Kanthos

Congrats

It might, you don't know unless you check. I wouldn't say it's *impossible* to use a slower hard drive either, just that you can't expect to have many tracks going in real time. Be prepared to do a lot of freezing of tracks.

I ordered mine a few days ago, but still haven't gotten any confirmation that it's been sent off. Hopefully nothing goes wrong with it.

I approve of your choice of board games. My wife's got me Power Grid for Christmas

There was also a Vinnie, Prabhu right after the Daniel Lloyd.

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday!

Yeah, if it's not just for you, a laptop is out I've never bought from Sweetwater; I'm Canadian and they don't ship many items to us. I just know them as one of the big three or four online retailers for music gear; odds are you'll find the same price online at Guitar Center or Musicians Friend unless one of them are having a sale.

I don't know about warranties. Digital pianos generally have a *very* small range of sounds. For example, my church has a Korg KC-350 that has 6 piano sounds, 6 electric piano sounds, 6 organ sounds, 3 strings/pads, no brass, and a few other pretty-much-useless sounds. Stage pianos aren't much better; lower-end ones that are more in your price range will probably have about the same, and higher-end ones may have even less (though, like my Roland, they'll often have a B3 clone, instead of just sampling a few drawbar settings from a B3). Really, a workstation is the only thing you should be considering. Anything less will give you not enough or poor quality sounds, and anything more will be too specialized or way more than what you need. True, you probably won't be recording songs on your keyboard, but no one's making you use that part of it, and you might be surprised - I try to do everything live, but my group at church does use a MIDI loop on one song we do occasionally; it's only 8 bars, but it's too much for me to play as well as play the 'normal' keyboard part. Workstations typically have a mode for playing and editing single programs and a mode for combining programs to layer them together and/or split them into ranges across the keyboard. They'll often let you do all kinds of tricks too that might come in handy - see my blog (link's in my signature) - I'm writing a few articles for a couple friends who have been asking me about my keyboard setup. Even if you have a dedicated EQ board, being able to set EQ on a per-preset basis on the keyboard is still useful. My preference would be to use the EQ board as a master EQ (i.e. to compensate for a venue where the high end sounds especially shrill, etc.) but use the keyboard EQ to tweak a patch to your liking in 'ideal' settings. And any on-board balancing of individual sounds that you can do (on the M3, assigning the sliders to affect the volume of individual timbres in your preset, for example) is still useful too; it gives you the option to make small corrections if something's not quite right. Seriously, I'd figure out what keyboard(s) might suit your needs and then look for them used. $1000 will get you an MM8 or MO6 (which won't be weighted) at sweetwater.com. The MO6/MO8 are roughly on par with the Korg TR in terms of features (the M50 being the oddball in that its sound engine is more powerful but its construction is cheaper), and as a serious keyboard player myself, I wouldn't go for anything less. The only other option I can think of, if you have a decent laptop and already have some good sounds (something like NI Komplete or just Kontakt 4 will give you a good selection of strings, a good piano sound, etc.), is to spend your $1,000 on an audio interface, if you don't have one, and a weighted MIDI controller, and bring your laptop with you to gigs. Roland also makes a laptop stand that comes in handy for this type of setup. By all means look at digital pianos or more basic stage pianos (neither are my specialty; I can't recommend anything here), but my suspicion is you'll find them lacking, and have to choose between spending more/finding something used, getting the old one fixed, or buying something you're not satisfied with. I'm curious; what do you have now, the one that died?

