Where the hell is my Damned Minilogue?

[happyrat1]

I've been waiting patiently for two months now for my dealer to supply me with a Korg Minilogue.

Apparently I'm like number 2 or 3 on the list of about 50 prepaid backorders.

I'm jonesing for some analog people.

I've been phoning Carlos over at Moog Audio's web sales dept. on pretty much a weekly basis for the past month and everytime we talk my spot on the list has not budged an inch.

What should I be doing to maintain my sanity and my patience in the meantime?

Any news in the grapevine on what's holding up Korg's production schedule or is this just another case of Canadians getting the sticky end of the stick yet again?

Gary

 

[SeaGtGruff]

I hope you get it soon! It's a real bummer to order something and then have to wait two weeks for it, let alone two months!

 

[happyrat1]

Carlos at Moog Audio told me about one customer who waited THREE YEARS for an Oberheim on backorder!!!

THAT, my friend, takes a true cementhead's dedication to the art!

Either dedication or a dozen blows to the head until amnesia sets in

Either way I'm giving them another month tops. If it's not in by mid April I'm cancelling the whole danged shootin' match.

Gary

 

[happyrat1]

Ya know what? Screw it!

I just cancelled the Minilogue and ordered a Roland JD-XI instead.

It's exactly the same price and the same dealer has it in stock and is shipping hopefully either today or Tuesday at the latest with the current Easter Weekend messing up the couriers.

This means that by Wednesday or Thursday next week at the latest I'll have a decent analog tradeoff for the Korg.

Plus this sucker is a hybrid ROMpler and Analog synth with vocoder functions built in.

Either way, I'll be making music by next weekend for sure

Gary

 

[SeaGtGruff]

Is the Roland JD-Xi the one that was released last year, with a combination of analog and digital technology? If so, I watched the videos of it being demoed at NAMM. It was very impressive, although I wasn't thrilled about the size of the keys. But I say that having never actually owned and played a keyboard with smaller-than-normal keys, so I really have no idea how easy or difficult it would be to adapt to them-- not that I'm much good at playing with normal-sized keys!

Anyway, you can still get a Minilogue sometime in the future if you get another case of GAS.

 

[happyrat1]

Yep. JD-XI was released at 2015 NAMM.

This gives them a chance to kick the bugs out of the firmware as well.

37 Mini keys is not a problem. The Minilogue also has mini keys.

The solution is to use my Kurzweil as a controller routed thru USB MIDI.

Actually I use my Kurzweil as an 88 Key controller for all my synths. Running Linux I've never had a problem with latency either.

I've downloaded and scanned the manuals quickly, it's not that complicated a beast. I'll print them up and bind them later today.

Wish me luck

Gary

 

[Fred Coulter]

It doesn't come with a printed manual?

Back in the day, I always got printed manuals with my keyboards. Usually etched in clay in cuneiform. Those manuals would outlast the keyboards.

 

[happyrat1]

I like to prepare before purchase by downloading and printing up the manuals before I buy so I know what I'm getting myself into.

Also a lot of keyboard manufacturers cut corners nowadays and print on half sized sheets of booklet paper that results in unreadable manuals. Using the PDF I can make damned sure it's an 8-1/2x11" standard size when I print it myself.

One final thing, is that while most keyboards ship with a basic manual, maybe a quick start guide and occasionally a parameter guide, they leave it up to the user to print for himself the MIDI Specs, the Errata, The Voice List and any other supplemental material.

Personally I've printed and bound over a hundred technical manuals and documents over the past ten years so I invested in a comb binder and all the accessories a long time ago.

My manuals look really slick and professional and compared to having Staples print and bind a 400 page manual for $60 I can do up a professional book for between $2 and $4 a pop.

Here's a sample of my work.

PS. (It also helps to have a duplexing laser printer that automatically prints on both sides of the paper. It cuts paper costs in half and makes for a much more compact and eco friendly manual. )

http://www.amazon.com/Brother-MFCL2700DW-Wireless-Networking-Printing/dp/B00MFG58N6

Gary

 

[SeaGtGruff]

Yeah, it's hard to refer to the printed manual that comes in the box when it hasn't been delivered yet.

I used to print out and bind manuals when I had access to a binding machine, but now I just look at the PDFs-- which are easier to search through, anyway. But one nice thing about printing a copy of the PDF even though you've also got a printed copy that came in the box is that you can keep your official copy in pristine condition while highlighting your copy of it.

 

[happyrat1]

Let's face it. Nowadays a lot of gear ships with no docs except for a quick start foldout and an out of date manual on PDF CDROM.

