I didn’t find any topic here with that subject yet
And since I’m lately spending more time with you guys than with my wife…
I’m Sven, a graphical designer from Belgium.
I have been playing keys from my 16th, and unfortunatly enough I’m 41 now (or lucky).
I have my own band www.theXperience.be
A Dance/Rock project with beamer, lightshow, fire and boobies. (what’s missing)
And since recent I play in www.dasrock.be a Alternative Rock band, playing Foo Fighters, INXS, Editors, QOTSA, …
I’ve done some 800 concerts with my previous band. Mostly in Belgium.
I owned the following synths, or at least a list of those I cherished the most, Roland D50, Xp80, Yamaha Ex5, Hammond XB2, Nord Electro 3,…
Now I’m on Nord Stage 2 and would never change again.
Yesterday I sold a ESQ1 that was gathering dust here.
Some 3 years ago I started experimenting with live laptop music. It was a pretty bumpy road from problems with soundcards to software that wasn’t reliable. I even had a whole concert every 3 minutes my main track was stuttering djidjidjidjidji. Horror lol. But we didn’t stop, neither did Depeshe Mode in Bilboa.
I’ll post some images later.
Furthermore, did I mention, I love boobies.
I grew up in the middle of Nowhere, which some say doesn’t exist, but I beg to differ.
At a very young age, I was taken to Elsewhere, where I learned to read poetry.
At the age of nine, I learned how to play the flute.
At age 15, I learned how to play the Magnus Chord Organ.
That led to playing in High School Rock Bands, though I did acquire a Farfisa Mini Compact organ (with a Haynes Jazz King amp) to do that after finding that a microphone stuck inside of a Magnus Chord Organ provided horrific results. (And much fan noise.)
Which led to circuit bending of said Farfisa Mini Compact Organ, leading me to an interest in Electronic Music.
Which led to my being a sneak-in student at the prestigious Boston “School of the Museum of Fine Arts” via passes provided by then-professor Jay Jaroslav to the electronic music lab there (two “Putney” EMI VCS3 synths, Sony 4-track recorder), which led to me becoming a full-time student four months later after being caught.
Which led to a lifetime of music making.
In 1978 through 1983 I was a street busker playing flute on the streets and in the subways of Boston and Cambridge, MA, and in NYC. Played 8 hours a day and became rather skilled.
Bought my first “I own this” real synth in 1994 - a Korg Wavestation keyboard that I still use.
Performed some concerts in 1997 with Laura Rohde using two Wavestations and an Ensoniq EPS. (Pardon the occasional digital distortions from having the recording input set too high. The concerts themselves were clean!)
As to hobbies, my YouTube Channel where I tend to show my discoveries while in pursuit of my hobbies as videos, and website at http://terrybritton.com show more of my many interests.
Since you asked, there’s a little about me at the bottom of this page. There’s also this interview which covers some more of my background and how Cantabile came about.
As for hobbies, besides computers, tech and music, I have this in my garage awaiting some TLC.
“Christine” - have owned her my entire adult life. Bought it as a wreck when I was teenager, did it up, drove it into the ground like a teenager should, then it sat in the garage for a long time, then it went in for a year worth of back to bare metal body work and amazing paint job, then it sat in the garage for another 10 years. I’m now in the process of organizing everything to put her back together (which I’ll probably do myself).
@dave_dore - Awww - I’m not actually from OK – I learned about Nowhere from my neighbor Sheena Brubeck who WAS from OK. I don’t think anyone is actually from the middle of Nowhere, but it does exist.
I’m from Norwalk, CT up till age 8 and grew up in Ridgefield, CT mostly. Great town and an idyllic place to grow up. But Oklahoma is one fine place!
Interestingly, Leon Russell is a hero of mine as well.
I’m from England, and by day I’m a software engineer working at The Foundry in London, on visual effects software for use in film/TV. Here’s one of our showreels, giving you an idea of the kind of stuff our tools are used for. If you watch a modern Hollywood movie, the chances are you’re watching our tools at work at some point.
