warning: quite a long post ..... only worth reading if you're genuinely curious or want to know more about what I do ......
Nothing against vinyl but 6000 albums??!! Starting a museum?
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No ....... I listen to them. First off I have an AMAZING collection ...... you'd creme yourself looking thru it. I have 59
different B.B. King albums for instance. Something like 18 Barbara Streisand ....... (hey ...... I love
music if it's good ) .... everything Captain Beyond did or the Guess Who or ZZ Top or Johnny Winter or Colours or Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks or BS&T or Tower of Power ... or .... goes on and on.
I have a seriously bad ass collection very much of which has not even come out on CD or would be hard to find if it did and almost always doesn't sound as good anyway. Plus you can go buy the stuff for 2 bucks at most flea markets and a surprising amount of it looks unplayed. That doesn't mean it will sound good ..... cheapo ceramic cart. styli can actually cut a sliver of vinyl outta the groove but usually if they look really clean, I put them thru my VPI 16.5 cleaning machine and they sound like new.
I started collecting vinyl in 1962 and still have every single record I ever bought except for one ......
sigh .... I learned my lesson about lending records at age 12 and since then no one so much as touches my records and I handle them very carefully, have always had good tables and carts and I have 40 year old records that sound great and are still fairly quiet.
Obviously an irreplacable resource for a full time musician plus they're fun to listen to and CDs are not.
And I insist they sound superior to redbook CDs in most cases, so I still buy stuff on vinyl when possible and something like 65% of everything that comes out is still available on vinyl.
I prefer the sound and no, there are no clicks and pops on the vast majority of my collection and no I don't use a Technics 1200 'table or some other godawful direct drive thing that people imagine must be good.
I have a nice VPI 'table with an Audioquest arm and a Sumiko Blue Point Special cart for my main 'table thru a AudioAlchemy VAC-in-the-box. Weak points would be the phono-pre and the cart although they're pretty decent. But if I had a spare 1500 bucks that's where I'd upgrade .... there's a TON of great phono-pres out now in that 500-700 dollar range.
Same with cartridges ....... just lots and lots of stuff out there to choose from and all of it better than what we thought was good 20 years ago ....... suprisingly there continues to be advancements in the world of vinyl.
And you use tapes and 3-1/2" floppies still - for performances? How/what/where?
I don't use tapes for performances but I have about 150 reels of stuff I've recorded that I wouldn't want to lose. I have had a home studio since 1969 and for the first 30 years of it I recorded a LOT. So I have a lot.
As for the 3 1/2" floppies ....... in Baton Rouge I mostly played in bands and wouldn't do a single act at all. But I did start using some seq's in gigs either to synch up with the band and have parts just come in where they should .... or occasionally to do a duo where I would use the seq's as backing tracks for 2 guitar players.
I absolutely loath the way it sounds when people use fully produced tracks to play with ...... sounds like shit ..... just karaoke is all it is.
SO instead of that I used a keyboard ..... did all my own ..... and mostly limited the backing tracks to bass and drums, both of which a keyboard can do quite well. On some stuff if absolutely needed I might also have a piano or organ track but that was it. No cheesy horns ..... no big violin section ..... none of that.
I approached it as a four piece band where we were 2 guitar players having to cover what parts we could just like you would do if you really only had 2 guitars/bass/drums.
Makes it sound very 'live' compared to other people that play with tracks.
Also with the keyboards I can have loops or can change the key or tempo or even the mix ..... I don't have to play things the same way every time like karaoke guys do. I can stretch a song out for an hour or go to the end when I want.
I get comments all the time from good musicians that pretty much don't generally care for playing with tracks but say that I have the best 'feeling' sequences and when they sit in they usually express surprise about how much it grooved and felt like playing with a real band ...... which is what I've tried very hard to do. None of my seq's have an awkward feel to them ..... I spend a lot of time making sure they do groove .... that's the most important thing to me ...... it helps to escape the karaoke label ..... no one sees me touch anything but a musical instrument ... no laptop or CD player or karaoke machine or iPod ...... only keyboard/sax/guitar/vocals.
Really helps it look and feel 'live'. And lots of improvision on basically everything so there are some chops on display.
Which brings us to the present ...... I did all this on a Roland XP60 ........ once I got to Florida it became obvious that the ONLY way I was gonna work 4 or 5 nights a week was to do a single act. The music scene here is ..... well, there
isn't a music scene here.
Obviously I used the stuff I already had and expanded upon it.
At this point my songlist is about 500 songs. I'll send you a copy sometime if you want ...... it's large (yes I sing all of them ) ranging from Frank Sinatra to Maroon 5 to Hank Williams Junior to Marvin Gaye to George Jones to Steely Dan to Boz Scaggs to ...... you get the idea.
Thousands of hours of work and quite a bit of work to transfer to a newer keyboard set up plus all the keyboards nowadays require you to load files into them.
With the floppies I stick a disc in ...... scroll to the song I want and press play. Also the fact that each disc will only hold about 30 songs or so makes it easier to look thru essentially my entire songlist in groups of 30 at a time.
So it works very well ....... I already own it ...... I have it down for live work ..... plus I'm 60 .... how much longer can I keep doing this?
So I've bought a few more XP60s on Ebay (know where a good deal is on one? ) ...... have spare floppy drives for them ...... have boxes and boxes of fresh unopened floppies and for the forseeable future I can't imagine I'll be changing although I'm always open if someone has a good modern alternative but it would HAVE to be a keyboard.
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