyway(s?), for a long time my user name was guestuser@guestuser.com !  Because I had been burnt in a couple of other forums, and was scared.   Eventually, I changed to Floyd Tatum, with a signature showing my real name.   I'm sort of jazz piano player, but I've also played plenty of country, rock, and blues gigs.   (Well, actually, not so many country gigs.  But I do like country music.  All music, pretty much).   So I combined Floyd Cramer and Art Tatum, to signify that I'm somewhere between these two, at least in my music tastes.   Obvious?

 

Cheers

Richard Whitehouse

[kaptainkeys]

Mine is something I came up with a couple of years ago as a play on the 'got milk?' phrase, my picture is just off google images, I keep meaning to change it one of these days but haven't had the time to do a piano photoshoot 😂.  I'd rather spend my time at the piano playing anyway.

[lightbg]

Go here

 

Came home from a gig around 2AM on a Saturday night, turned on ‘Night Flight” and saw this. Before the Internet I was using a BBS that only allowed 7 letters for a name, so I dropped the “u”. Haven’t changed it in 40 years.

 

[Threadslayer]

A few years ago I began to notice that I had an uncanny ability to Kill. Threads. Dead. Just by responding. I started to develop a minor complex about it and experimented with mild, innocuous responses just to see if I could slide one past the goalie. Nope. Absolute slaughter more often than not. So, I decided to roll with it and adopted Threadslayer one Halloween and never looked back. Hopefully this one survives... Time will tell.

[octa]

rescuing this thread from TS! 😜 but it may soon die anyway.

 

was heavily into Captain Beefheart's "Trout Mask Replica" LP when the internet came to town, so "octa" is from that. It's pretty obvious which tune.

 

avatar is me passed out in a NJ hotel room on tour. Photo by guitarist in band at the time. (2014 maybe)

 

 

[Old No7]

1 hour ago, Threadslayer said:

A few years ago I began to notice that I had an uncanny ability to Kill. Threads. Dead. Just by responding.

 

Please immediately proceed to the post I started on "Synthesizer vs Arranger" and work your magic. 😉

 

Old No7

[allan_evett]

My birth name was Bartholomew Mortimer Bingham-Trahern, but things quickly became complicated in elementary school; so I took my father's much simpler surname. I then took a much older cousin's first name, and that was that. Since then I like to avoid pseudonyms, stage names and so forth. 

 

Meanwhile, the avatar... I'm well known, in regional band lore, for causing extended photoshoots; it takes about 100 shots to capture a reasonably sane likeness. So, enter the dog; her name is Roady.  But that name isn't stage-related, it came from a comment my wife's daughter made. We had lost our 16 year old shepherd mix several months earlier, and when we brought this Jack Russell - Chihuahua mix home the reaction was, "OMG, you guys got a rodent-dog!".  Yes, going from a 70 lb critter to one of 10 lb would appear that way.  She's getting quite on in years now, but does have a slightly-younger 'brother' - Bunior, to keep in line. Yep, another Chi mix, though this time there was a Papillon involved. Fun, loving and playful, yet fiercely anti-social to all outside the family. Even will attempt to bite us when in a 'mood', and we 'invade' his space.

 

Here's this morning's selfie attempt. Roady sat for the selfie, but Bunior excused himself to go bark at the neighborhood.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Moonglow]

I’ve told this story a few times over the years, but it’s been a while…

 

My dad played tenor sax in a wedding/dance band here in NW Indiana called “Ray Stinson’s Moonglows” but most local people simply referred to them as “The Moonglows.” They were really popular from the early-1960s to the late-1970s, and it was said if you didn’t hire the Moonglows for your event you were really missing out. As a little kid, I recall attending many family wedding receptions where they played, and when I was around 14, I started tagging along with my dad to band jobs. By then I had about ten years of piano lessons under my belt, and Ray would let me play solo piano during the band’s intermissions (this was back when almost every dance hall had a house piano). I did this for a couple of years and eventually started sitting in with the band for a song or two. It was through these experiences that I truly cut my teeth as a musician. Then on one fateful Saturday morning their keyboard player fell and severely hurt his leg and could not play the job. Unable to find a sub on such short notice, I was called upon to do the gig (a wedding reception). Dad and I rehearsed the songs all afternoon, most of them I had never played before, but was certainly very familiar with the arrangements. There were a few speed bumps, but fortunately no real train wrecks. I’ve played many memorable gigs, but that one will always carry special weight, because for a short moment in time, I was a Moonglow.

 

As for my avatar, that’s B. F. Skinner, which I selected to represent my love for psychology. I’m actually more of a humanist than a behaviorist, but that was the only viable picture of a famous psychologist I could find at the time, and it sort of stuck. In my early days here (I joined in 2003), people asked if that avatar was a picture of me, to which I replied, “No, I’m a lot younger and have more hair.” Well, I just turned 60, and resembling my avatar more with every passing day!