Saturday

Hamilton, GA is between Callaway Gardens and Columbus.  Saturday night, Yacht Rock played a wedding reception out in a tent in the woods.  This one was more or less the same set of music we'd played the night before, and the crowd was just as good looking (though younger).  Nothing more to report.  Twas a pretty easy night.

Lots of tuning before we got started.

No Zach on this one, but Kip did another excellent job running sound (Zach's roommate Liz worked as Kip assistant).

This one had one of the more unusual first dance songs.  I like it, though.



Once the sun went down, all the bugs in the county descended upon us.  This happens when you put a bunch of lights in a tent in the woods next to a pond.  Bugs everywhere.  The curtain behind the band was full of insects, and I spent most of the second set picking these guys off my keyboards and microphone.  At one point, one even went down my shirt.

The two hour drive home was spent pondering what might be in my truck with me, crawling up my legs.  I hate that.

Friday

Yacht Rock has played for a golf tournament at North Druid Hills Country Club for the past four or so years.  At one time we used to set up on the pool deck (in the sun), but for the past few years it has been in a tent around the corner (good because we had rain the previous two years).  This annual event is really easy, and the talent level (of the audience) is high.  Even the load in/load out isn't too difficult.

We brought back Arthur's Theme and added You're So Vain for this one.  Arthur's Theme is really complicated for me because of a pretty involved, two handed string part, and giving way at the end of the chorus to strings and a synth part.  There's also a famous sax solo, and it's a quick one beat change to jump from one to the other.  Later in the song it gets even more complicated--I play a chord, play a sax fill, reach up and play the next chord, play another sax fill, and then jump back to playing two handed strings.  It's going to take a few more attempts before I really have my coordination down.

You're So Vain is easy.  I don't even start until after the guitar solo halfway through the song.

One other thing I liked about this gig is that we had a nice sized stage with two levels, with my station and the drums up about a foot higher than the front line.  Plenty of room for everyone, I wasn't hiding behind the guitar amp, and I could see what was happening out front.  I could go for more set ups like that.

Honky Chateau

I'm glad I don't play many gigs at Chateau Elan because it's soooooo damn far away.  The best way for me to get there is to go across the top of I-285 and then up I-85, both of which are always a big mess...and then the place feels like it's right outside of South Carolina.  Too far.

This gig was a wedding, and our first good test of the in ear monitor system.  Major success!  Everybody's pretty happy, and it sounds like we're already all pretty close to dialed in.  I'm loving the sound.  Zach and Kip have done an awesome job of bringing this to fruition.  I hope they're as excited about it as we are.

Also (and I think this is purely psychological), I'm excited that I have to bring less equipment.  It's only my amp (in a pelican case), but something makes it seem like I shaved a significant chunk out of my load in/out.  I guess I can work it out to be one fewer trip between my truck and the stage.

Other than that, nothing to report.  My part of the first dance looked like this:

Good pre-gig food.  No margaritas, though.

Friday in the Woods

The same group of us (plus Ben Holst) who played last Saturday night in somebody's backyard in Alpharetta/Crabapple played our second gig Friday night at a backyard in Cumming.  Frankly, I'm not sure how we got the gig--maybe Greg knew the guy?  Anyway, there was an open space in the stand of trees between his house and his neighbor's that he seeded with grass.  Pretty sweet.

The hauling of gear from the street to the stage (there was an actual stage with power and a small PA) was grueling, but the gig itself was pretty cool.  Nice stage (the host owned a roofing company, so it was really solidly built).  Good sound, all things considered.  This time, knowing what to expect of the gig, I was better prepared and more comfortable.  I even had a couple of decent organ solos!  Playing keyboard on a gig like this is definitely more fun than playing saxophone.

They had a frozen margarita machine (I had two), and barbecue.  I would probably die from the food if we had regular gigs like this.  I considered drinking myself into oblivion just for the hell of it, but no one else in the band was going for it, so I gave up before I began to get giggly.