For hobbies, I’m the keyboard player in two bands. The most active is IQ, a prog-rock band that does regular shows mostly around Europe, but with the occasional trip further afield (we’re in Canada for some shows next Spring).
Here’s a clip from a recent show in Sweden:
And another:
You can hear the whole of our most recent album, The Road of Bones, here:
My other band is Sphere³, an instrumental prog-rock-fusion band. We’ve been absent from the public eye for a few years now, while we all work on other projects, although meanwhile we’re slowly writing tracks for our next album, which in this band takes a very long time!
You can hear the whole of our album Comeuppance, here:
For many years I was playing a very conventional keyboard setup - basically a load of hardware synths and a mixer. I then graduated to a pair of Muse Receptors in my rack, allowing me to run VST plugins, which opened up a whole new world of sounds, and I quickly realised not only that my hardware synths couldn’t really compete, but neither could any new synths on the market. But the Receptor is quite limiting; not all plugins will work on it, the plugin installation process requires some black magic, no sane way to back it up apart from a full hard drive clone, and loading new plugins takes a long time (none of the cleverness Cantabile has!).
I decided to replace the Receptors with a dedicated PC running a plugin host, and after considering Mac Minis for a while, I eventually settled with the Gigabyte Brix. I tried out a few plugin hosts, including MainStage on the Mac, Plogue Bidule, and Brainspawn Forte, but nothing really came close to being able to do what I needed to do until I tried Cantabile 2. I started small, using it to supplement 3 hardware synths, but once it had proven itself, the rig gradually evolved to use more plugins and less hardware sounds. When Brad announced he was starting work on Cantabile 3 I dived in and excitedly tried out all the alphas/betas, slowly watching it evolve from the ground up into the powerful beast it is now.
My current rig consists of Cantabile 3 running on a pair of Gigabyte Brix machines (one running as a backup), with a MOTU Ultralite Mk3 audio interface and MOTU Microlite MIDI interface. My main controller keyboard is a Kurzweil PC3x, and I use a Moog Minimoog Voyager for leads (sometimes as a MIDI controller for a lead in Cantabile!). In my rack I also have a pair of Nord G2 Modular Engines, which provide some extra modular synth capabilities, beyond what I can get from my plugins in Cantabile. I also use an Akai LPD8 for controlling Cantabile (selecting songs, bringing up level meters, toggling live mode etc), and an LCD monitor for its display, but the keyboard/mouse are tucked away in my equipment rack. Almost all of my sounds now come from Cantabile - the Voyager and Nord G2 Modular Engine remain my only hardware sound sources.
Favourite plugins: Ivory II, VB3, M-Tron Pro, Omnisphere, Synth1, Serum
Favourite hardware instruments: Mellotron M400, Moog Voyager, Roland D50, Logan String Synth
Favourite Cantabile features: Racks, intelligent handling of held notes across state changes, state control of routes, new bindings, jump prevention.
This was WWRY in 2008 I think. I’m the one between the red-haired girl and the guy in the gray suit. Just at Ben Elton’s fist. Yes, that’s Brian and Roger in front.
My whole livetime I’ve been working in the music-business, but had some time when I programmed websites as a side-job.
Programming (php, emberjs, Android) now became my hobby.
Originally I’m a pianist/keyboarder.
In my business we either have Kurzweils - or nowadays they get monstly replaced my Mainstage.
We also had a try with Muse Receptor, but that didn’t work out well.
Since I’m a PC user Cantablily now is a possibility for me to finally have a working environment that can replace Mainstage. I’ve not used it in production yet, but will in 4 months in a production of “Jesus Christ Superstar”.
Now you know, why my requirements in such a software is quite a bit different than those for normal gigs.
We usually have 300 sound switches per Show per Keyboard… Like every 4 bars.
The plugins I’m about to use will mostly be Kontakt, Omnisphere (I think I gonna sample the sounds and effects I’ll need for stabability sake) and some softSynths like Helm.
For Piano I use productionvoices piano’s.
Because they are quite cheap and really good for my requirements.
Utmost respect for you, my friend. I’ve been involved in a few musicals as lighting asst. and actor/singer and got to know the musical directors. It is a demanding job, and what you all accomplish (musician-wise) really makes the show!
