My eye got a YACBOH last week (≡ Yet Another Clean Bill Of Health) and so far things are looking up, another pun intended. I have another lens in my glasses for my left eye and this one as I expected is decidedly thinner than the last one. My vision is still a bit wavy, but by and large is better than it was.
My brain appears to have decided on its own accord that it prefers the right eye to the left, and I’m finding particularly when I play the piano that I’m not getting the left eye interfering nearly as much as it did before the latest operation – which I suspect is a good thing. As a result my piano playing is actually quite good and I’m getting more and more confident that I can get back to somewhere near my previous standard which will mean I’m in a good position to ‘finally’ do some recording.
I’ll be helping my son do some music for a function in two weeks time to help raise money for homeless Vietnamese children, and so have been busily arranging various pieces both familiar and unfamiliar to play on that occasion. David is getting quite good now (despite a lack of practice time for him due to pressure of work) on the saxophone, and we’ve come up with a good range of songs for his soprano, alto and tenor instruments and the sounds he is producing are actually getting to be quite professional, although he would be the first to admit he has a long way to go to really become fluent with the instruments. Nonentheless he is showing good improvisational skills and also has the unteachable knack of being able to recover from wrong notes – something that his father has had much experience in doing for many years now.
We’ve had a good time together working through the programme, and the Stuart piano has been quite superb in its ability to blend in with the saxophones without overpowering them in any way, even when played hard. I began to think about how I could transport the piano to our function but having seen the stage we will be on I’m not sure that the stage is big enough…
We were playing together at a mass last Sunday, and I began to realise that my venerable KS32 keyboard just wasn’t good enough any more as a performance instrument. Given the professional saxophones that David has, my brother-in-law’s drum kit (he plays professionally too) and the importance of the occasion (we are expecting between 600 and 700 people to attend) I knew that I had to ‘up the ante’ as it were if I was to produce an appropriate keyboard sound and feel when we played.
So I have acquired a new keyboard – an 88 note Kurzweil SP2X. Kurzweil have always had an excellent reputation for the quality of their keyboard sounds and having kept tabs on keyboards for quite a while in anticipation of having to upgrade this was the one I thought would be the best value for money – and so it proved. Very nice piano sounds, decent effects and although it doesn’t have the full MIDI sound set, I don’t really need all of those and if I do I can always hook the keyboard up to my notebook computer anyway. I bought the keyboard locally and got what was really a very good deal considering the current exchange rate of the $Aus.
So that’s one problem solved – albeit a fairly quick decision when I actually made it, but as I intimated one that I had been thinking about and doing my research on for quite a while.
But…
• Does it sound like a Stuart? No.
• Does it play like a Stuart? No.
• Does the treble ring like a Stuart? No, of course not.
No electronic instrument I’ve come across can get close – but for my purposes the Kurzweil doesn’t need to.
Incidentally, I was also able at the same time to reacquaint myself with some nice-looking Bechstein grand pianos.
• Did they sound like a Stuart? No.
• Did they play like a Stuart? No.
• Did the treble ring like a Stuart? No.
Nonethless, let me not sound rude and stupid here. They were very good quality pianos – even though I thought the 190cm one was much better than the 220cm one that was there – and it was half the price too, but that might just be a voicing problem.
It just goes to show how good the Stuart piano really is.