Keith Emerson dead

[mathman]

My very first concert was Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.  I was a lucky man.

 

Sad.  Now.  A loss.

[HAMERMAN]

Extra sad that it was his own doing.

[sixesandsevens]

On 3/11/2016 at 7:47 PM, chromium said:

Very cool!  My modular system is all recent stuff (2001+), made by a variety of vendors... but in similar format to the Moog.  It's mostly used, and I started piecing it together in 2007.  That ribbon controller is something that I build/sell as I have time.  Uses industrial force and position sensors, and I make the enclosures, have the boards/panels machined.  Those have helped the ol' "Hamer fund"  (...and were another Emerson inspiration - although none of mine ignite pyrotechnics).

I still have a '74 Mini that was a beat up road warrior, but I went thru the whole thing and restored/refinished it.  Also have a similar era Oberheim Four Voice with the sidecar sequencer.  Same deal there- massive sweat equity.  I've let go of a lot of others, but have managed to hang onto the Sequential Pro-One I bought as a teen for peanuts when everyone was dumping their analogs for DX7s.

That's awesome.  You don't see much synth love on here, so I want to call out your posts as awesome.

I got into synths just as things really heated up in the analog resurgence and while I feel like they're an exponentially more dangerous time-sink for me than guitars, I really appreciate how much broader my appreciation for sound is as a result. 

[sirDaniel]

yikes, Bowie, Squire, not Emerson....

My youth is evaporating rapidly.  Thank goodness for records..  

 

[Willie G. Moseley]

The Emerson, Lake and Powell album figured into my transition from cassettes and LPs to CDs in the mid-'80s, as well as how classical music is utilized in movie soundtracks (this may take a while to recount but a lotta folks can identify with such, so please humor me):

The Missus bought me the cassette of that album in '86, and I was impressed with the difference Powell made compared to Palmer (but didn't particularly favor one over the other). I was really taken with the mechanical, creepy-yet-irresistable re-working of Holst's "Mars, the Bringer of War" from The Planets, which I'd never heard in its original classical form...or had I?

There are a lot of moments in movies where viewers remember the portion of the soundtrack that was playing at the time, and it could be anywhere from symphonic to rock music, for that matter. Personally, I remembered the music from the '50s version of The Ten Commandments when the exodus began, when the Red Sea parted, etc. (Elmer Bernstein conducting a symphony).

There are three huge, booming notes at one point in "Mars" (preceded by martial-sounding, rat-a-tat drums) that demand attention from a listener (particularly if such music is played on rock instruments). IIRC the three notes are the root note, up to a seventh, then down a half step (legitimate musicians please feel free to correct if I'm wrong and I don't have a keyboard handy).

And the first time I heard those three notes in ELPowell's version of "Mars" I said to myself: "I've heard that before", and methinks I've noted this before in this forum, for that matter.

I pulled out my Beta VCR tape (really!) of The Right Stuff, and cued up the launch sequence of John Glenn. The music in the build-up and launch segment were indeed from "Mars", and those three notes boomed through my stereo speakers as the Mercury-Atlas pulled away from the tower. As it gained speed and altitude, the soundtrack segued to a more-melodic excerpt from "Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity" (listen for the tambourine), and when Friendship 7 reached orbit, the music morphed into an excerpt from "Neptune, the Mystic". Incredibly powerful melding of cinema with appropriate music, and for me, encaustic. The Missus was impressed by the fact that I had subliminally made the connection regarding "Mars."

Not long afterwards, I got my first CD player, and the first two CDs I bought were Leonard Bernstein conducting The Planets + Emerson Lake and Palmer's Pictures at an Exhibition. Curiously, I don't think I ever bought the ELPowell album on CD.

It's interesting what kind of personal memories the passing of a rock star can evoke...