SteveCastellano.com

The most puzzling thing about this ad is how someone who posesses enough unstupid to be able to successfully post an ad on kijiji doesn’t know how to spell “guitar”, in spite of owning one. Do I know where you can buy a guiter tuner? Aside from a MUSEC STORE, no, I’m effin’ stumped. Though it’s nice to see you’re keeping your options open with respect to digital vs. analog – I gather you’re willing to consider a $10 analogue stroboscopic tuner, or perhaps a tuning fork?

If, instead of being cars that turned into robots, the Transformers were Anvil cases that turned into discotheques, they’d be International Dance Party.

Via Niklas Roy on Vimeo.

Some years ago, enough that I can’t quite remember the exact number, I found myself at Steve’s Music in Toronto noodling around on the newest cool thing, a multi-timbral synth from the folks who brought us the Prophet-5 (so favoured of Tony Banks, Peter Gabriel, and pretty much anyone else who had five grand to drop on a polyphonic synth in the late seventies) and its more affordable little brother the Pro-One (I have one of each and you don’t, ha ha ha) called the Six-Trak. MIDI was a big effin’ thing when this four-octave number hit the shelves, and add to that a built-in loop sequencer and the almost-unheard-of ability to play more than one different sound at once, and you’ve got a pretty happening little synth on your hands. Until, of course, you notice that it’s got only one oscillator per voice, and the one voice on the inside of your head starts making tsk tsk noises and saying “thin, thin, thin” – but then you say to the little voice “what about stack mode, in which you can layer six different individually programmed oscillators on top of each other” at which point the little voice in your head says “hmph” and tries to pretend that it’s more interested in rearranging the flowers in that vase over there than playing with your new synthesizer. But you’ve got yourself a new Six-Trak, and it’s cute as a lost golfball and cheap as chips and there it is on the harvest table by the window over there. And anyway there I was recording a multi-timbral loop sequence, and gathering a small crowd at my elbows, and not caring whether it was me or the new synth from Sequential that was a pretty effin’ cool thing going on at Steve’s Music on a Saturday afternoon in, jeez, could it have been like 1984.

A while back when the band was considering covering some Cake tunes I started searching eBay for used trumpets. This is not so outlandish an endeavour as you might think; I’m not entirely unfamiliar with the trumpet, having played one for a few years in high school, until my dentist and parents insisted on corrective dental appliances. I ended up with a Tru-Tone trumpet of indeterminate vintage, which the folks at the Scarborough Music Company where I had it fixed up assured me was a decent find.

The next problem with which I had to contend was the fact that 20+ years of disuse renders an embouchure pretty much non-existent. Well, no matter, it’s all about practice, isn’t it? So I dedicated myself to practicing in the car, after the fashion of a sax player friend of mine. But I soon discovered that the RSX is a bit cramped for trumpet practice, even in the passenger’s seat, and I was garnering more than my share of strange looks from passers-by in the underground garage at my place of work. Enter the Yamaha SB79 Silent Brass System.

The SB79 is predicated upon a simple theory: jam a mute into the end of the trumpet to clam it up, jam a microphone into the mute, wire the microphone up to a headphone amplifier, jam some headphones into your ears, and listen to yourself practice in relative quietude. And the SB79 actually works, and works quite well; as if in tribute to the unlamented Rockman, engineered by Tom Scholz, credited by many with doing for the guitar what Kraft did for cheese, the SB79 even boasts an echo effect to further enhance the sound of your private performance.

In an attempt to improve my intonation and fast-track my practice I’ve wired the output of the SB79 into my G5, in order to take advantage of the instrument tuner built into GarageBand. And the most exciting thing about the SB79 may not be how well it works – a note at full volume sounds natural and realistic in the headphones and is entirely inobtrusive (though not, obviously, inaudible) to those in adjacent rooms – but that they make one for the tuba as well.