I also got into web development programming, and now am learning javascript as a hobby thing, mostly, though I actually do have a couple long-time clients whose sites I still care for.
I am pretty sure Cantabile will be up to the task - even with THAT many cues!
Wow, I thought I got through a lot with about 100 per show. Crazy! I’d be fascinated to hear more about your setup, how you manage your sounds, volume levels and so on. That would be worthy of a forum thread on its own I reckon.
I am from the San Francisco Bay Area in California. By the day I am a public school music teacher. I teach 4 concert bands, a jazz band, and two choirs. My primary instrument is the baritone saxophone, which I play in a semi professional wind orchestra. I’ve played piano my entire life also, but my true love is synthesizers. I don’t get to play keyboards live much anymore due to my teaching schedule, but I occasionally write music with various bands for a fun web competition called “song fight.” I use Cantabile a lot with my choir classes as accompaniment when I need to conduct and not worry about the piano parts.
I live in Germany, more precisely in Düsseldorf for more than 10 years now, but still feel like an “exiled Bavarian”, having grown up right at the foot of the Alps and having lived in Munich for more than 20 years…
I make my living as a consultant for IT strategy and organization now, having run the IT function for one of the larger European companies for close to 10 years. In parallel, I’m currently hatching an interesting little start-up around crowd-sourced consulting with some friends.
Musically, I’m an ambitious amateur (i.e. I don’t need to make a living from my music, but aspire to a reasonably serious level of proficiency in my projects) My musical history has been quite varied - started with classical music education (piano, violin), diverted into local Bavarian folk music (no, accordions don’t need to be embarrassing ), played jazz with a bunch of university-trained classical musicians, had a number of own projects and supported others, did a lot of home-recording and have now arrived at my current project: “Cränk! - Classic Rock & More” - a classic rock cover band project that is a lot of fun.
Plus, we’ve recently started a little project called “Family Business” with my wife and two daughters, playing acoustic versions of all our favorites, swapping instruments around on pretty much every song. Given our various backgrounds, this ranges from Joan Baez to 21 Pilots
Outside music, my hobbies (when there is still time) are mostly sports (volleyball, golf, inline skating) and a bit of personal C++ coding (see the LivePrompter project elsewhere on this forum).
Equipment-wise, I’ve collected tons of stuff, starting with my initial setup of Korg CX-3 and Yamaha DX-7. Various keyboards, 19’’ boxes and external effects, plus, of course, a growing number of guitars, guitar effects and virtual amps (never really got addicted to big Marshall stacks). But recently, most of this is gathering dust, thanks to a super-efficient and super-creative combination of a Kurzweil PC3K, a Line6 James Tyler Variax and Cantabile!
Great to be part of this community - I’m definitely spending too much time here !
They can be downright amazing. There was an accordian busker that used to get around Sydney CBD (might still be, I don’t get in there much these days) who was amazing. I always stopped and listened and always left him more than just a few dollars…
I’m another Neil, living in Oxford UK.
I used to earn a living intranet/web programming and for the last 4 years have been teaching my little boy. After fighting to get a diagnosis of ASD we, as so many have done, found the cupboard bare in terms of practical and progressive support. I taught myself all about behavioural approaches which have proven so successful and am now really rather good at it. If anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask.
I spent most of the 90s in a project studio making electronic music, with just about enough success to scrape a living. In the 00s I started playing piano but let it slide by the 10s. About a year ago I started again, playing keys in a Camel tribute band.
+1 on the accordions (was highly fortunate to stumble across a good one in a charity shop the other week for £120. Unbelievably, a 94 year old lady was demoing it, who started when she was 40)
I’m still in installing and testing process. Trying to figure out how I should manage that best.
But I think it’d be a good idea having a seperate thread for that. I will start one as soon as I have something to report!
Jeff
from problems with soundcards to software that wasn’t reliable. I even had a whole concert every 3 minutes my main track was stuttering djidjidjidjidji. Horror lol. But we didn’t stop, neither did Depeshe Mode in Bilboa. 
Thanks to Sven for thread idea!
