Cameron MacKenzie

I did the jack cleaning and the factory reset, but no changes in the sounds. I am trying to install some music-studio-type software from a disc I bought weeks ago in order to record the Casio's sound, but am stymied by a cyclic redundancy check error popup. However, I saw that a music store within a 10-minute drive of me was having a sale on, um..., Brand X digital pianos 🙃, and in fact I got what I thought was a pretty good deal on one. So I am back to plinking away on piano and don't know whether I will pursue solving the problem with my Casio.

I will try the jack-cleaning idea. I don't currently have recording software on my computer (I used to), but I will work on making that happen in the next few days so I can record a sample of the Casio voices. As far as "factory reset"... is there a button somewhere for that?

I have had the headphones plugged in for months. I just now pulled the plug and listened through the speakers. Same problem with the sound. I live in a notoriously hot, arid climate, so I can't imagine there is any moisture left even if there had been some on the thermos 12 hours ago when this happened--which I doubt was the case, since I made an effort to run my fingers under the thermos before setting it down. There wouldn't be any good reason for the thermos to have been manufactured to be magnetic, but I suppose it might happen to be for some reason. In that case, it could have produced some transient currents in some circuitry as it was set down on the deck The piano's power switch was on at the time, since I had just walked away for 15 seconds.

So I get out of my piano seat at the Casio to go to the kitchen and grab a steel thermos of cold water. I couldn't feel any condensation on the thermos, so I figured it was safe to place it on the deck of the digital piano. I set it just to the left of the right speaker, so it was just to the right of the HALL button. Immediately (not later when some condensate could theoretically form and drip into the piano) the tone of the piano changed. I put the thermos on the floor and powered the Casio off/on. Still wrong sound from Casio on all of its voices. My best description would be that the voices now lack some overtones. Timbre has changed. Some voices are way lower in volume for the position of the volume knob. What is going on underneath the deck at that spot that would be sensitive to steel being moved close to it? (I couldn't resist the reference to a book title in my topic title.)

There's no time for fussing and fighting, my friend. How does one go about getting his song copyrighted? I've heard that in the old days they'd mail to their own house, and keep the envelope (with its date stamp from the Post Office) sealed.

Nice sound there. I don't know the song. It reminds me just a little of Lobo's 'The Albatross.'

Yeah, feeding the headphone jack signal to an all-electronic circuit to add effects to the sound has a lot of merit. I am pretty sure I could make a circuit that puts on a tremelo effect like the old Leslie rotating speakers (i.e. an oscillating volume), and make the oscillation frequency of the amplitude be whatever I wanted it to be. But a circuit that wobbles PITCH (vibrato) is probably beyond what I would be able to whip up.

I've been looking online at information about the Arduino microcontroller. It is a cheap little computer, essentially, which can be wired to external components that one could build in the garage. On my list of jottings about what I might use the thing for is this: let the Arduino and its software control a device I could build in which a stepper motor wobbles a rubbery/spongy lever which would bear against the pitch-bend wheel of my CDP-230R. I would be able to specify the frequency and amplitude of the wobble. Then while playing my keyboard I would get a vibrato effect. I've heard that variable resistors wear out with repeated use. Variable capacitors, on the other hand, could be twiddled millions of times without wearing out, I would think. Does anybody know how wear-resistant the pitch-bend wheel's guts are?

That is pulling me away from my idea of staying tightly clustered on the circle of fifths, since a half step change in keys throws one way over to the other side of the circle. At the risk of being overly pedantic, I ask about your "ii-vi-v-i progression in the key of C this would be d minor, a minor, g major c major)." Is it more standard to make those last two Roman numerals uppercase when it is the major chord? ... ii-vi-V-I. ... I thought that was the way music theorists distinguish major from minor in Roman numerals, though I've never taken a class in that kind of thing and may be wrong.

That does indeed sound like the basic idea behind the circle of fifths. So maybe I am onto something.

I can't argue with the "if it sounds good it is good argument." But to flesh out my original post, I thought there might be a rule like, "Stay close on the circle of fifths." For instance, it might clash if one piece is in D and the other is in A flat. I've read that producers back in the days of the LP album would order tracks to avoid incompatible keys for successive songs. I figure the same thing would apply to a medley, though I am not sure what makes for the incompatibility-- the circle of fifths thing being my best guess as to that.

My basic question: Is there a rule of thumb for choosing the keys for the components of a medley? I've never heard anything about this. The first example that comes to my mind is from the Beatles. John wrote the "I read the news today / oh boy" bit that starts out 'A Day in the Life.' Paul met up with John and told John he had a song he had been working on, which starts out, "Woke up / got out of bed / dragged a comb across my head." They decided to weld the two together into one track for their album, effectively producing a medley of two songs. My songbook scores both of them in G, but just statistically speaking, it's likely that when the two fellows got together with their songs-in-progress, they would have been in different keys. So maybe this is suggesting that you should record both (or all in the case of more than two songs being joined together) in the same key. Complicating my example above is the fact that a lot of Paul's notes are unnatural to G, but natural to E. I don't know how relevant that is to my question, though. A point against matching keys would be that transitioning to a different key helps the listener identify where the different songs are welded together. But I don't have a feel for whether that is desirable, or whether one should keep things as seamless as possible by matching keys. Maybe you know a rule of thumb for this, or maybe you can point me to some examples of medleys I can find at some website such as YouTube. I have some specific songs in mind that I might try to do as a medley, with just a verse and not much more taken from any given song.

Very soothing piece. Has a bit of a Vince Guaraldi feel to it.

Keep those hits coming, man! My favorite five acts--------- * Beatles * Supremes * Bob Dylan * Tijuana Brass * Rolling Stones

Ah, so you ARE Hugh O'Kelly. I had not picked up on that.