Yacht Rock had a private gig last night at the Egyptian Ballroom (Fox Theatre)--some kind of big entertainment industry party. We played two long sets.
The load in is notoriously difficult, mainly because there is one freight elevator to service the ballroom (for production, catering, and the band), and it is not quite the size of a twin bed, so there's always a bottleneck of stuff going in at the beginning of the day, or stuff coming out at the end of the night. To alleviate this, much of our gear was back lined. I brought everything just in case…I guess if I'd checked in ahead of time, I could have planned a little better. I ended up going half and half--I used their keyboards, keyboard stands, pedals, throne, and monitor, and supplied my rack so I could still have my EWI rig, and my sax wireless. Along with that, I needed sax stands, tambourine…a little bit of stuff out of one of my boxes.
After getting the gear all sussed out, we endured a pretty difficult soundcheck. Two big problems we encountered:
1. The sound guys made guesses about what we would want in our mixes, so we had to go through every mix, clear everything, and start over.
2. The monitors were being mixed from front of house, and the front of house guy was up in the balcony, so communication was difficult.
It's safe to say that each of us ended up with monitor mixes that were "good enough to get through the gig." Mine wasn't great, but it was so difficult to fine tune things, I just let it go.
Following soundcheck, we had several hours of downtime, so I took the chance and ran my extra gear (2 keyboards, amp, and keyboard stand) home so I wouldn't have to deal with it at the end of the night. What else was there to do for four hours?
I made it back in plenty of time. It turned out that the Dan Baraszu Trio was playing in the lobby. Nice! The band was Dan, David Ellington on organ, and Chris Burroughs on drums, all old friends of mine. Awesome group. We hung out for their soundcheck.
They had sound problems of their own--the guy who manned their PA laid out two monitors (the band laughed at that--for what? two amplified interments and a drummer on a stage the size of a parking space!). Once their set began, I went out front to listen, and the guy had the kick and snare louder than anything else in the band (if you know Chris, you know how powerful he is to begin with). No organ in the mix! I sent Chris a text encouraging him to unplug the microphones aimed at his kit. They were plenty loud enough--there was no reason to have a PA in that space. It would've sounded much better with just the natural stage sound.
Our sets turned out fine. Mike Bielenberg filled in for Bencuya. He was reading charts all night.
I brought two EWIs to the gig and checked to make sure everything was working correctly a couple of times. Of course, I had no problems at all. It was back to normal, but I still don't trust it yet.
The crowd was very cool. It didn't take them long to really get into it, and they requested an encore at the end, which is always appreciated. Hopefully we will get some really sweet gigs out of this!
I loaded out in one trip, and was home forty-five minutes after the last note. Possibly a personal record.
