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.

Great job! I think member Hugh O'Kelly also recorded this song. The Beatles catalog is a big fat vein of ore to mine. I see a headphone/earplug cable. Did that provide you with a click track?

Nice. I couldn't pick up on any mistakes.

Did you have more butterflies for your first live performance, or for the first one that had a substantial audience?

Do those microphones on goosenecks get used for anything? (If so, no more people's feet thumping above your head and making extraneous noise, now that you are out of basement.)

I've wondered if I'll live to see the day I can set the voice knob to "Diana Ross" and type in some made-up lyrics on a typewriter style keypad and get "her" to sing the words at the notes I play on the black & white keys.

Good deal. I've got an Autodesk subscription at home, but it isn't exactly cheap.

Tangential question for happyrat: What CADD software do you use to make your one-line diagrams?

^------^ Fair enough. Again, thanks for all the assistance, and I'll try to take it the rest of the way by myself. If I wind up with any musical tracks that are not too embarrassing, I will upload them to this Casio board. But my warning is they are going to be "old fogey" material, ~ 1960s.

In a sense, I am now in business. Yesterday I was playing my Casio recording back from the RECORD function of the software, and it wasn't very loud. But today I went to the MIX function of the software and saw there were two more stages of virtual gain control (one looking like a twist knob and the other like a fader), and when I cranked them up, I got quite a satisfactory volume out of the computer speakers. I can also raise the volume of the recorded track in the EDIT function of the software, by a few dB, though not enough to make the amplitude look as high as it does in the sound samples that came with the software. My ultimate goal is to burn to CD and play through better audio equipment than my computer has built into it, but I have not yet tried to make that happen. So the remainder of this post falls into the "gilding the lily" category, rather than being something I absolutely have to implement. The Behringer provides left & right channels, but my software is either mixing them to mono or else picking out one of them (the left or the right) and making that be the waveform that shows up in a single track. If I really cared about having the lower Casio keys heavier on one side of my stereo recording and the higher Casio keys heavier on the other side of my stereo recording (and I'm not sure I really do), should I expect my software to be able to record two tracks simultaneously, one of the tracks being the left Behringer output and the other track being the right Behringer output? (My software allows up to 16 tracks, and I think if I wanted to I could do a mixdown at some point to effectively give me even more than 16 tracks.) The other thing is that Gary's second video link says at 6:50 that connecting the Behringer USB cable to the computer will initiate a download of "audio CODEC." If my computer did that, I didn't notice it happening. What I can say is that when I plug in the USB cable and right-click on the Windows speaker icon and go to the Recording tab, there is an icon for "Microphone USB Audio CODEC" which was not there before. It has a green checkmark showing it as the default device. I can go then to the Properties tab for it, and then to the Levels tab, and slide the volume anywhere from 0% to 100%. However, doing this slide does not in fact change the amplitude of the waveform I get in the software when I do some more recording from the Casio. In the Advanced tab I changed the setting from its original 1 channel 16 bit 44,100 Hz to 2 channel 16 bit 44,100 Hz, figuring I might as well aim high and go for a stereo sound through the USB if such is possible. (I think what I have described in this paragraph is equivalent to Gary's instructions to "First look in device manager and check...", but my Windows 8.1 savvy is not all that great and I may be wrong in thinking this.) ... So it seems that this new CODEC is maybe not doing anything for me, based on the fact that its volume slider is irrelevant to the amplitude of the waveform. Is there a Behringer website that I can go to in order to download a CODEC? (I haven't looked for such a site yet.) As I say, I could get by quite happily with the way I (with your generous assistance) have things set up now.

Gary/happyrat ought to get a sales commission because I now own a Behringer 302 and a plug/jack adapter that I put into the headphone jack of the Casio and which supplies left & right RCA jacks. I wired said jacks to the input jacks on the Behringer (trying LINE inputs first, then 2-TRACK inputs), and when I made the USB connection from back of Behringer to computer, the Behringer's power light came on as orange. As expected, the Casio speakers became inactive. I tried playing something while in record mode in the software, and did not get a waveform to show up. I tried a variety of settings for Casio volume, Behringer gain, and Behringer main mix, as well as various on/off permutations of the pushbuttons on the Behringer for LINE/USB FROM & TO and 2-TRACK TO. As I came up on the Casio volume I noted that the L & R signal clipping green lights on the Behringer came on intermittently when I was using the 2-TRACK inputs (but not when using the LINE inputs), so audio is getting from Casio to Behringer. Any advice? Should I try connecting the Behringer 1/8" headphone jack to the computer 1/8" jack, for instance? *EDITED MINUTES LATER TO ADD* With these Behringer button settings (not excluding all other possibilities necessarily, though)-- LINE/USB FROM pressed down (which either means LINE IN or USB PLAY depending on how to interpret the label) LINE/USB TO not pressed on (which either means MAIN MIX or PHONES depending on how to interpret the label) 2-TRACK TO not pressed on (which either means MAIN MIX or PHONES depending on how to interpret the label) and with all the volumes/gains full up, I see a tiny waveform on my computer monitor, and if I turn up the computer speaker volume all the way I can hear the Casio's voice. It isn't very loud, though. And I am driving the Behringer signal clipping LEDs crazy by doing this. Again, this is through a USB cable to the computer.