Kanthos

Didn't know Hammond made amps. Given your budget, don't bother with the X50. It's a scaled-down version of the TR - the sounds and effects are the same, but reading between the lines on Korg's website, it doesn't seem like it has a combi mode (multiple sounds layered or split across the keyboard) or a sequencer mode (you'll probably want to use your laptop for recording individual tracks for a song, but sequencer mode can be useful for live performance - it's what I use). Also, on a lesser note, the X50 looks kind of dorky, in my opinion; the TR looks more 'pro', which may or may not matter to you.

I actually prefer the joystick-style bend & mod on the Korg TR beneath it, but the stage is fantastic. Not wild about the synthesizer on it though, but I don't know of anything else that does organs that well and also does good piano and electric piano sounds - usually, it's one or the other, or you don't have drawbars for the organ.

This isn't the prettiest setup, but it's functional. I built the cabinet myself. It's 3 pieces: bottom, top, and the insert in the bottom to support an amp so the amp points up at an angle towards me. And if anyone wants a few more shots, go here.

I've got a TR 61 and a Nord Stage. The Stage is way above what you'd want (as is its little brother, the Electro), but the TR would probably suit you. In general, workstation keyboards like the TR tend to be more performance-oriented, while arranger keyboards like the PA series tend to be for people trying to compose and arrange music using a hardware setup. An arranger keyboard might also be the way to go if you're only ever going to be playing in a one-man band and need backing tracks, though running an iPod through the sound system works for that too. Really, if you have to ask what an arranger keyboard is, odds are it's not for you. Also, since you want things like piano, you obviously don't want a synth (Korg Radias, various Moogs, and such). The TR is a great keyboard for what you want, but you might want to consider the Korg M50 instead. The sound quality is much better - the M50 is a newer keyboard using a different audio engine than the TR, which uses Korg's Triton line. The M50 gets you more effects (even if you don't program them yourself, you'll notice the difference in the factory presets), and generally sounds better - the tradeoff is that you can't get a sampling upgrade (letting you use audio from other sources and play it back with the keyboard) or aftertouch (variations in sound coming from the pressure you keep on the keys after you first press them down), and of course, it's more expensive. Aftertouch isn't necessarily a dealbreaker; the M50 responds to aftertouch from other sources, so you could combine a cheap MIDI controller that sends aftertouch with the M50 and get the better sounds from the M50. Both are in your price range though, although you may have some trouble finding a TR in store since it's been discontinued for almost a year because the M50 is its replacement. Then again, stores do have old stock; my local music store had a TR on display last month. As for other manufacturers, there are really only three others that make workstations. Yamaha's MO or MM series (similar; the MO is better) are within your price range, but Yamaha tends to be a bit better for acoustic instruments and a bit worse for electronic than Korg does, though the M50 may very well blow the MO out of the water on all counts. I've never been a fan of Roland's sound; if you're interested, one of their Juno lines would be in your price range. I have no experience with Kurzweil; they tend to be less common. What I'd suggest is that you go to your local store and try out the Yamaha MO, Korg M50 and TR (and make sure to find a good synth patch that uses aftertouch, to get an idea for what it's used for and whether it matters to you), and the Roland Juno D and Juno Stage. Try out a number of sounds on each (ideally on the same set of headphones - bring your own if you've got a good pair), and talk with the sales staff about features. Poke around the user interface of each a bit and see if it seems easy to use. (IMO, all are good for the basics; Korg and Yamaha seem more intuitive to me for editing than Roland). In general though, you can't really get something that's dead simple: you don't have to think about effects or editing until you're ready (though if you're interested in electronica, you'll really need to learn synth programming and how to use effects), but you'd never want a keyboard that didn't have a good feature set, even if you don't use it. You might be surprised too - I use the sequencer mode on my TR for live playing instead of to record songs. You've got a decent list of options now; try them out, because you're the only one who can really make that decision. As for an amp, I'm going to give the same advice: once you've chosen a keyboard, get them to run it through a few different amps in your price range. Try a few different sounds, ones you'll commonly use, and see what you like. I've got a Roland KC 150, and to my ear, it was far superior than the Behringer and Peavey amps I tried when I bought it. Lastly, performing with a laptop. I perform with both my keyboards and a laptop, but never fully trust the laptop. Both my keyboards talk to each other directly without going through the laptop, and I have a second copy of each preset so that if the laptop dies, I can switch to the keyboard-only versions, and while the quality of my orchestral sounds in particular will go down, I can at least keep playing. Maybe it's my setup (Dell laptop with Native Instruments Kore as the host and performance tool), but Kore seems a bit buggy at times, and I doubt it's the hardware - I know enough to keep everything in perfect condition and optimize it well for music. Anyway, you might have better luck with a Mac; all kinds of pro artists tour with Macs in their setup. Still, it's probably a good idea to not trust it fully and be able to play if anything goes wrong with the laptop: if your keyboard fails, there's nothing you can do, but if the laptop fails, you can at least keep going with the keyboard.

