Saying Goodbye To Old Friends

Recently I decided to get rid of a couple guitars that I never played anymore (my old Kramer Pacer Deluxe and an '84 Fender Elite Strat) and buy a keyboard workstation. It was hard to do frankly because the Kramer had tremendous sentimental value from it being with me through so many phases of my musical life. It was the first brand new guitar I ever bought and my main instrument for over a decade through multiple bands. And the Fender, well it just had a very unique voice that no other guitar really has. I had 2nd thoughts while selling both of them, especially while cleaning and setting them up in prep for their sale. I was reminded of what great instruments they were. But in the end, as nice as they were I had moved on and I simply didn't use them very much anymore. I really needed other things a lot worse.


In particular, I wanted a very flexible keyboard workstation that would simplify my gigging set up for the Full Moon Fever. Currently I use a Roland VR-760, a Roland SH-201, and an E-mu PX-7. The E-mu and a Mackie mixer live in a DJ rack. Combine all that with stands, speakers, power amp, and pedalboard -- that's a lot of crab to schlep! A good workstation could replace the SH-201 and the PX-7, eliminating the need for the DJ rack, and leaving fewer and smaller things to carry. Plus, the workstation could function as a master for program changes so I could more easily reconfigure the entire rig between songs (the existing gear had too many MIDI limitations to pull that off reasonably). Finally, a more up-to-date workstation would give my synth sounds a nice upgrade, and it would give me a portable, all-in-one option for recording when I don't want to fire up the computer.

So that leads to a philosophy that I wish were more part of my makeup. I really need to be more pragmatic and commit to only keeping stuff that I use regularly. Otherwise its just wasting space and monetary resources that could be applied to things that would give me more utility.

So I bid adieu to my faithful Kramer and Fender, and welcomed... I'll save that for another post. There's plenty to write about that.

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