a couple of recent gigs

[Dogoth]

I did a tracks show for a "smooth jazz" sax player recently. I've probably done 30-40 of these shows (some sax, guitar, keys etc....) all single acts with tracks.

This fellow player was one of the loudest sax players I've ever worked with. If you had a section of these guys, you'd be turning up the brass to keep it balanced (no kidding). He really was a talented guy and for a few songs he played pp (so he was capable of playing subtely), but for most of the show he was at ff or above. The only reason I had him in the mains was to get some slap delay & verb going (and for those few quiet songs). Nice guy too.

On NYE I did monitors for a well known 80's brit rock group (AKA wrinkle rock :-). Usualy this means LOUD stage but suprisingly this wasn't the case. The all original member group just released a CD last year and it was nice material. Nice tones, nice volume, good guys. The keyboard player had an interesting monitor setup (one that I've never seen before). He submixed all of his keys to L&R, ran this into a little 6 channel mixer & strategicaly placed a couple of sdc's on stage on short stands. These 4 channels drove his ear buds. Interesting concept. He had a "more me" knob and an otherwise fairly open sounding mix in his ears. I'm sure the secret is the placment of those two mics (their sole purpose was to feed his IEMs). I guess it worked OK because after a couple of small placment changes at sound check, he was smiling all night long.

Proof you can always learn something new.

Cheers