If you're going to be doing live performance, why do you want an arranger keyboard?

Fixed it for you

Or, download them at work, bring them home on a USB drive, and sync at home? Or, just download them at home? How long does it really take to download a few files a week and sync your iPhone? It's not like you have to sync for every new track.

Is it impossible to do both? Seems to me like the RRR takes little effort, compared to other things on the show. (Although, finding dice to roll noisily on the table can be hard It's not like you guys are airing the show live either, so it's not like you have a fixed length to adhere to.

M-Audio makes two that would be cheaper. The KeyStation Pro 88 is strictly a controller, while the ProKeys 88 is a stage piano and has a few sounds on it. The MM8 will definitely be better than either if you want to do any live performing ever, but these two are at least cheaper. If you really don't care about live performance, they're worth considering. I don't know how realistic the action feels on them compared to the MM8; I haven't played any of them, so you'd probably want to try them out in store if you're thinking about returning the MM8 to save some money.

IMO, the MM8 is only a good keyboard if you want something suited for remixing and live performance without a computer, and you're on a budget. As far as keyboards go for live performance, the MO8 and now-discontinued (but still on store shelves, if they're not out of stock) Korg TR-88 are both probably within your price range but are much better. I could be wrong on this though; I'm not exactly keyboard shopping right now. And if you just want to remix with a computer, you can certainly get an 88-key weighted controller for cheaper than the MM8, since you wouldn't need the controller to have any sounds on its own. To be clear, I don't think the MM8 is *bad*, just that there might be better options, depending on what you want to do.

I'll try again. In order to make a remix, you need original ideas (which a strict classical program does not develop), and the skills to pull it off. While you can make a remix by clicking notes into software, if you're going to develop piano skills, you'd want to use a MIDI keyboard and play the notes into your software, which means you have to be a good enough player to do that. You're right; I misspoke. I should've said, 'if you can't find any Beethoven that inspires you or that you can learn from...'

I suspect tweek hit the nail on the head: you probably aren't being asked to choose between classical music and 'other' music, but rather are choosing between a classical style of education and a style that focuses on ear training, rhythmic patterns, accompaniment, and improvisation. DO NOT PICK ONLY ONE! You want to do a hybrid of both, if at all possible. I spent 9 years taking classical lessons as a kid, and got up to my grade 9 in Canada's Royal Conservatory of Music program. It placed high emphasis on technique (scales, arpeggios, learning fairly basic chords - triads and dominant sevenths) and on performance. I did all the related theory and harmony courses, so I learned a lot there too. This is likely what you'd be choosing in a classical education. It misses out on a lot: Improvisation Composition Exposure to and performance of alternate styles of music (i.e. jazz, latin jazz, rock techniques like slides, etc.) Making up an accompaniment (i.e. playing off a leadsheet or when you just have chords) Understanding how the theory you know applies to the pieces you play If you are a naturally gifted musician and you have (or make) the opportunity to play things by ear regularly (in my case, it was playing in bands at church when I was in high school), you can develop some of these additional skills. If you're naturally better at playing by ear than you are at sightreading, this will be easier than it could otherwise be. And of course, strong performance skills from a classical program will help you in other areas - all the best keyboard players I know have classical backgrounds first. Going the other direction is much harder and the skills aren't as useful: skills at improv won't help you at all with performing piano sonatas. My *strong* recommendation is to have your teacher incorporate both. Naturally, if you're a total beginner, you'll have to start somewhere, and if so, I'd start with the classical program. But I wouldn't let things progress too much without having your teacher help you develop skills that the classical program doesn't cover. A couple other thoughts. You say you hope to do some remixes some day. To do a good job of it, you'll probably need skills from both areas. If you haven't become grounded in classical performance, don't expect to do a solo piano remix that will have any hope of passing the judges' panel (unless you record MIDI and correct your mistakes): you won't have the technical skill to pull it off. On the other hand, remixes involve taking a song and injecting it with your own personality and ideas. If your exposure to making music is strictly how to play what someone else wrote, in the way they decided it should be written, you're going to be lost when you try to take a source tune and make it different. You probably won't pass the panel here either, because without a substantial dose of creativity, you probably won't make your piece different enough from the source material to be accepted. Lastly, as others have said, don't swear off all classical music. If you can't find *any* Beethoven that you like, you just haven't developed much as a musician yet. I'm not saying that Beethoven or even any Baroque or Classical composer will become your new music of choice, but there is *a lot* to learn from their music, and a lot to be inspired from, no matter what genres of music you wish to make. If you don't see that yet, you will in time, as long as you haven't closed your mind to it. Also, don't discount romantic and more modern music either; as time progressed, composers incorporated more complex musical ideas. Same goes for jazz too; it's not video game scores, but a good musician can draw inspiration from Kind Of Blue or A Love Supreme just as easily as Jeremy Soule's scores. By all means, have personal tastes and favourite artists, but if you never venture far outside those preferences, you'll miss out on a lot, and it *will* show in your music. Good luck!

