Yesterday I was exactly where I needed to be. I’m hesitant to post this because it perhaps doesn’t paint the best picture of the parties involved, but by trusting one another and working together, we DID get to have an amazing show with a spectacular new artist. Again, tentative to throw in names just because of search algorithms, so if you know, you know. She is like the incredibly sensual, young female version of Jimi Hendrix you never knew you needed. Solid songwriting, emotive, screaming guitar, and a powerful voice coupled with a palpable stage presence that reminds me that for SOME of us stardom is a matter of luck, but for some of us it’s only a matter of time. This will probably be the only time she is small enough that I’ll get to work with her.
In February ilyAIMY performed at the Catonsville Clubhouse, a great space just a couple of minutes from home. During the show a really pretty young woman came up and started asking me questions about my guitar tone. She introduced herself and said SHE was playing her very first gig, and it was gonna be here. The sound was great, could she hire me?
I checked my calendar – it looked open to me – sure, let’s do it!
Oh – but now – “actually, the house can handle sound, I REALLY need video! You do that too, right?”
Yeah, yeah I do. So, there were worries. I’m not going to get into specifics. There was a lot of earned trust that needed to happen, but day-of, a number of my worries turned out to be pretty well-founded. A week ago the guys who’d be running sound at the show came out to my open mic and we chatted a bit. I convinced them to bring out their old 12-channel board because I really didn’t think their usual 8 was gonna cut it for a 7-piece band, even if it was JUST 7 pieces (everyone was unclear as to the number of backing vocalists, maybe it was Evan PLUS a 7-piece band?).
The band filtered in pretty much on-time and after multiple checks with Evan, got themselves set up and organized. In the meantime the guy who’s gonna be twisting knobs told me about how this was going to be one his last shows because he was losing the top range of his hearing, the violinist told me how she’d brought a backup violin that sounds awful because the pickup on her main violin had been tetchy, the momager told me she’d bought her daughter a brand new amp (that no-one quite knew how to operate) and the house QUICKLY ran out of channels.
All-in-all we got things up and running. I set up cameras around the room in a clockwise fashion, coming back around and updating the sound crew on what needed to be changed in the room, solving problems, listening, reporting in, setting up cameras, getting cornered by people who wanted to weigh in, changing lights explaining things. It was a lot of work. When the results are posted, they’ll speak for themselves.
The night went beautifully. No-one would probably know how stressful the set up was. The video’s gorgeous, in no small part because the artist and the band were going to transcend any difficulty in any case, but more to the point the AUDIO came through great, and that was mostly about me setting up additional mics, because the board recording was maybe only 1/3 the story. If that.
Boof. Okay. 8 cameras offloaded. Audio mixed. Footage synched and rough pass rendering. Time to go run an open mic!
