Yacht Rock played the 40 Watt in Athens last night. Another terrific gig!
I think we've got our thing in Athens down. We know how to navigate, where to eat, where the record store is. The crowds are really good now--last night was not as packed as the Georgia Theatre gig, but it was solid--maybe three quarters full. They loved us, we loved them; we played two encores!
The first set went really well for me until the very end. The last tune was Easy Lover, and when we started I noticed that my bell sound didn't have any delay on it. Weird, I thought. Then when I went to the main synth lick, it DID have delay on it. Somehow I've managed to switch the effects routing. I tried to do my best playing the marimba parts on the verse with my left hand while scrolling with my right. Difficult! What I eventually ended up doing was bringing up that synth sound in the patch category and flipping back and forth between the performance (with the keyboard split) and the patch to get through the set.
Shortly into the second set, the batteries on my EWI went down, and so I stole the four AA batteries from my sax transmitters to power it (it happened in Hey Nineteen, so I played my opening lick and then had two verses/choruses to get the thing back up and running before the solo!). I spent the remainder of the gig trying to mentally plan if I needed batteries in a saxophone where they would come from. This came true on Caribbean Queen--I play EWI on the intro, and then I had the first verse to steal batteries from my MIDI transmitter (also AA batteries), stick them in my tenor, and be ready to play at the chorus on the keyboard. It's a lot to think about.
Hopefully my gear will settle down tonight.
We had a really good time! The sound at the 40 Watt is really good. I wish they were all like that.
davidfreemanmusic.net
