Jim Alfredson

We're just over $300!!! C'mon folks, keep it coming!

I got it! Me too. It says, "McLaughlin is a hack."

Cool, Joe! A new axe to play with!!!

If it makes you feel better, Joe... I was hanging with Nagy today and that man has more guitars than I've ever seen!!

Loser.

Exactly! Three gigs, man!!! DO IT, JOE! DO IT, JOE! Ha! I'm the worst when it comes to this stuff. Mr. Impulse, that's me. Like that PR40 cabinet I just bought. I saw it on eBay and said "Come to papa!" But hey, it was a killer deal.

I'm not a drummer, but I play organ, which requires a lot of independence of the limbs as well. There are a few things I do to help with this, if I'm really stuck: 1) Slow it down. To a crawl, if need be. 2) Work with a sequencer. This sounds weird, but it works for me. What I do is play each part into the sequencer, put a click track behind it playing 1/4 notes or maybe even 1/8th notes, and then slow it down. This allows me to hear not only where each part lays in relation to the click, but how much space is between the parts themselves. In other words, I can hear "hey, I need to hit a C natural on beat 2-and with my left hand, followed a half beat later by a Eb on beat 3 with my right hand... oh and on beat four both hands hit together, G in the left, D in the right..." etc. Hard to explain... don't know if I helped or not!

All of these things make me nervous. But I have to do more research. What the hell is HouseCall Control? I don't like that one of the folders is called "netzip". Netzip is nasty stuff. Don't do anything yet. Like I said, gotta do more research.

Do it, Joe! Do it, Joe! Do it, Joe!!!

You should see if he'll let you borrow it and hook it up to your rig. I bet you'll be surprised. They sound really good. I think they are the best tone cabinet that Hammond made. I had a big ol' ugly thing with my BCV. I think it was a D20 or something. Man, it was HUGE and sounded awful. It had two 12" speakers and this weird Leslie-wanna-be rotating thing in it (a metal canister) that spun above the speakers (the speakers fired up in a V-shape) and it was terrible.

Here is some original advertising from Hammond about the PR-40: I like the sentence that I put in bold-face. Haha! Obviously Hammond didn't like Leslie competing with them! In fact, I read that Hammond didn't make a lot of money on the organs, but made most of their money on the cabinets. When people started buying Leslies instead of Hammond cabinets, they were not too happy.

Agreed. It's hard, I know. My senior year of high school was really rough for me. I was head-over-heels in love with this girl, I was starring in several school productions, and I was working on an "album" of my original tunes (this is back when I wanted to be Tony Banks!) so my grades took a nose-dive. But I did just enough to keep my GPA at a level where I could still get into Michigan State. It's tough, but ya gotta do it.

Jim, why do you dig the PR-40 Tone Cabinet? Didn't know they had much use other than putting a lamp on it. Mike, if you can find a PR-40 for low bread, get it! The PR-40 has ridiculous bass! The one on this minty '59 B3 in my living room sounds great! I just hooked up the one I bought on Tuesday to my '54 C2 for this afternoon's Organissimo rehearsal, and it sounds great as well! They have a lot of power, too. They use about 8 EL83's! They have two 15" woofers in there firing straight ahead, a 12" woofer firing straight ahead and either another 12" or a 10" (couldn't quite tell) firing up. Plus built-in spring reverb. You can set-up a switch on the organ to chose between the Leslie, the PR-40, or both. I'm starting to think this is how Rudy got his sound. Listen to "Organ Grinder's Swing", specifically "I'll Close My Eyes"... Jimmy is tapping the pedals on the quarter notes while playing whole notes in the left hand. And the pedal taps sound HUGE! Really deep and rich. That's what the PR-40 sounds like.

Kinda got a Bridgit Riley thing goin' on there really: I noticed that someone on eBay sold that LP for over $300 I know we've discussed this before, but did you ever check out the "magic eye" cover of this one? John McLaughlin The Promise If you can do the "thing" you can see writing, even on this reduced image. I tried it and it worked. Now if I can just uncross my eyes. Ha! I always wondered why that cover was so ugly... I never realized it was one of those magic eye things. Cool!

Moving this to the Jazz Radio forum.

That's pretty amazing. I was wondering where he came from. The Pistons don't give him much playing time due to picking up Arroyo. I really hope he makes a decent career in the NBA.

Sorry guys, I didn't get much sleep the previous night, so I hit the hay. I was worried Zora was going to wake up any minute (she sometimes needs changed in the middle of the night), so I wanted to get my shower in and to bed right quick!

Well, that's the thing. $5000 is actually a really good price for that instrument. You could take it to a bigger market than Lansing and probably get twice that for it, if not three times that much (if you pair it up with a really great sounding and looking Leslie speaker). But I don't have $5000 lying around! I lucked into the B3 I have now (a 1958... she was a beauty when I got her, but now she's a road dog). I'm hoping to find another like that, someday. I'm hoping my good karma will let me find one in mint condition that I can just keep at home and record with.

2004 was a rough year for Joe, but also for the band itself. After the extreme high in October 2003 of playing the Clearwater Jazz Festival in front of 15,000+ people and being treated like kings, it was back to reality. 2004 we just kind of stagnated, but that's because our personal lives needed attention. In my life, my wife and I had a baby, which is a big enough change as is! In 2004, Organissimo just lived on playing local gigs for not much bread. We still got a lot of feedback on the CD, but not much in the way of getting out of our current box as far as exposure is concerned. We're doing our best in 2005 to remedy this, including recording a new CD (that I'm very excited about... you guys ain't heard nothing yet...) and we're actively pursuing a manager to help get us out of Michigan and onto the wider scene. It is my hope that by the end of the year we'll be playing Chicago, Philly, Indy, Columbus, etc. Maybe even Japan if we're lucky (working on some stuff there). I think 2005 is going to be a good year for us! And there was one big success in 2004... this board!!! This place has exploded!!!

Ok! I'll start... that scottb is a stupid motherfu... oh wait. Shit.

Ah, late night chores. I usually wind-up farting around on the computer until I'm ready to fall asleep in the office. Then I come downstairs and realize I told my wife I'd do the dishes (she likes waking up to a clean kitchen). DOH! So now I'm doing dishes while half-asleep. Organissimo did have a gig tonight, so I'm in wind-down mode. But I'm about to take a shower and hit the hay. Nighty Night!

I hurt myself on a sharp eleven once and now I can only use dull ones.

Man, I didn't know Van Halen covered "Fur Elise." Yeah, they were way ahead of Alicia Keys, man.

What do they sound like?

But all the "Smoke on the Water" you can dish out. Dude, that's only in the keyboard department. Along with "Fur Elise" and "Jump" by Van Halen.