Manual

Manual may refer to:

Instructions

Other uses

See also

Manual (music)

A manual is a musical keyboard designed to be played with the hands, on an instrument such as a pipe organ, harpsichord, clavichord, electronic organ, or synthesizer. The term "manual" is used with regard to any hand keyboard on these instruments to distinguish it from the pedalboard, which is a keyboard that the organist plays with his or her feet. It is proper to use "manual" rather than "keyboard," then, when referring to the hand keyboards on any instrument that has a pedalboard.

Overview

Organs and synthesizers can, and usually do, have more than one manual; most home instruments have two manuals, while most larger organs have two or three. Elaborate pipe and theater organs can have four or more manuals. The manuals are set into the organ console (or "keydesk").

The layout of a manual is roughly the same as a piano keyboard, with long, usually ivory or light-colored keys for the natural notes of the Western musical scale, and shorter, usually ebony or dark-colored keys for the five sharps and flats. A typical, full-size organ manual consists of five octaves, or 61 keys. (Piano keyboards, by contrast, normally have 88 keys.) Some smaller electronic organs may have manuals of four octaves or less (49, 44, or even 37 keys). Changes in registration through use of drawknobs, stop tabs, or other mechanisms to control organ stops allow such instruments to achieve an aggregate range well in excess of pianos and other keyboard instruments even with manuals of shorter size.

Sirius (disambiguation)

Sirius is a binary star system in the constellation Canis Major, appearing as the brightest star in the night sky.

Sirius may also refer to:

Businesses

Music

Products

Eye in the Sky (album)

Eye in the Sky is the sixth studio album by the British rock band The Alan Parsons Project, released in June 1982 by Arista label. It was recorded in London's Abbey Road Studios.

Overview

Songs on this album are in a number of different styles, from cool and funky to lyrical and heavily orchestrated. The Hipgnosis-designed sleeve was green with an image of the Eye of Horus, which was gold-foil stamped for early pressings of the LP. It is variously reported as their best-selling album and was the last platinum record from the band (joining I Robot and The Turn of a Friendly Card).

Vocal performers were Eric Woolfson, David Paton, Chris Rainbow, Lenny Zakatek, Elmer Gantry and Colin Blunstone.

Eye in the Sky contained the Project's biggest hit, the title track with lead vocals by Eric Woolfson. The album itself was a major success, reaching the Top 10 (and sometimes the #1) in numerous countries.

This album was the first of three the Project recorded on analogue equipment and mixed directly to the digital master tape.(a fact not widely known until the liner notes of Vulture Culture, where this trick was revealed).

Orion (mythology)

In Greek mythology, Orion (Ancient Greek: Ὠρίων or Ὠαρίων, Latin: Orion) was a giant huntsman whom Zeus placed among the stars as the constellation of Orion.

Ancient sources tell several different stories about Orion; there are two major versions of his birth and several versions of his death. The most important recorded episodes are his birth somewhere in Boeotia, his visit to Chios where he met Merope and was blinded by her father, Oenopion, the recovery of his sight at Lemnos, his hunting with Artemis on Crete, his death by the bow of Artemis or the sting of the giant scorpion which became Scorpio, and his elevation to the heavens. Most ancient sources omit some of these episodes and several tell only one. These various incidents may originally have been independent, unrelated stories and it is impossible to tell whether omissions are simple brevity or represent a real disagreement.

In Greek literature he first appears as a great hunter in Homer's epic the Odyssey, where Odysseus sees his shade in the underworld. The bare bones of his story are told by the Hellenistic and Roman collectors of myths, but there is no extant literary version of his adventures comparable, for example, to that of Jason in Apollonius of Rhodes' Argonautica or Euripides' Medea; the entry in Ovid's Fasti for May 11 is a poem on the birth of Orion, but that is one version of a single story. The surviving fragments of legend have provided a fertile field for speculation about Greek prehistory and myth.