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Ask the Slot Expert: Here yesterday, gone today

Jack White's keyboard player had a short organ solo in the middle of White's first song on the April 4, 2026, Saturday Night Live. I wanted to watch him play, but a few seconds into the passage the director cut to a shot of the drummer, who was just providing a background beat.

I get mad when a director cuts away from a musician who is doing something musically significant to a shot of a bandmate playing accompaniment or, worse, someone in the audience. It's as if we have to be reminded that there are other people around.

Sports directors know what they should be showing. The director followed the baseball to the fence the three times Los Angeles Angels outfielder Jo Adell "robbed" a Seattle Mariners batter of a home run in the game on April 4. The director didn't cut to a shot of the pitcher or a spectator watching the ball.

I'm always disappointed by concert films. When Keith Emerson or Rick Wakeman or another keyboardist (I really only care about watching keybaordists play) launches into a difficult passage, the director always cuts in reaction shots or shots of the other musicians. The directors should learn the music and know when they should stick with one musician.

Many years ago I saw a documentary about Genesis' Live OVer Europe tour in 2007. As I recall, the band thought they had done as much as they could with the Varilite lighting system they had used for years and switched to a different system.

The documentary showed a training session with one of the lighting techs. He was learning when he should switch lighting schemes. He came from the theater world and he said he would switch when the musician hit a spot on the stage. That's the way it's done in the theater.

The band rep said that would not work. You can't tell the musician to go to a particular spot. The lighting tech would have to know the music and switch schemes when the band got to that point in the music, regardless of where the musicians were standing. Letting the music drive the image can be done.

DVDs provided a solution to the irrelevant shot problem. Some DVDs let the viewer call the shots. A DVD can have sections with multiple angles and the viewer can switch the angle shown during the section. All my old DVD/Blu-Ray players support discs with angles. Unfortunately, none of my concert DVDs have multiple angles.

I thought this might have been a feature that went extinct because so few discs had multiple angles. I checked and modern players also support multiple angles.

I know two CD features that are pretty much obsolete today. One I don't miss at all and the other I wish had been used more often.

My first CD player had a Delete Track button. The person who wrote a review of this player had the same question I had: Why would anyone want to skip just one track on a CD?

The reviewer found the answer. I agreed with him. The track Who Dunnit? on the Abacab album from Genesis. There's an example where you might want to put a CD in, play the whole disc, but skip just one track on it.

I think the Delete Track button is no longer on the remotes for modern CD players. I don't miss it.

One feature I do miss is Indexes in CD tracks. Mainly designed for classical music, indexes were a way to jump to different sections of a long piece of music. You could play the track with Beethoven's 9th Symphony and then press the Index+ button a few times to jump to the fourth movement, which you'll recognize for the Ode to Joy theme.

The remote button is gone now because it required CDs to be prepared with index points and not many were.

I wish it had caught on. The bands I like have produced some long pieces of music with distinct parts. Each part is in a separate track on the CD, even though they really don't stand alone. When the music got ripped for streaming, the parts ended up in separate songs. I don't know if any streaming app lets you say that multiple songs should be considered one entity and always played in a particular order.

Thinking about buttons have come and gone on audio and video equipment made me think about buttons that have disappeared from slot machines and things that were prevalent in the casino 20 years ago that have disappeared.

I remember when credit play on a machine was fairly new and you could press a button to switch between adding wins to the credit meter and dropping wins in the coin tray. The only advantage to playing with coins is that the process yielded a built-in way to slow you down. You could play much faster using the credit meter. Casinos loved the credit meter.

There's another meaning of "cash/credit switch" used today. Many machines let you switch the credit meter from displaying credits to cash (dollars and cents). There's no physical button to make the change. You just press the credit meter display and it will switch from one mode to the other.

The Cash/Credit Button is one thing I used to see on the slot floor all the time and it's gone today. I have a list of a few other things that used to be prevalent but are non-existant today. I'll share them next week.

Until then, what things can you think of that are no longer seen on slot floors? Send me an email with your list.

If you would like to see more non-smoking areas on slot floors in Las Vegas, please sign my petition on change.org.

Send your slot and video poker questions to John Robison, Slot Expert™, at slotexpert@slotexpert.com.

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