Saturday, March 13, 2010

Thursday and Friday

Thursday night was a very low key Yacht Rock night.  Mark Dannells' guitar rig went on strike during the second song (said it was one of very expensive pedals), but he had it "fixed" (it decided to work again) by the end of the song, and it was fine for the rest of the gig.

Equipment issues in live performance are the ultimate Chinese fire drills.  Not only are you embarrassed because your gear has gone haywire (usually catastrophically, and often very audibly), but you are then under the gun to diagnose and fix the problem before the next song begins.  To make matters worse, not only is everybody in the band watching you solve the problem; everybody in the ROOM is watching you solve the problem.  When you don't have the answer, you will sweat blood.  For something like the configuration of guitar pedals (or say, an EWI MIDI'ed into a laptop?!), there are so many little cables and switches that you end up frantically pushing and pulling the connections and hoping that it's not an issue with the actual electronics.

Friday night was a duo gig with Dan Baraszu in Acworth.  We played at a The Old Mill, pretending to be the house band.  In the middle of our set (this is all pre-planned), a guy in the audience would get up to join us for a song.  He would then break into his girlfriend's favorite song, and stop in the middle and propose to her.  Even though he was a terrible singer (and bailed on the piano playing), it still worked:  she said yes.  The gig was otherwise very easy.  I played flute, soprano sax, and tenor sax.

Some weird weather was blowing through on the way there.



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