Anyone who doesn’t think it’s sad when a music store goes out of business needs a heart transplant. It’s someone’s livelihood, someone’s passion, and it is a grind. There are certainly lots of easier ways to make a living than by owning or managing one. They provide a mecca for young musicians, and can be a place of discovery where same become wide-eyed and invigorated about making music, albeit often loudly and poorly. They also provide jobs (and cheap gear, natch) for musicians in their formative school years and beyond, as they did for me briefly after I graduated from university.

On the other hand you’ll be hard pressed to find a musician who doesn’t have at least one music store on his or her “places never to set foot in again” list due to a botched service job, sullen or patronising staff, high prices, poor selection, or egregious trade-in, return, or consignment policies. Add to that the clientele, jostling at your elbows as they press their greasy noses up to the pedal case, sniffing at your noodling as you test-drive a new instrument as if they were adjudicating your audition for the Mothers of Invention, or playing any one of a number of tunes on your “tunes I would not favourably compare to having a quarter-inch chainsaw sharpening file jammed in my ear” list – loudly and poorly. It seems like a recipe for an aching head with a cartoon scribble of rage hovering above it, and might lead you to believe that the demise of such an establishment is not so lamentable after all.

I would certainly tick a few of the aforementioned boxes on the scorecard of Songbird Music on Queen Street in Toronto, whose proprietors announced they were going into receivership two Fridays past. But even so, and while I was never part of any Queen West music crowd, members of which can be found mourning Songbird’s passing on various blogs and message boards, I do think I’ll miss having it around, and popping in to see what analogue synths were collecting dust on the shelves (it was an authorized Moog dealer and the second-best store in town for used analogue gear after Paul’s Boutique) on my way to drinks at Squirly’s.

I vacillated about jumping into the car to check out the liquidation sale when I first heard the news last Saturday morning, but finally decided against it. Toronto’s a pretty big place, with lots of gear pigs and keyboard players. The most attractive deals would be gone within the first 24 hours, which had already passed by that time. Aside from which, I do really have just about everything I need at the moment, barring the few rare and phenomenally expensive items that I think would truly round out my collection. But when I found out yesterday that the doors had not yet closed for good I decided to put a fleece before the Lord. Songbird was also Toronto’s only authorized Metasonix dealer. I don’t really need any more Metasonix gear – and even using the word “need” in conjunction with vacuum-tube modular synthesis components requires a bit of semiotic gymnastics – but the fleece logic went as follows: if there was still any Metasonix gear left on the shelves after a week on sale at 40% off, I obviously know more about the intrinsic value of the stuff than anyone else in the city, and was meant to rescue it from obscurity, misuse, or neglect.

Witness please, what may be the only Metasonix TM-7 “Scrotum Smasher” (sorry mom!) in Toronto, and one of fewer than 100 in existence (or so I’m guessing – the serial number is 76). I believe Trent Reznor has one. It comes in a handsome off-white cardboard carrying case, hand-lettered by Eric Barbour, is itself painted a shade of yellow that can only be described as alarming, and is adorned by the whimsical and disturbing artwork of Dave Lovelace, who you may know from his Retarded Animal Babies DVD.

What does it do? I’m not sure. I haven’t plugged it in yet. I told the cashier that I might just frame it. Essentially it’s a tube distortion unit, and when I listened to the demos on the Metasonix site I was surprised at how normal it could sound when you run a guitar through it. Because according to the inimitable Eric Barbour it is capable of much more. Manipulating the various controls (including “Scrotum”, “Mega Scrotum”, and “Scrotum Up Ya Ass” dials as well as a “Double Scrotum” toggle that switches between “Teabag” and “Blue Balls” – sorry mom!) can provide you with such effects as puking upon the face of the universe and destroying the godhead. To sum up, it is a “mean, angry guitar preamp…for the disciplined, intelligent, non-risk-averse musician.”

I don’t know why I waited this long to get one.

Those were actually the first three words I used to describe Dave Smith’s latest creation, the Prophet-8, in a text chat with my wife. Yes, Dave Smith is in ur r&d dept, devaluin ur vintage prophet-5s. Let’s just look at it for a while, quietly.