You're asking too much for one keyboard to handle at your budget level, unless you can swing buying something used. Is your Yamaha in such bad shape that you can't rent something else in the meantime and fix it? Regardless, you're looking for a workstation keyboard, not a synth, and not an arranger (generally better suited for having the keyboard add backing parts to your arrangements as opposed to live performance, and typically more expensive than the equivalent-model workstation keyboards). Any workstation keyboard will let you plug in a pedal (though typically just one; if you need a damper or sostenuto as well, you'll probably have to spend a lot more on something that's a dedicated piano keyboard), and they'll be velocity-sensitive. Typically, just the 88-key models have weighted keys. At 88 keys, you're looking at the Yamaha Motif 8/ES8/XS8/XF8 or the little brothers, the MO8 or (worse) MM8, or the Korg M3-88 or M50-88 or, going older, the Triton Extreme 88 or TR-88. There's also Roland or Kurzweil; Kurzweils aren't as popular and tend to be a bit more complicated to use, especially if you ever edit any of your sounds on your own, and I'm generally not a fan of most Roland sounds as far as realism goes, but if you were going this route, there might be an 88-key Juno model, I don't know, or else you'd have to go with an 88-key Fantom model. I have a Roland VR-700 despite these comments, but I use it because it's got a great B3 engine where I can set my own drawbar positions (essential to the music I play) and has a great piano sound and good enough sounds from other instruments that I can make do with just this keyboard in a gig. Typically, I also use a TR and/or a laptop running Kontakt to round out my sounds, but that's more than you want at this point I'm most familiar with Korg, so I'll start there. The TR and Triton Extreme are more-or-less the same keyboard; the main difference as far as you're concerned is that the TR has double the polyphony (notes that can sound at once); if you do any layering of sounds within your band, or want to, it's not that hard to hit limits where notes start dropping out on the TR, and you sacrifice your sound because of it. The Extreme also lets you use 5 insert effects compared to the TR's 1. The M50 and M3 use a new sound engine compared to the Triton line, one that tends to be better at realistic instruments. The M50 is fairly cheaply made; while it sounds just as good as the M3 (the key difference is just polyphony; both keyboards give you 5 insert effects), it's just not as durable. That might be ok if you're only moving it a few times a year, but make sure you have a good case and take care of it. The other difference that might affect you is that all of the Korg keyboards I've mentioned so far except the M50 have aftertouch: a measure of how much pressure remains on a key once you've played it, so you can do things like slightly adjust some sounds by digging in a bit as you hold the chord. I find it useful; you may not. As for the Yamahas, I've only tried out the MO6 and MO8. I probably would've gotten the MO6 instead of my TR-61 if it wasn't for the price. If I recall, it has better polyphony than the MM8 and probably a bigger sound library. Of course, the Motif line blows them both out of the water, but you get what you pay for. Overall, I'd suggest you get to your local music store and try out a few keyboards to get a better sense of what's out there. Really, it comes down to your own preferences, whether you like the sounds you hear or not, how comfortable you are with the basics of the user interface, etc.

A keychange.

Do you have any other examples of it, where it's clearer? If it's the sound I think, it might be some kind of keyboard instrument, but I'd want to hear it more clearly and for longer than 4 short chords in the entire song to narrow it down.

Garageband certainly isn't the best program out there for the Mac, but in what way(s) is it letting you down? If you're new to this, don't be quick to blame the program for your own lack of skill. It takes a lot of time to get proficient.

Not a clue. Seems similar enough to Kontakt for me that it's not worth having. Incidentally, they've got some new sales on; all of them are two-day sales. There's a big discount on Quantum Leap Pianos and Pianos Gold that ends today, I think, and $195 for Silk that ends tomorrow.

That's a B3 organ (or something approximating one, of course). The B3 has a set of drawbars that are basically volume controls for a set of harmonics; you create a sound by setting drawbars in various positions. The tremolo effect comes from the leslie speakers that organ players would use. Basically, you've got two pairs of cones, low and high, that are spinning around, and you can change the speed from 'slow' to 'fast' (you'd have to physically modify the speaker to be able to set the specific speeds on a real leslie), usually through a footswitch or rocker switch attached to the organ. A software synth or some keyboards that have a B3 emulation will give you a lot more control over the speed, maybe even using an expression pedal to adjust it continuously. The distortion would either come from running the organ through a guitar amp, or by overdriving the leslie, or you might be hearing the various harmonics mixed together as distortion; I didn't listen too closely to the tracks to be sure. There's a few other things you can adjust that make the B3 sound, but those are the ones you mentioned. As far as synths, there's one called VB3 that's not too pricy, and I seem to remember hearing of some other one that was free. Native Instruments used to have the B4-II, and they currently have Vintage Organs which sample the B3 and a few other types of organs as well. The demos sound quite convincing, and they give you the controls that you'd have on a real B3.

I just got an e-mail from soundsonline.com; Goliath is on a pretty big sale right now for the next two days, selling for $195.

Sorry, I can't resist, but DUH!