We finished after 10 PM, and I was home by midnight.  Not too bad!

On the Hill

Yacht Rock had a ticketed event on Memorial Day, a fundraiser at a Buckhead church.  We played this gig last year, too.  It's a too small tent over a too small stage in the church parking lot.  Last year it rained pretty hard, but we ended up getting through it.

This year we also had the same too small tent/too small stage combination, the same two hundred yards of extension cord to the nearest electrical outlet, and the same weather conditions.  We played five songs before the front left quadrant of the stage had standing water and the sky began to flash with lightning.  No good.  I'm glad I'd brought my tarp to put over my gear.  After consulting the radar (and singing Rain by The Beatles, Who'll Stop the Rain by CCR, and almost It's Raining Men), the gig officially ended.

It's unfortunate not only because we were unable to continue the performance, but also because this was the gig where the entire band moved over to in ear monitors.  We had a really long soundcheck and got each person's mix roughly dialed in, but having an entire gig to fine tune everything and get comfortable with the sound of everything would have been a huge bonus.  My mix was probably 85 percent solved at this point, and already way better than it was at the Purple Rain show--I'm digging it.  I think we're really going to love these things!

Oh well...any outdoor gig in Atlanta during the summer is a crapshoot.  With no rain contingency, what can we do?  At least the early release from the gig left those of us who needed it more time to dry our equipment out once we were home.  Fun.

In other news, here's a video of me playing with Greg Lee at Eddie's Attic last week.

Dave the Dipshit

I don't write about my church gig on Sunday nights anymore;  usually there's nothing worth writing about.  However, last night gave me a story to tell.

In the past six to nine months, the vocalists in the group have decided that they don't like the sound;  specifically, they don't like the way that I run the P.A.  Even though I'm listening to what it sounds like in the cathedral (I've been doing this gig now for fifteen years--I know what the room sounds like), and listening on headphones, the singers will complain about what they hear (there are no monitors, just singers with handheld microphones standing around the piano), or roll their eyes, or decide on their own that their microphones aren't working and will pass to each other the microphone with the gain turned highest (set for a weaker singer), at which point they will turn to me wanting like they're proving a point (I guess that would be if I set all the microphones right at the point where they will begin to distort, they'd all be really loud, and then they'd be satisfied, and who cares if you can't hear any of the instruments halfway back in the church).

Our set up is a twenty-four channel analog mixer plugged into the amps that drive the speakers.  No monitors, no compression.  I have control over the gain, the EQ, and level.

A month ago, I'd finally had enough of the vocalists and informed the music director that either that bullshit with the vocalists must stop, or I would quit.  That put an end to it.

Last night, I was getting everything dialed in on headphones when the singers swapped microphones mid-song, causing me to flip out, throw my headphones, and cuss out the music director, only to figure out minutes later that the routing of one microphone channel was incorrect--the reason why I could see it on the meter and hear it in my headphones, but it was not making it to the speakers in the church.

Nice going.  I wanted to crawl in the piano and die.  Apologies all around after mass.  Damn.

A Casual Gig in Alpharetta

No Yacht Rock gigs this past weekend, but Mark Bencuya put together a gig for most of us at a friend's house--a birthday party and graduation party rolled into one.

Greg organized the tunes, and all of his picks looked great until we each realized we'd be learning somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty songs for the gig.  Ouch!  I'm guessing that Greg probably knew a lot of them, though, and Bencuya probably knew most of them.  Monkeyboy, Cobb, and I had a lot of charts to write!

I supplied the PA, so I got there kind of early.

Soundcheck:

It turned out to be a very casual evening, and we played very well considering that there was no rehearsal or communication about any of the songs (except for a little bit of "Which keyboard part do you want?").  We laughed a lot.  It was fun.