Plus it's hard to curl up in bed at night with a PDF manual running on a computer unless you own a tablet and I've never been one for etext to begin with. Too hard on my tired old eyes and it's simply not a substitute for a real honest to god paper manual with page numbers and margins you can make notes in and corners you can dog ear to easily find a page.

To be honest, for a computer savy guy who's constantly playing with bleeding edge technology, I'm still pretty much a throwback to an earlier time without google and without ebooks and without nasty little smartphones that carry all that crap along with ya wherever you go.

While I've ripped a lot of my collection to MP3's I still prefer to buy my music and movies on physical disks and play them on a real stereo rather than license an invisible stream of bits on some frigging "cloud"

Today I can't help but think that we're all speeding down the path to a world foretold by Soylent Green, Logan's Run, 1984, THX1182 and the stories of doom foretold by the likes of Edmond Cooper and TJ Bass and Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

For all the whizbang electronic "conveniences" we've gained, we've lost a lot, such as food that tasted like real food, freedom to speak our minds without becoming an internet meme on the twitter/youtuibe public shaming network, and the blind optimism of the potential of mankind in the face of the steady erosion of climate and civil liberties while we all drown in a raging sea of political correctness.

Don't you dare go after my fetish for paper and plastic media buddy, cause that's my last link to a kinder, simpler time when the world wasn't constantly trying to do us all in

Peace...

Gary

 

[happyrat1]

BTW, Michael, if all that's keeping you from binding your own manuals is lack of a machine, you can easily find one for under $100 on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/Kenley-Binding-Machine-Binder-Starter/dp/B013TA809U

Believe me, these things pay for themselves after three or four manuals. And a couple of boxes of combs and covers will last the average person a lifetime.

Gary

 

[CowboyNQ]

It doesn't come with a printed manual?

That's the norm these days. Or you'll get a very basic printed manual to get you going, but the good stuff's on a PDF.

It's no biggie. Computers have shipped the same way for years.

 

[happyrat1]

Of course nowadays I'm not really sure if manuals are really necessary any more

Some of these Youtube tutorials do a far better job than the Chinglish google translations that pass for documentation for a lot of Asian keyboards these days.

I wish Youtube had been around thirty years ago when I owned a Yamaha DX-27S. Back then when you bought used gear you were lucky if any manual came with it at all and the internet was only used for downloading pron

Gary

 

[happyrat1]

It Arrived Today!!!

Lotsa multifunction buttons to master.

It's gonna be a fun weekend.

Looks good in the studio though. And fits nicely on the mixer/module rack.

Gary

 

[SeaGtGruff]

Thank goodness it looks better than the drawing on the box (those keys)!

PS-- Is that an X stand I see in that last pic? I thought you were allergic to X stands?

PPS-- I'm not picking, because I use X stands myself. I'm just welcoming you to the Dark Side.

 

[Rayblewit]

Gary has left the planet!
He is now engrossed in reading the manual . . .

Step 1. Find middle C.

uh!

 

[musicstand]

Gary has left the planet!
He is now engrossed in reading the manual . . .

Step 1. Find middle C.

uh!

"Gary has left the planet" He is with the Klingons in the Bajoran worm hole approaching the Cardassian/Roland JD-Xi zone. The Romulan Roland gang are notorious for stealing "patches and programs" that you have saved. I was watching the tutorials Gary even though I don't understand. giggle

 

[happyrat1]

Gary has been beating his head against a wall with firmware upgrades and trying to make the JD-XI square peg fit into the Linux Cakewalk round hole!!!!

Yes, that is an X-stand but if you look very closely it is the old fashioned type with a very sturdy crossbar locking mechanism instead of those gear destroying pins that everyone else is using nowadays

At any rate I've wasted the last 4 hours trying to get this thing to sound musical in my cakewalk.

I have much studying to do the next few days grasshoppers.

While it sure as hell seems to be multitimbral in performance mode I have to read up on the MIDI specs to see how to get it talking to more than one MIDI channel at once.

For now I'm shutting down the toys to curl up with a 150 pages of documentation.

Gary

 

[happyrat1]

Like I said I've been klunderfutzing with this thing for 4 hours and I'm burnt out.

Found a video from Roland that explains how to set up with a DAW.

Too tired to make any use of it now.

I'll start fresh tomorrow

Gary

 

[SeaGtGruff]

Yes, sleeping for a while and giving your brain a chance to sort, file, and absorb the results of a 4-hour, 150-page cram fest can do wonders!

Just beware of bizarre dreams about being chased by giant Rolands, evil DAWs, and collapsing X stands!