You might want to avoid Rune Factory. I've finished both of them and will pick up the third one, but it's an action RPG (meaning you control the character, make them swing their sword and cast spells, etc.) and you'll spend the majority of your time either farming monsters for drops that you can craft or doing actual farming - Rune Factory is a Harvest Moon game with RPG trappings. Personally, I loved the first one, and the second one had some improvements but horrible pacing - you spend the first part of your game doing mainly nothing but farming and getting the villagers to like you (you can kill monsters, but that's pretty limited and other than doing kill quests for the villagers, it's not that useful) until you get married, have a kid, and take off in the middle of the night. The game continues as your kid, and you gain all the skills your father had, but only now, after a considerable number of hours, can you start cooking, forging armor and shields, and making accessories. It wasn't a bad game, but it felt like compared to the first game, which I finished twice and the second time had beat the end boss within the first three days of winter of the first in-game year, they tried to make Rune Factory 2 'harder' by making it longer. Mind you, it's not like you can start forging or cooking stuff in your first in-game day in the original Rune Factory, but getting the forge is only limited by you getting a house expansion (easily doable by the end of your first spring if you know what you're doing); the kitchen takes a bit longer since you have to buy the recipe books over time and the kitchen upgrades are only available on one day per month. Still, the pacing was much better. Anyway, you may or may not like them; I certainly did. If you're looking for a challenge or you hate Harvest Moon games, definitely avoid these. I've never played the Wii game, just the two DS games. Also, the Etrian Odyssey series is great if you like incredibly hard classic RPGs. They even make you draw your own map, which is really cool. You've got a lot of choice about the classes you take and how you build them, and the game is quite involved. It's entirely possible to die on the first floor of the dungeon if you're not careful, but once you get used to it, it's a good challenge but not unmanageable. The game plays fairly similarly to Final Fantasy III, but you don't have class change, of course. On the other hand, you can have up to 30 people in your guild, though you only take five into the dungeon with you at any point, so the variety's pretty good, and it's pretty easy to powerlevel a new class you want to try by taking some experienced characters out with a beginner and fighting enemies a number of floors into the dungeon. Another thing I thought was really neat is that other than some starter weapons, armor, and items, everything that shows up in shops is dependent on you getting stuff out of the dungeon. As in, if you get, say, 10 of a particular drop from a monster and 5 of a particular item that you can harvest or mine from the dungeons, and sell all those to the shop, they'll be able to make a new weapon that they couldn't before. Overall, this is a game that is hard but also forces you to be smart about what you do and when and how you structure your party and what abilities they have. I liked the first one best; the classes seemed a bit more balanced than the second one. I've just recently gotten the third and haven't had much time with it yet, but it seems like it could be the best of the three.

Brad, please remove the following under For Sale, :::computer/music electronic stuff::: MOTU Micro Express MIDI Hub: $75+shipping OBO [kanthos] (9/10) Lennar Digital Sylenth1: $100 OBO [kanthos] (9/10) Edit: Removed something that was based on incomplete information and probably in poor taste. Sorry to those involved.

I'd say this is in 3/4, and each note in the track is a 16th note. You could, I suppose, write the B section as 6/8, but with the accents being where they are, it doesn't really lose the 3/4 feel either. I wouldn't change time signatures just for two bars when the notes still fit nicely into the old time signature.

Anything here or a gift card to EB Games Canada or amazon.ca or the Canadian iTunes stores for me.

If you need something else with sliders and knobs, I highly recommend the Novation Nocturn. I use it in my live keyboard rig. I can recommend the Axiom 61 as well; it's got a pretty good semi-weighted action which, in my opinion, is a good compromise between weighted action for piano playing and synth action for everything else. Lastly, don't worry so much about how programmable your keyboard is, at least not at the expense of the touch and feel of the keyboard. There's a piece of software called Bome's MIDI Translator that's pretty cheap (free if you send the developer a postcard) that lets you convert MIDI messages into others - you could run everything from the keyboard into Bome's, and from Bome's into your DAW, letting Bome's do any conversions that the keyboard doesn't do for you. Let me know if you need any help with this; I'm using it in fairly advanced ways in my live keyboard rig.

For CDs, yes (at least, if you live in the US). For live performances, I'm not sure, though I remember hearing something once about venues in which live music is performed getting a license to cover those costs. Although, that might apply more to a band playing in a bar as opposed to specifically organizing a concert. But as far as selling the music itself, and not tickets to a live performance of the music, yes, that agency would probably be the one to talk to.

Read zircon's post, point 1. He already answered that in this thread.