The SMS2 on my M4000 is not working and at this time and I have all of my tools packed away. I do not have any shop at the moment although I am currently looking to rent a space until I can build a stand-alone building on my property. I can get out a soldering iron, I suppose, but I have no means of tracking down the problem. All my test equipment in a mountain of boxes in a storage facility ten miles away. At the moment, the Mark II is in the garage. I need to get it up a flight of stairs and the door frame has to come off in order to do that. My wife has been ill for some time and my little sister is fighting leukemia, which has taken about everyone else in my family except my mom, who gave it up to emphysema. Getting this place in order has taken a lot of work. My hands are pretty full. I am about to send off one of the M400s to Vancouver and that will free up enough space to get the Mark II in, once I get the door frame off and get some help to get it up the stairs. I suspect that will have to be done soon as we are getting into the fall.
You may or may not know that we moved to a new (for us) home after 24 years in the old one. We gave up 1/3rd of the space we had for more land, more privacy and fewer stairs and another Doberman (we have 3 rescues), but most of all, to be near my sister.
My life is very much,"day to day". I have been playing more than I have for the last 40 years. True. Fewer instruments to noodle with right now because most are stored away for the time being. But I have been playing for an hour or more nearly every night and, amazingly, I've gotten better. I have also been composing and recording music and writing lyrics, something I did quite a bit of, long, long ago. Something might actually come of it. The music comes easy, the words a bit slower. The stories are there, but phrasing is the issue. I also find that writing lyrics is often like writing a letter. I used to always wait a day to mail letters of a personal nature. Often, I would find that there was more or less in them than I wanted to say. Second guessing, I suppose. I also hate the sound of my own voice and it's never me I imagine singing the words.
I wish Dave Seville was still alive

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Frank (too much shit to list)
Wot no M4000 or Mark II? About time we heard some.
Mark
Lately I have been spending time with just two instruments... an M400 and my Triton ProX... and a cheesy drum machine. No computers except to capture what I'm doing.
| Thanks Dave but I couldn't face getting another computer system. With computers and workstations I seem to get distracted away from playing. The electro 4 is fairly simple and I think I will be more likely just to play it. Mark Sent from Yahoo! Mail on Android |
One word: Logic.
David I probably will in the end Andy. It has a fairly good action and the one I tried out had a quite useable piano and a very nice harpsichord. The free sample library is also a plus. A good piano will cost at least $20,000 compared to $3700 for the Electro. ( Kiwi dollars )
Mark
Nah, get yourself the Electro Mark. I have the Electro 3 and am really happy with it. Lightweight, so simple to use. Great organs, acoustic pianos, Rhodes variants, trons, all very useable particular when driven through the on board eqs and amp/effects sims. And if that's not enough, you can download from the huge sample library for free from the Nord website.
Andy K
Sent from my iPad Seems to work well but I don't really like computers. Some times I think I should just buy a really good piano.
Mark
I'm sure we have different needs for these instruments, but I couldn't do my job without Kontakt. It's deep, but it's robust and well designed. Anyone who owns the Chamber Winds, Angry Strings or Plucked piano for their tron is essentially playing a Kontakt patch :>)
fritz
-----Original Message----- From: Mark Pring < markpringnz@yahoo.com> To: newmellotrongroup < newmellotrongroup@yahoogroups.com> Sent: Thu, Sep 26, 2013 3:57 am Subject: Re: [newmellotrongroup] Off topic Software vs hardware samplers Well I have been messing about with Kontakt 5 for few days and will be saving up for the Electro 4 or something similar.
I was trying out the Nord Electro 4 HP73 at the week end which I really liked. However it is really just a keyboard that plays back samples. I have a weighted action midi keyboard and a PC already and for a 10th of the price could use Kontakt 5. Has anybody on the list used both? Any thoughts?
Mark |