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#211941 - 01/03/02 09:13 AM Arranger keyboard horror stories!
pasadoble Offline
Member

Registered: 11/30/01
Posts: 218
Loc: Portsmouth, England.UK
As I will be soon using a new Arranger keyboard on-stage (PSR2000) my mind goes back
to the Arrangers I have owned in the past and their faults and some of the gremlins I've experienced, no doubt all Pro/Semi-pro keyboardist have had these night's when our equipment seems to take on a mind of its own, although amusing now, at the time it filled us with horror as our bemused audience
looked on in disbelief at our frantic attempts to get things working correctly again.
Several items in my past musical armoury come to mind, my old Roland RA90 Arranger module would on a hot night suddenly drop to half tempo usually during a fast running drum pattern/style. The Gem WS2! great keyboard in its time, but Tempo and Volume on this keyboard shared the same data wheel, many's the time I sped the tempo up while thinking I was turning up the volume (whoops)
My PSR730 would randomly and inexplicably change the key of a Midifile and I would only know after I had started it and everybody was on the dance floor! what do you in that situation 'PANIC' also on the PSR730 the demo
button was just above the volume control and the first time I used it I accidentally pressed it while performing Cool & The Gang's 'Celebration' to a packed dance floor, after a quick pause on came that really cheesy 'Big Band' trumpet demo, that cleared the dance floor immediately.
Well there's a few of my experiences, no doubt there are many stories to be told on this subject so feel free to add to this very entertaining topic.



[This message has been edited by pasadoble (edited 01-03-2002).]

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#211942 - 01/03/02 09:42 AM Re: Arranger keyboard horror stories!
Anonymous
Unregistered


I used to perform with a PSR5700, which I dearly loved. But it was definitely a Florida keyboard. On days where the temp dropped into the 40's I would have to set up in the early afternoon and let it adjust to room temp or it just flat out refused to play.

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#211943 - 01/03/02 09:54 AM Re: Arranger keyboard horror stories!
Fran Carango Offline
Senior Member

Registered: 05/26/99
Posts: 9673
Loc: Levittown, Pa, USA
Initialy working with the G series from Roland, it was very easy to accidently select a performance instead of a tone change in your exsisting performance while you were playing..When it happens you have to ablib,this gives the real meaning to improvise...
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#211944 - 01/03/02 10:39 AM Re: Arranger keyboard horror stories!
Uncle Dave Offline
Senior Member

Registered: 12/01/99
Posts: 12800
Loc: Penn Yan, NY
psr2k owners know that in a hurry, it's very easy to hit the "Transpose" when reaching for the "Tempo" buttons. They should be further apart .... a nightmare waiting to happen.
I put a small stick-on clear, rubber foot right in the center of the two tempo buttons so that I can FEEL the correct one....great for those quick changes in the dark.
The little feet come 12(I think) in a pack at Radio Shack for about $2.00.
Could be a lifesaver one day.
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No longer monitoring this forum. Please visit www.daveboydmusic.com for contact info

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#211945 - 01/03/02 11:03 AM Re: Arranger keyboard horror stories!
DonM Offline
Senior Member

Registered: 06/25/99
Posts: 16735
Loc: Benton, LA, USA
There or sooooo many.
I remember a problem with the Roland G800 in that it wouldn't store Transpose in the performances. If you were in a transposed situation you couldn't change performances during the song without some quick button pushes. Much safer just to not use transpose.
On the PSR740, I had a lot of trouble at first wanting to change a style or sound on the fly and doing just the opposite because the wrong thing was on the screen.
On the PSR 8000, it was very easy to reach for a sound bank button and hit a registration change instead. Very interesting when it happens in the middle of a song.
In the early days of using arranger keyboards I almost always kept a duplicate in the car, just in case, but I can never remember one quitting completely. Occasional reboots, yes, but in close to 20 years of using them, I've never had one die on the job. Now if I can find some wood to knock on . . .
DonM
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DonM

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#211946 - 01/03/02 11:06 AM Re: Arranger keyboard horror stories!
Fran Carango Offline
Senior Member

Registered: 05/26/99
Posts: 9673
Loc: Levittown, Pa, USA
Don, Above your neck!!
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www.francarango.com



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#211947 - 01/03/02 03:21 PM Re: Arranger keyboard horror stories!
Beakybird Offline
Senior Member

Registered: 01/27/01
Posts: 2227
The worst is when you're playing a PSR740 or a PSR2000 and you think you have the freeze button on so you can press a registration button and only the voice changes. Whoops, your theme song from Dr. Zivago suddenly turns into a 212 bpm Dixieland!
On the PSR740 there is a horrible feature that the freeze button does not freeze the transpose. So if you have a song transposed and you press a registration button, the song gets transposed to 0. Oops!

Larry

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#211948 - 01/03/02 09:02 PM Re: Arranger keyboard horror stories!
ChicoBrasil Offline
Member

Registered: 06/09/01
Posts: 993
Loc: Belo Horizonte,Minas Gerais,Br...
Hello Larry and Frank
I had the same trouble with G800 and 740.
Terrible!!!
Chico

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#211949 - 01/04/02 05:32 AM Re: Arranger keyboard horror stories!
Tom Cavanaugh Offline
Senior Member

Registered: 12/06/99
Posts: 2133
Loc: Muskegon, MI
Larry,

The transpose bug/defect that you mentioned on the PSR740 was one of the main reasons that I dumped mine on Don.

Tom
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Thanks,

Tom

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#211950 - 01/04/02 07:31 AM Re: Arranger keyboard horror stories!
stillme Offline
Member

Registered: 07/30/01
Posts: 152
Loc: Michigan/US
I don't have any experiences that include onlookers...but I did spend a couple months creating about fifteen songs, working on them until late at night (when I had to get up at 5 am to work the next day), only to have my keyboard say one day that the disk they were on wasn't formatted and showed nothing on there. (I was devastated...I cried for hours) Luckily my husband put the disk in his computer to check it out and they were all there...so he copied another new disk for me from that one and it worked. My disk drive is messed up on mine.

-Tracey

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