David Freeman Music

I made it to both my church gigs yesterday… Church gig number one had a different drummer again.  I'm not sure if the usual guy has not been available, or if the church is shopping for a new guy.  This week's guy was pretty good. We had Tommy Dodd, steel guitarist extraordinaire, once again.  It didn't appear to be a special occasion…I'm guessing they'll bring him in whenever they feel like it.  Evidently the budget can handle it. Other than that, it was pretty ho-hum.  We had a piece with a children's choir and a couple of pieces with an adult choir.  Not much for me to do. Last week was the big holiday show.  I was not invited to participate.  The rest of the band wanted to know where I was.  I said, "At home."  They said, "Your name was in the program." Church gig number two was ok.  I was informed that the ushers complained of multiple instances during the past few weeks of distortion when the band was playing.  M...

I would have thought that this Saturday (December 10) would be a big date on the calendar--one of those Saturdays when everybody in the world would be working and I would get a couple of calls.  Maybe I'm so up to my eyebrows with Yacht Rock stuff that people assume I'm unavailable;  I don't know…maybe there just aren't that many gigs to go around right now.  Anyway, I had this prime date on my calendar wide open, and I was fortunate to pick up a House Live gig (sax/flute, percussionist, DJ playing house music). It was a long gig--5 hours--but the money was good, and it was coming at a good time.  Not only did I want to work, but these sort of gigs are a good chance for me to play a lot of sax and flute.  I get to practice, more or less the whole night, because the gig is so open--I can take an idea or a pattern or an interval and play it over and over;  put in on different parts of the beat;  flip it around. Last night was a good exercise for th...

We did it!  The Third Annual Yacht Rock Holiday Special was a huge success! This year we did it at the Buckhead Theatre .  It's really nice!  Much better than the Roxy was.  I liked the stage size, and the sound seemed good to me (at least where I was, though Greg mentioned that the slap off the wall was really bugging him).  All my stuff went well--no problems.  The different alto mouthpiece worked much better, and my sax solos in general were better than usual.  I think my biggest problem (other than showing up an hour late for load in) was that I kept trying to play Your Momma Don't Dance in F instead of C…played it too many times on tenor and not enough on bari! Yay for us and congratulations to Pleaserock (Nick, Pete, Esther, and Kristen) for once again organizing an awesome event! davidfreemanmusic.net

Yacht Rock played our 10 High gig last night--it happened to be the big dress rehearsal for the Big Christmas Show We're Not Quite Ready to Play.  Traditionally, we've kind of sucked real bad at the 10 High the night before a big show, and then we play the big show and nail it.  Last night was kind of…fine?  No disasters…I for one am just not comfortable with the everything yet.  I kind of know my stuff, but it feels like I need another week or two to digest it--my brain's not there yet.  Like, I can't spot anything on the set list that scares me (except for hearing my voice on We Are the World --I can't wait for that to be over), but I don't feel like I know what I'm doing.  The past month has been such a blur that this show feels like something else to get through. So…my alto was wildly out of tune.  I don't know if it's a good idea or not, but I'm going back to an older mouthpiece (a Chinese copy of a Guardala).  It's more comfortable....

I think it's a sign of how busy things are that I have to look at my blog to see the last time I checked in. Thursday night, I got home around 2:30 AM.  I got up at 8 to play a Yacht Rock rehearsal for the upcoming show (this coming Friday at the Buckhead Theatre).  It was a little rough.  Nick had (I think) fifteen songs that we were learning or reviewing.  I had charts for stuff, but I hadn't played any of it (except for the review tunes, which I hadn't played in six months--since Christmas in July).  We hacked through stuff until we ran out of time.  It wasn't terrible, but I didn't feel adequately prepared. Friday afternoon was spent catching up on things at home--laundry, cleaning, bills, computer stuff.  I got in a little practice on the YR stuff. Saturday morning, Yacht Rock was up early to drive to Greensboro, NC to play a corporate party.  That took all day.  It was a relatively painless gig, though the crowd obviously didn't q...

Yacht Rock played a weird, pieced together gig last night at the 10 High.  Nick, Pete, and Cobb were off somewhere else playing a non-Yacht Rock gig, so we had Ganesh and Kevin Spencer up front and Daniel Morrison in the back.  Ganesh and Kevin were off somewhere else playing a non-Yacht Rock gig until 10:30, so the other five of us (Bencuya, Greg, Daniel, Dannells, and myself) played about half of the first set without them.  No big deal, but it was strange, mostly I think because there wasn't the usual volume coming out of the center and right monitors. Once we got going…it never really got going.  The crowd was indifferent and we were indifferent.  Dannells played his ass off, though, and I enjoyed playing a few tunes ( Kiss You All Over and Lonely Boy ) we never touch with Nick and Pete  up front. davidfreemanmusic.net

Yacht Rock spent two days in Athens at David Barbe's studio , recording two of our original songs.  I'd never done any kind of recording where I sat through the creation of all the parts before. For me, it involved a couple of days of sitting in the control room and about thirty minutes of playing.  Normally when I get hired to play on a session, I walk in and the song is waiting on me. I played flute on one song and sax on the other.  Neither solo was really worth a damn.  As much as I wanted to summon something really awesome--something spellbinding and hip, I just couldn't do it.  We ended up with some pretty safe/average stuff.  I don't know if it was because I'd just been sitting there too long or what, but I had no magic.  The rest of the song sounds good, though! I got home Wednesday night/Thursday morning at 1 AM.   I was up at 8, headed across town to a studio in Snellville for a 10 AM session.  This one was more of th...