We were all pleasantly surprised to see a pretty full (700+) room on Friday night. All the work that had gone into learning that music deserved a good audience, and we got it. Very cool!
The efforts of Cobb, Bencuya, and Nick were amazing--the three of them played a TON of music. Not one of their heads exploded. Dannells carried a ton of (musical) weight in The Dark Side of the Moon, and was brilliant throughout (even if he's still pissed about the solo in Time). Every solo on that album is a classic (and David Gilmour's stuff is always so melodic that it sticks in your ear!), and Dannells' tone and technique were spot on. My hero!
For my part, I was mostly just reading charts and trying to stay in tune. I don't know if the charts are the problem or what, but for me the gig felt more like a sideman than a part of the band, and I couldn't get that into it. I think I played well and I was more than happy to help, but I felt that my contribution was miniscule, and that's really all I was doing--helping. This project like it was mine--I was just along for the ride.
Peter Stroud played in the XTC band Nigels With Attitude. What a neat guy! He plays great, he's super nice, he looks like a rock star. He's royalty around us. When Peter speaks, everybody listens to what he has to say. After the show, I he spent a couple of minutes praising my playing--really cool of him.
Saturday: Back to Yacht Rock.
We played a private party at the Westin Buckhead. It was a pretty bland event, and twenty-four hours after the Variety Playhouse, were came crashing back to earth--ignored by a couple of hundred people more interested in two minutes in the money cube.
I played well on this gig, though I had a lot of trouble finding the right volume level. Everything felt too quiet or two loud. At one point I turned my amp all the way down and tried to play off the room sound. Weird. I mentioned how I could hear my sound slapping off the opposite wall, and he said he couldn't hear me at all.
It was a super easy gig, though--three sets of the usual stuff. No equipment catastrophes, no drunk idiots, no cigarette smoke.
We had a lot of down time in between soundcheck and the gig.
Sunday: church gigs.
My first church gig of the day was strangely cohesive, considering how seat-of-the-pants it was. I think the band is getting better about reading the leader.
Where as last week I think I played almost exclusively soprano sax, this week was all flute and tenor. This week also had the children's choirs singing along to tracks and standing WAAAAAAY to close to my horns. With this I can never be happy.
The band played one of the leader's originals--some kind of frenetic samba--that I had to chart out because he didn't have any sort of lead sheet on it. The leader asked the organist to play on it as well (because church organ sounds really good on a samba), but the organist didn't have a chart, so he made a photocopy of the chart, so suddenly my chart has been donated to the church? Why'd I just let that happen?
In between church gigs we went to Cobb's house to celebrate Nick's birthday. That was really fun!
My second church gig was ok. Since the sound has been weird the past few weeks, I tried running mono instead of stereo. There's a mono out on the board, so we used that. First song was full of static. What the hell? I moved it to the "left" channel of the stereo out, and it sounded better in the room (cathedral) than it has in weeks. I cranked it up--it makes me think someone's messing with the amplifier settings. Anyway, I went out in the house to check the sound, and when I walked by, the drummer was playing with four fingers (two on each hand)--like drumming with your palms on a table. Check the technique! More what the hell!
Drummer tells the band leader to tell me (since he's wearing headphones of the main mix) that the overall mix is louder (duh--we went from 12 on the main volume fader to 5!), and the drum mic is too hot. I turned down the headphone output and cut the gain on the drum mic by twenty-five percent. It seemed like he was pouting after that. I don't know what to do with him. Perhaps he should do some reading.
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