It's got salsa, rhumba, cha-cha, disco...

Man, my mom cracks me the fuck up. I go over to her house today, and she presents me with a Casio CTK-411, which is your typical home keyboard drum-n-chords magical music machine. Now, I have to preface this with a little bit of back-story. To my parents and grandparents (and I imagine this is true for most music pros), it seems unfathomable that someone can make a living making music. Even though I’ve been doing it for over 15 years, it still hasn’t sunk in. My grandfather’s now-traditional opening salvo whenever I see him is “got a job yet?” My mom put the “hip” in “hippie,” but even she can’t seem to grasp the concept that one can get paid (in the long run) for this.

So my wife and I moved from Chicago to Oregon a couple months ago, and have in the process gone from living over 2000 miles away to literally being just down the street. A side effect of this is that my mom has finally seen my studio, and once she got over the cognitive dissonance that was created by seeing two monitors attached to one computer, she began to take stock of the other contents of the studio.

I was unaware of this course of events until presented with this Casio today. I tried my hardest to not be snobby about it, and I think I failed when I asked “why do you think I need this?” It turns out, she saw my controller, which is a brandless, buttonless black thing that has nothing but 5 octaves of keys and pitch and mod wheels. She decided I should have a keyboard with “more stuff on it.”

So, go ahead and yuck it up. This bad boy has MIDI in and out. I’m gonna one-finger-chord my whole next album, and then who will be laughing? Are there any circuit benders in the Willamette Valley that want to make this bitch, like, cool and stuff?