bitflipper

I have only the first two on Craig's list. Hmm, Craig's List. Good name for a website.

That's what I set my hot tub to when I really want to cook. Humans weren't actually meant to live in such heat. I see that Las Vegas broke their all-time record yesterday, 120°. If it gets hotter than that, they'll close the airport because airplanes with normal loads can't get enough lift at such temperatures. Reducing load capacity reduces profits below the threshold of profitability, so they just say "screw it" and go home. Last summer I actually got heatstroke at an afternoon gig. It was only in the 90's. But I thought I was gonna die. I shaved my head the following week. I have an upcoming outdoor gig next week. My band's singer gifted me a fan/mister unit that goes around the neck. It worked quite well during my initial test, during rehearsal inside my garage. We always practice with the doors and windows shut so as not to annoy my neighbors, so I'd guess the temperature was close to 100° in the garage, given that it was 93° outside. Don't know yet how long the battery lasts, but it's charged via USB so I could theoretically plug it into the back of my synthesizer.

And when the rain Beats against my windowpane I'll think of summer days again And dream of you

Oh, I did get it in my eyes. And was still an hour's drive away from the gig with no one along to take the wheel. There was a minimart nearby where I bought a spray can of sunburn treatment and bathed in it before continuing on down the mountainside. Oddly, I remain nostalgic for those days and don't remember them as the horrific mishaps they were.

They had ELEVEN albums? Here I considered myself a fan, but had no idea they had been so prolific.

I had a '73 Dodge Tradesman van in which I ran the heater all summer to keep the engine from overheating. It was especially bad going up mountain passes loaded with gear. Once I made the mistake of stopping at the summit of Snoqualmie Pass to top off the coolant, removed the cap and was rewarded with an Old Faithful of boiling water to the face. That night I kept red stage lights on me to disguise the burns. Ironically, that van's heater was largely ineffective in winter due to a broken flap on a fresh-air vent. That vent was located next to my foot, so on long winter drives I wore double wool socks. One memorable trip was a 16-hour drive through British Columbia in a driving snowstorm. My left shoe was covered in snow and my left foot had no sensation in it. Because that gig began on a Sunday rather than a more typical Monday start, we had to go directly to the venue and play. Such was the life of a touring musician in the 70's, when even an oil change was a major expense. And that was before the price of gas shot up to a dollar per gallon.

I think it's entertaining when the supporting act commandeers the whole show. Usually, it's because promoters ignorantly put together a bill without regard to whether the participating bands complemented one another or were even of comparable skill. Think Jimi Hendrix opening for the Monkees. I witnessed such an embarrassment c. 1971 in a concert that saw Free paired with Colosseum. That package began in Frankfurt, with Free billed as the headliner because they had a current hit single ("All Right Now"). We heard that in Frankfurt Free got booed off the stage with the crowd demanding Colosseum come back up. German audiences do not hold back, be it praise or disapproval. So when I saw them the following week in Munich, Free opened instead - to polite applause. Then Colosseum brought the house down with one of the most powerful displays of god-level musicianship I've ever seen. Free wasn't awful, it was just a bad pairing.

Lol, nothing is more frustrating to a software support person than conversations like this: "I got an error message" "What did it say?" "I don't remember" Error messages don't exist just to annoy users. They are supposed to convey information that will at a minimum identify the general type of error that occurred. Sure, such messages often mean nothing to the user. But they do mean something to the people who can help you.

Back in the day, Seattle's premier rock 'n roll venue wasn't a concert hall but an enormous beer hall called the Aquarius Tavern. On Wednesdays a pitcher of beer cost $1 and admission was also $1. Having a seating capacity of only 1,000, it didn't have the budget to compete with arenas, but they always managed to land the highest quality acts. Sometimes, that would be a national touring act that just needed to fill a week in their calendar. Sometimes, it'd be a local band on their way up in the world. Heart was one such favorite - the best cover bar band ever, and fearless. But sometimes, it'd be a major act on their way down. My most memorable experience there was seeing Badfinger. They were in decline at that point, hadn't had a hit in a while, and clearly felt they were slumming. Everybody in the band was extremely drunk. But they sounded amazing. Best-sounding drums I'd ever heard. Perfectly balanced vocal harmonies. It must have been one of their last performances because, sadly, Pete would be dead not long after.

I saw Grand Funk that same tour. It was a free concert in Hyde Park, the band's European debut. No one in the audience seemed to have any idea who they were, me included. But their performance was so tight and so energetic and their songs so instantly catchy that everybody was immediately on board. I was blown away when the amazing organist got up from the Hammond, strapped on a guitar, and played just as amazingly on that instrument. What I didn't know was that the band had already been very successful in America and had accrued lots of stage time to polish their set. They were primed and ready to storm Europe, and the Brits welcomed them enthusiastically. I never saw them in Germany, but I imagine they were a hit there, too. Germans love high-energy rock 'n roll and would applaud with their feet, in unison, which made me fear for the architectural integrity of the venue.

So you should be rested up and ready for a challenge!