For the very few of you who come here looking for used gear before you go to Craigslist, I’m announcing a price drop on a few of the “Gear for sale” items as well as an exciting addition to the list. The Mackie 1604 is now available with manual, 2 8-channel quarter-to-RCA snakes and a 32-point RCA patchbay for only $325. The JV-1080 can now be yours for a mere $300, and don’t forget there’s a lovely gig-bag style 2-space rack case into which that synth would fit perfectly for just $50. And be still my heart, but I have decided to loosen my grip on the knobtacular Korg MS2000R, which I’m also offering up for just $325. Unfortunately I’m having some trouble tracking down the manual for that last one, but it is available from the Korg website as a PDF. All prices CDN, pickup only.

Let’s recap:

• Mackie CR-1604 with snakes and patchbay – $325
• Roland JV-1080 rack syntheziser – $300
• Korg MS2000R rack syntheziser – $325

Check the Gear for Sale page for additional listings.

I’m kind of sorry that the SmartCard never caught on, and not just because it’s the only way to upgrade the firmware on the Motif ES (which probably won’t be getting any more firmware upgrades now that the XS has been released). I recently found the one that I borrowed indefinitely for the aforementioned purpose in the bottom of the washing machine as I was transferring clothes to the dryer. I just reformatted it and it seems to be working fine.

The latest addition to the arsenal is a cross between a piano and an airplane wing, the post-stretching Yamaha Motif ES 7 76-note sequencing-sampling workstation and part-time DeLorean spoiler.

You might recall that I purchased the Motif ES rack a while back for gigging, and the rack was essentially this keyboard with 76 fewer keys, no sequencer, no sampling capability, no master mode, no Smartmedia™ slot, and much, much smaller. And really, who needs all that crap anyway, particularly the obsolete Smartmedia card slot. Shame that’s the only way to upgrade the firmware. And what up with that? Bus speed? I seem to recall upgrading the MS2000R firmware with a sysex dump.

Well if I had one thing to complain about regarding the Motif ES 7, I’ve used it up. If I had two things, the second would be the amount of trouble I’m having getting it to communicate with the free Yamaha Studio Manager software on the Mac. But obviously I’m pretty nuts about the sounds, or else I wouldn’t have bought the same sound engine over again. And I’m thrilled about not having to patch a mile of MIDI cabling or program the Anatek Pocket Pedal to send control signals from the FC7 on channels 2 and 3 (more of a pain in the ass than you’d imagine) before every show.

Oh I’m sorry, I’m boring you.

The most interesting thing (just so you know, if what follows here isn’t interesting you can just stop reading) is that in spite of the fact that the sounds are pretty much the same, having them in a keyboard workstation format is proving to be somewhat inspirational. Maybe it’s just shopping endorphins. But I think there’s a real difference having this half-acre of synthesizer in front of me instead of a few square inches of rackmount faceplate. A decent sized LCD screen makes exploring patches and programming performances seem like an entertaining possibility rather than a chore. And ever since the DX7II (the black ones with the real buttons instead of the membrane switches) Yamaha has had the best patch selection interface. You could get to any one of 32 patches instantly, with a single button-press. Of course at the time they were all DX7 patches so it didn’t really make much difference. Now we have 1-button access to a bank of 16 plus a Master mode that serves as a live performance bank of 128 voices, performances, songs and patterns with 4 zones of MIDI control each. This keyboard was obviously designed with live performance in mind.

Even though I don’t have any practical use for the sequencer, I like how the transport controls have that chunky mid-70s sci-fi computer terminal feel to them. And the four assignable sliders? Way more useful than the four rotary dials on my previous controller (which is a steal at $300 used for an 8-zone 76-key MIDI controller) – for volume of individual zones in performance mode (banal but your main practical concern on a gig) to adding a bit of realism to a Hammond patch by emulating real-time voicing changes.

So more than 2 years after its introduction, and on the eve of the appearance of its successor the XS in a keyboard department near you, the ES is still a fine axe – and all the incentive anyone should need to roll up his or her sleeves and start pushing buttons. And don’t forget to check the Gear for sale page for great deals on the ES rack, the Quadrasynth Plus Piano, and a pile of other neat stuff.