From classicjake@yahoo.com Tue Feb 19 21:10:37 2013
Subject:Anyone still love their Electro-2 like me?

Hello music lovers and thrill seekers!

I may be one of the last of a vanishing breed. I'm still holding onto
my cherished E-2 (seventy-three) and still loving it. Sure, I've
thought of upgrading, but for a variety of reasons I just haven't. I
was doing a fair amount of studio work in 2012 which meant writing,
rehearsing, and recording on a B-3 with 122 Leslie, so there's another
year gone by with no upgrade to the portable rig.

Now that I'm between projects, there's finally time to dig into the E-2
and tweak away. To my delight I'm finding tweaks that are squeezing
more from the E-2 than I thought possible.

I've also finally begun arranging the various sounds in some sort of
order that makes sense to me. I've had this board for years and never
bothered to group the various instruments together. It was a factory
refurb when I got it and the patches were just scattered every which
way. I was playing out a lot at the time so I never wanted to move any
of the sounds around for fear I wouldn't be able to find them at the
next gig. I memorized the location of the ones I used most and left
everything else where it was. Besides, my rig always included a
Kurzweil and I rarely used the E-2 for anything other than organ. So as
long as I had a few of my favorites handy as a starting point I was good
to go.

This week I started organizing the sounds in a way that makes sense to
me. Whether this will work well in live performance remains to be seen.
The E-2 has six banks, A through F, with 8 preset buttons.

I decided bank A would signify Acoustic and assigned buttons 1 through 4
to acoustic grands, bright to warm and dark. Buttons 5 through 8 are
Electric Grands with various EQs and Chorus effects.

I made bank B my B-3 bank and filled buttons 1 through 8 with my
favorite preset starting points. Of course the E-2 organ section has
room for 9 more presets assignable to the bottom row of draw-buttons but
I've never used them much because it requires holding the shift key
while selecting and that's just one too many steps for me. Besides,
I've gotten fairly good at sculpting my organ sounds on the fly. Eight
presets seems plenty.

Bank C contains 8 Clav sounds. I created some cool variations and
assigned them to buttons 1 through 8.

Next, letter D reminded me of Dyno-Rhodes and DX7. Here I placed
various 1980's sounding Rhodes and Electric Grands with a variety of
effects added.

Bank E, electric pianos, contains 8 versions of Wurly patches, from
vintage Ray Charles to Supertramp and Ian McLagan-style overdrive
distortion.

I'm still working on Bank F which I'm thinking should contain 4 vintage
Fender Rhodes sounds and possibly 4 freaky special effect sounds like
Clav with Leslie, Organ with Flanger or Ring Mod., cRaZy stuff.

Do you keep your presets in a particular order? Maybe I should have
done this long ago. In any case I'm having fun, I'm still digging my
old Electro-2, and it's costing me nothing!

Cheers!
Jake

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]