As it turns out, Mike McDonald recorded a demo of “It Keeps You Runnin” in Jeff Baxter’s garage, on Jeff’s “crappy little piano, like a Casio or something…” and producer Ted Templeman liked that sound so much that they ended up using that sound on the actual record release.
Sounds like the sort of thing Jeff Baxter would have had. The only truly expensive gear he was known to use was the Roland GS-500/GR-500 combo. But his favorite guitar was something he found in a dumpster and repaired, with pickups he designed and built himself.
Baxter doesn’t seem to remember the make/model of the crappy keyboard either, but he does remember using a Roland drum machine
Based on the release year of that song (1976), it was probably not a Casio toy keyboard. If I have heard correctly, Mike McDonald mentioned a “little Sound City electronic piano” (42:56)
Searching further, Italian-made Sound City DMI Piano was released in 1972. Perhaps that was the one? It sure sounds cheesy. It is also “little” compared to a full size electric piano.
Baldwin and Bontempi also made budget keyboards around that time that could have also been described as “like a Casio, what you’d buy for your 5 year old”. But nobody really remembers Baldwin/Bontempi/DMI Sound City/etc of that time.
Others have speculated RMI or Univox, though it’s the Univox pianos I see priced as cheaply as the DMI Sound City pianos.
I don’t remember which model of cheap Yamaha keyboard I owned in the early 2000s, so I wouldn’t be surprised if McDonald or Baxter can’t remember exactly what “Casio-like” keyboard was used in that 1975-1976 time frame.
I guess by “Jeff’s garage” McDonald meant Baxter’s apartment. Mike McDonald himself lived in a “garage apartment” at the time Baxter made that fateful phone call to invite McDonald to come join the Doobies, plane ticket and per diem will be paid for.
So the Muse has reached 1k posts and the Rev 4 hasn’t??? How about that? The mod matrix may be simpler but it is my goto bread sounds synth. No synth can do bread better than the Rev 4, imo that is of course.
Also, I just don’t think that threads about reissue Instruments are that big, because they’ve kind of already been around for decades, and we know what they can do. Sure, there are some updates, but if they nail it, then we already know how it sounds. And that’s a good thing.
Threads about new instruments are new and intriguing to people, so there is a lot if discussion about how it sounds to people, first time hearing it, it’s feature, etc. And there are also usually a lot of questions.
The muse looks incredible. It has “the sound” as I like to call it. P5/P10 has it, Deckard’s Dream has it, 3rd wave has it. Most other modern poly synths don’t. The other modern DSI/sequential stuff sounds good, but it sounds modern. It sounds precise. It sounds literal. Few synths have this romantic ineffable sound quality that is what makes me think “this is how a poly should sound”. If I didn’t already have the other ones I would be all over it, and there’s been a few times listening to demos of the muse that I’ve contemplated letting the Pro10 go to get the muse, but that’s just gas.
I posted this in the digitakt2 beats thread but I’ll double post it just because we are celebrating the wonderful Rev4
Just received my Prophet 5 a few days ago and I’m really fascinated by it’s sound quality and possibilities. I’ve created a free tool in M4L to control parameters from Ableton and also to modulate them with an LFO mapping tool (also included). Everything is configured to be used with the Push3 Standalone and also with Ableton Live on a computer. The possibilities are endless as all the P5 parameters can now be controlled with P-Locks on the sequencer. A full random parameter generator has been added in the last version.
I think if you updated firmware to the one before this , patches made on older firmware versions would be super quiet as they didn’t have a sensible velocity amount mapped, or something to that effect.
The mod matrix may be simpler but it is my goto bread sounds synth. No synth can do bread better than the Rev 4, imo that is of course.