My music interests

I'm mainly interested in classical music, some of the non-raucous jazz music, some 50's and 60's rock and pop music, but don't care much for the current crap.

I play keyboard instruments (only for the fun of it), mainly the organ.  I have been known to dabble with pianos, but they're a bit too painful on the fingers for me, these days.  I don't care for synthesisers, though; there's too much fiddling to set up and change the sort of sounds it's going to make, you don't just sit down and play music on them.  And I don't really care that much for fake instruments, especially non-keyboard instruments being faked on a keyboard, and anything that really needs the mechanical accoustics of the real instrument (e.g. even a straight, truly HiFi, recording of a real piano is a completely different experience from sitting at a piano, feeling it resonate, and each note reacting against each other, even against the strings of the ones not being played, as well as effect of the room around it; never mind a completely fake simulation).

I really only like the organ sounds on an organ, even though the electronic organ is quite different from a pipe organ (I think it's, now, an instrument in its own right).  I don't make much use of their attempts to emulate traditional instruments; apart from the sound being too different from what I want to hear, they don't sound like the real thing, and many of them were never meant to be played by a keyboard.

Technics SX-U90

I currently have a Technics U90 organ, a model above the one I always wanted to own as a kid (in the 1980's).  Back then, we only had a Hammond 123J3.  But before I bought the Technics, I had a Yamaha D30 Electone for a while.  I'm pretty sure it was a D30, what I remember of it looks very like the D30's picture in the Electone Museum website, and the model number sounds familiar, though I've got an invoice with 803 written on it, but the salesman's business card from the store with D30 scribbled on it. 

Buying that Yamaha organ could easily have been a very embarassing affair.  I went to the store intending to try out a few different organs, and see what I liked best.  I ended up playing music in the store for probably an hour or more, badly bashing out Beatles songs, amongst others, while trying out different keyboards and settings, before settling on the Yamaha.  The next time I went into town, I walked to the store thinking about looking for some sheet music, and there out the front of the store was Julian Lennon giving some little promotional concert from the back of a flat bed truck.  It's just as well my two visits were on separate days, I could just imagine being in the middle of making a hash out of one of the Beatles' songs and this voice coming up from behind me saying, “You're doing that all wrong…”

I also used to have a little Technics K200 portable organ, but I traded it in with the Yamaha for the U90.  Sometimes I think I made a mistake trading in the Yamaha, the fake Leslie in the U90 doesn't sound as good as the real one in the Yamaha.  It had a real rotating horn speaker—with a transducer made out of polystyrene, of all things—but I don't recall if it was a genuine “Leslie”.  Somehow, I doubt the parts were actually from that company.  If the truth be told, I'd really like a Hammond B3, or the new XB3.  They have a very distinctive sound (which I like), a proper piano-like keyboard (not thin plastic, break-the-keys and/or slash-your-palms if you do a glissando slide along it, sort of thing), and a real Leslie speaker sounds a lot better than any emulation that I've heard.


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