I know it's a personal failing, but I am incapable of playing piano without giving the left hand something to do. If I don't, it'll twitch and often just start playing unbidden. Happens to me all the time onstage - I'll be in the middle of a blazing organ lead and suddenly realize my left hand is trying to butt in. As you noted, the piano is meant to be a solo instrument. It covers more notes than any other instrument short of a pipe organ, so of course it's going to compete with pretty much everything. Especially if there's a vocal on top of it, in which case you'll have no choice but to carve out a spectral notch for the vocal. Some other ideas... Keep the left hand parts simple, like just hitting the root note of the chord. That's enough to quell my OCD need to keep the left hand busy. If it's a MIDI recording, I may go into the PRV afterward and simply delete the left hand notes. Roll off the low frequencies with EQ, much the same way as you'd do with an acoustic guitar. When recording, I often automate a HPF so that wherever the piano is alone (e.g. an intro) it can have the full spectrum. On stage, I use a fixed HPF that greatly reduces the low end to mitigate conflicts with the bass. Try duplicating the bass part with your left hand. Bass and piano actually blend very nicely in unison. I especially like the piano an octave below the bass, in much the same way as celli and basses are traditionally layered in classical and film scores. Give your left hand something else to do that's not playing low piano notes. If you have more than one keyboard, or can split your keyboard, try playing string parts with the left hand. In my band, I do a lot of dual voice stuff, e.g. horns or organ with the left hand, piano with the right. When I'm super caffeinated and feeling frisky, I play shakers with my left hand.

"large spring with a pickup" sounds plausible. After all, every band had one and it long ago occurred to many that it could make cool thunder-like sounds. But I've no idea how you'd get anything melodic out of one. Unless it was just a cute name he'd given to a repurposed Hammond spring reverb.

In 1969 I got dragged to a live play in London's West End. It was a revisionist interpretation of Macbeth, with a live rock band on risers above the stage. It really opened my eyes to the possibilities of multi-media presentation, with its gorgeous saturated lighting. The anonymous band was really, really good. Made me realize how crappy live sound reinforcement was at most rock concerts. In 1970, I got dragged to a nightclub in Frankfurt, Germany, to hear B.B. King. I honestly did not know who he was - it was just before "The Thrill is Gone" would turn him into an overnight pop star. It was a small room, and my buddy and I were sitting in comfy overstuffed chairs with only a small dance floor separating us from Mr. King. He didn't seem to be fazed by the small weeknight crowd, and talked to us as if we were chilling in his living room. He talked about his car, a Cadillac land yacht that he described as being just like him: "built for comfort, not for speed". Later that year, we went to see another new band, except this time I was familiar with the individual members. That was ELP. It was only their second performance, after their debut at a free concert in Hyde Park the weekend prior. The performance was a little ragged, but they did the entire first ELP album (which we hadn't heard prior), including crowd-favorite Lucky Man. It was my first time seeing a Moog synthesizer in person. The synth was attended by a technician in a lab coat, who was responsible for setting up patches and keeping the thing in tune - with a frickin' oscilloscope. Nobody complained about the pace of the show, as it had been delayed 4 hours during which time the audience patiently sat on the floor and passed joints around. That was a Friday night on what would be a truly memorable weekend. On Saturday night we saw Deep Purple, where they covered the entire Deep Purple in Rock album and brought the house down with Sweet Child in Time. Jon Lord became one of my heroes that night, but I was most impressed by Blackmore's effortless virtuosity and their new singer's (Ian GIllan) incredible vocal range. We'd each eaten a gram of hashish in preparation, and wound down afterward by parking at the end of the Frankfurt airport's runway to admire the strobe lights. I don't remember what admission prices were in those days, but they must have been dirt cheap because otherwise we wouldn't have been able to afford it. We'd go almost every weekend while I lived in Munich, usually to Circus Krone, where we saw the likes of Moody Blues, Mothers of Invention and my favorite, the jazz/blues/rock fusion band Colosseum.

Maybe I'm just making this up, but I've always thought it was a voltage-control input device, probably hooked into a Minimoog. Like the handheld ribbon controller Keith Emerson used to use in the early days of ELP.

My philosophy is don't worry about it being original (not possible) or stolen (everybody's been stealing from J.S. Bach since the 17th century ). Worst-case scenario is you write a hit and Smokey Robinson's grandkids come after you.

Duh. Have you never been to a Dunkin' Donuts? They re-sell the holes. How they retrieve them after the initial sale remains a mystery.

You can demo it and see for yourself. It's pretty neat. I do not use it myself, mainly because I have a superior more versatile tool called MSpectralDynamics from Meldaproduction. That one's considerably more expensive, though. In either case, both work best on complex sources such as busses, rather than on individual tracks. Most of the time the result is meh, but once in awhile it can do magic.

Looks like you can. The attached executable above is a crude tool I slapped together years ago when I was translating my software into French and didn't have a French keyboard. It lists out the ASCII character set, so that any character can be copied/pasted from it. It also converts typed text into ASCII, hexadecimal or binary. Handy when you need to throw in the occasional °, ¥ or ¿.

An experiment, to see if I can attach an EXE to a post... ASCII.EXE

Happy birthday, Rain. Am I remembering correctly, or did you not move to LV from Montreal? That would be an adjustment, for sure. I've been in LV when it was 110° and I've been in Montreal when it was, um, really really bone-chilling cold - whatever that is in Celsius. Up here in Seattle homes don't have air conditioning, so when it's in the 80's at night, that's what it is in my bedroom, plus 5°. Very poor sleep the past couple nights. At least I got my annual haircut last week in anticipation of the coming heat wave. Bald as a billiard ball now, and plan on keeping it that way through August.

Have to agree, she's a handsome woman. But here's a better reason...

Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians, we don't discriminate.

Bapu doesn't get a vote, for the same reason John Hinkley doesn't review Jodie Foster movies.

Are you saying I'm not average? I even sat through that dismal Wonder Woman movie because of the HZ soundtrack. He was in the Buggles, man. He played on Video Killed the Radio Star.