Monday, February 23, 2009

Last Night's Gig... surprise new track

After a long night watching a procession of Reading Rock (TM) we finally had the chance to go on and do our thing.

At the moment the set is still short (we've got new tracks coming through but it does take time for them to mature and no mistake!) so when we'd done the 6 tracks in the current set we got asked to carry on - so we did a new one!

New keyboard player Tony did a nice job with some really chilled soulful keys.

The revelation of the night was that we did it all without our usual backing tracks - this meant things definitely got a little more smokin' and I suspect now we have a full sized reliable line-up (fingers crossed) we can probably look at playing everything without click (although I suspect I have one or two tunes up my sleeve which I'd like to put some samples behind - I may look into foot pedals for that).

And, big kudos to Dave, our new sound engineer (and a fellow Xantia driver to boot - top stuff) who spotted the elephantine bass tendency of the room and gave me a nudge to look out for it. A quick cut at 120Hz and a boost elsewhere and the bass sound was one hell of a lot more rounded, and no mistake. I'll be taking more time to look out for that in future.

The new track got extended by a few bars by Armen, and all of us had the same idea and came back in "slight return" style: Jacquoda grabbed the opportunity to give the audience the "goodnight" speech and plug the CD, which was very entrepreneurial of her.

All in all, an enjoyable evening. And my bass pod survived a bit of a tumble, which showed how solidly it's built. Excellent.

I'll be in the studio for an hour this evening working on an arrangement, I hope.

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