This was a party with local musicians in attendance, so several people sat in.  Heaven Davis sang a few with us (including the evening's finale, where we played a Pat Metheny-ish version of The Star Spangled Banner while fireworks were shot off in the cul-de-sac.

I always get a kick out of seeing Heaven Davis because even though I played on her album Steamy, she has absolutely NO IDEA who I am.  I even played her CD release party at 800 East, where I was first introduced to Mark Cobb by Clay Cook.

So...we finished shortly after 10 PM;  I was on the road by 11 PM.  Not a bad night!

We're doing it again (different backyard) next Friday, so stay tuned.

Searcy, Indy Jones, and Greg Lee

I played at Eddie's Attic last night on a few tunes with Greg Lee.

The opener was Peter Searcy (with Greg Lee).  Pretty cool, as Greg has told many, many Searcy stories, and I'd never heard him.  He and Greg have a great vocal blend, and Searcy's stuff has a lot of passion to it.

Next up was Indianapolis Jones, Nick and Mark Cobb's original project with Tim Smith (of Noel Gallagher's Highflying Birds) and Jason Nackers.  Outstanding!  Probably the best band in Atlanta right now, playing some of the best songs of this century.  They never fail to impress.

The Greg Lee Show rounded out the evening.  An excellent performance by everybody on stage (mostly Yacht Rock, plus Ben Holst on bass), though I really sucked bad on the piano part to Bencuya's Cartoon Butterfly, and played a gruesome wrong note in the first chorus of One Kind of Love.  I want to jump off a bridge;  then again, that's how I feel about pretty much everything right now.

Purple People

Saturday night was the annual Purple Rain show at the Legacy Fountain in Piedmont Park.  This year we added two partners in crime (from the Vegas Home Depot gig earlier this year):  Keisha Jackson and Slick Barnes.  They nailed it!  Their backing vocals added a lot to our efforts.

I think this was one of our best Purple Rain performances.  I felt really solid on everything (except for the beginning of Baby I'm a Star, where I'd managed to accidentally shift the keyboard up and octave and turn on the tremolo--I played half the verse staring at my keyboard---"What the hell is happening?").  Our only trouble was at the end of Baby I'm a Star.  I finished on time, but there were a couple of random notes sprinkled in among the rest of my bandmates!

The second set was all yacht rock stuff.  Really mediocre saxophone solos on this gig.  Booooo.

Other big news on this gig...in ear monitors!  I used my new IEMs for the first time on this gig (Mark Cobb used his as well).  They're really nice and comfortable and sound fantastic!  I think, though, that I need to start from scratch on my mix--Zach (our monitor guy) gave me a mix as a starting place, but I tweaked it until everything sounded weird (the vocals were nothing but reverb), and my keyboards hit the limiter repeatedly (the limiter keeps the volume from spiking and blowing my eardrums, but if your instrument keeps hitting it, you have no dynamics).  I remember now from my previous experience of using in ears that I should set my stuff up so it can be plenty loud without maxing out, and then build the other instruments around it.  It's going to take some time, but I'm really looking forward to it.  I can already see that once we get the mixes dialed in, it will be hard to play without them.

One other thing...boxed water!  Someone brought us a box of boxed water, under the guise of a birthday present for Pete.  Sneaky.

Much less plastic.  I can dig that.

Hall of Architects

Yacht Rock played a Friday night gig at the College Football Hall of Fame downtown for a bunch of architects.  Nice place!

The crowd wasn't that into us in the first set, but the second set was a different story.  Alcohol, perhaps?  Whatever it was, it made for a pretty good gig.  The only highlight I can think of was Nick's super long harmonica solo on Heart of Rock and Roll.  Excellent.

Zoom Zoom

David Ellington and I played another event for Porsche last night--a repeat of Monday night's drinks and dinner gig.  Different crowd, same basic result, though we got several compliments and a few guys checking us out, so maybe they were listening after all.  This one ended about twenty minutes early, which felt about right.  Nice little gig!