Music Before the Money

Reviewers have had a field day chopping my novels to pieces but they always gave me credit for two things: research and twists. What are twists? Twists are the unexpected turns in the plot that happen just when the reader thinks that he or she has it all figured out. They are the pieces of candy that keep the reader glued to the book.

The first serialized horror movies in the ’70’s with Freddy Kruger and his buddies were great because they were filled with twists. The best one was where the killer had been killed but, somehow, was resurrected to either kill again or appear just long enough to set the stage for the sequel.

Even Poltergeist was great because we actually thought when the house was “cleared” the movie was winding down to an end. Then the last scene, where the father shoves the television set outside of the motel room, had me onedge because I thought a ghost was going to come out of the set!

Now, twists are so formula-driven that we expect them and are pleasantly surprised when a movie is “straight.” And gore and violence are the distractions which make us forget how cliché-ridden the twists have become.

The dismal art of worrying has been well documented by health professionals and others who have documented the sad results. Worry can weaken and sicken us, and cause our daily lives to be a living hell. And at the very least, worry prevents us from living fully and happily the only life that we will ever have. At the other end of the s

Benjamin Disraeli, Queen Victoria’s trusted minister, once wrote about worry: “A god, invisible but omnipotent. It steals the bloom from the cheek and lightness from the pulse; it takes away the appetite and turns the hair gray.”

However, it is a disease than can be reversed and even cured. All it takes is a change in our thinking, a new template on how we see and react to different situations. One of these changes can occur immediately if we keep in or mind that 97% of the things we worry about never happen. Because worrying over things that ‘might’ happen can waste large portions of our lives, considering that so often it is for nothing, and almost certainly does no good.

Here’s a paradox: Worrying about things that have happened will not turn back the hands of time to give you another try at doing it right. So that is a waste of time too. So many of our anxieties and fears are for nothing. Most of the rest can simply be discarded because worrying just isn’t going to do any good.

Here’s a story:

You only have two things to worry about, if you’re sick or well. If you’re well you’ve got nothing to worry about, but if you’re sick you only have two things to worry about, you get better or you die. If you get better you’ve got nothing to worry about but if you die you’ve only got two things to worry about, you go to Heaven or you go to Hell. If you go to Heaven you’ve got nothing to worry about and if you go to Hell you’ll be so busy shaking hands with all the people you know there you won’t have time to worry.

As Alfred E. Newman, the fictional editor of MAD magazine once said: What, me worry?

Perched to the left of my Wurlitzer electronic piano, and directly across (through me) from my venerable Korg MS-20, was the Crumar Performer, a two-instrument, lighter version of the Crumar Multi-Man. This is one of those many attempts by mainly Italian companies like Farfisa, to build a polyphonic, affordable keyboard able to do synth brass sounds as well as strings. And the machine never did a bad job at all for a paraphonic - single filter for all voices - sound machine.The Performer is a polyphonic analog Strings and Brass machine produced at the end of the 1970’s by the Italian synth company. With just 49 keys it was fully polyphonic and you could play all 49 notes simultaneously.

Programming is simple and clearly laid-out with just 15 sliders and a few buttons. A solid black chassis and wood end-cheeks round out this classic and often overlooked string machine. In the middle we find the String Section and although it was not as smooth-sounding as an ARP it was pretty good and had16′ and 8′ push buttons to switch on two octaves. There was also a three band EQ to change the sound character a bit and not just a tone knob like so many others. And the strings could be “attack mode,” labeled Crescendo and there was also a Sustain slider. Two of the bulky sliders - the volume fader included - were shaved off by a previous owner and I used a guitar pick in the slot to move it.

There is also a fader for delay length where you could make the strings and brass swell and one for VIBRATO where the vibrato came in slowly during the length of a note.

What the Crumar had over the Logan and ARP was the ability to easily mix an orchestra on the fly simply by using the slider. And if I wanted - but I never did - I could have used the optional Brass output jack and EQ’d the horns separately.

Just another different axe I owned for a while.