The only thing VGDJ needs that isn't mentioned in the first post here is ANOTHER SOUNDSCAPE. I really missed this show; I'm very happy it's coming back! Good work everyone!

This would be a favourites thread. There's no one DAW that is the best; there are some that are the best at a particular thing (and perhaps some that aren't the best at anything), but any opinions you get will just be people saying what their favourite is - moreso, saying which DAW they use. I've tried only two DAWs in detail: Cubase and FL Studio. I greatly prefer Cubase, but can't really fairly compare it to Sonar, Logic, ProTools, etc. If you're looking for advice on what to buy, the best anyone can give is that you try out as many demos as possible, so you're making an informed choice based on the features that most interest you.

The DLLs for those VSTs are in locations that your DAW knows to search?

This is a remake of the original Monkey Island. The new Tales of Monkey Island series is currently $34.99 for the five episodes.

Anyone know if PC gamers can play with XBox gamers? Or are they separate?

I've used NI B4-II and was quite happy with it, although I didn't like all the presets. I had no troubles with it though. For leads, going with a Keith Emerson sound never fails. Use Vibrato on C1, upper drawbars set to 888000000, percussion is On/Soft/Fast/Third, rotor speed set to *stop* (or turned off; you don't want the slight swirl that comes with the speed on low here). Use a bit of drive, not enough to really distort the notes but enough to bring them out. You'll end up with something similar to 5:34 of this - actually, these settings nail their studio version of Hoedown right on.

A lot of the great rock organ players from the 60s and 70s who used distorted sounds would often get them by playing through guitar amps; I don't know of anyone who actively used pedals for that. I get a good distorted organ sound out of my Nord Stage by using the built-in Fender Twin amp sim with a fair bit of gain, plus some of the gain from the Leslie speaker. In terms of those two plugins, play with the overdrive section and if you need to, warm up the sound with a guitar amp plugin, maybe something from SimuAnalog.

Well, my main question is related to posture and how I'm carrying myself: I'm working hard to get rid of tendonitis and want to hear, from someone who plays as intensely as he does, what changes I can make that would help, and also what kind of physical warmups he does (I already have a good idea of his on-keyboard warmup routine from his Keyboard Madness DVD). Everything else I can think of to ask is related to gear, sound design, and other things that don't really need a demo anyway. Thanks for the advice; I'll hopefully be less stressed about it by Thursday

I've only heard good things about MOTU as well. I've ordered an MOTU Micro Express MIDI interface that I'll be using as a MIDI interface to my computer when I need it and as a standalone MIDI patch bay for my keyboard rig. I'll post back again once I get it to comment on the quality.

At least now you'll know to avoid this kind of thing in other programs in the future, and it wasn't that hard to get worked out either

Davydd, they won't be able to temporarily access your account now that you've changed the password. However, they probably scraped all your contacts from the account, so they will probably annoy those people in the future (or already did so while logged into your account). To do so in the future, your friends would need to just accept and click on random messages from strangers; if they're doing this from another e-mail address similar to yours and using your display name, they still won't be in your friends' contact lists.

Next week, I'm going to a keyboard masterclass with Jordan Rudess from Dream Theater. While I'm really pumped about it, I'm also starting to really freak out, mainly because I'm not quite sure what I'm supposed to do. I've never been to a masterclass of any kind before, plus I suspect that this one will be different than the typical masterclass that university music students might have, mainly because Jordan's big strengths over your average piano teacher are in sound design, synth programming, creative use of gear, and so on. I have a few good questions I want to ask, but I'm unsure about the playing component of it. My understanding is that usually in a masterclass, I'd play something and get critiqued on it, while the comment I got from the person at the music store setting up the class was different: "The Master class will be JR with up to 15- 20 people playing with him. Its an opportunity to play, jam, and ask specific music questions with him. He will conduct the class and cover whatever topics the class wants to get answered" Should I prepare something to play in general (probably a jazz tune; classical seems out of place, and background keyboard parts like I'd play in a band wouldn't really show too much), or should I think of things I could play that would highlight my questions? Or am I just overthinking things?

Seriously good job on vocals. That's a really nice-sounding track.