i am just going to spill out a bunch of my thoughts on the show i played last week at impala gallery as part of their kaleid series.
first off i would like to say that I appreciated everyone that came and that couldn’t come. Your words of encourage in person or on the twitter/txt meant a lot. The SNOMG that happened just a day and a half earlier really messed up our city. Both the L and the metra were still having problems staying on any kind of schedule even as late as the night of this show. (for non-chicago readers in a nut shell we got ~20in of snow in about as many hours w/ >50mph which made a mess of the roads and train lines.)
So dont take this the wrong way, but each txt/tweet from a friend saying “sorry, stuck, wont beable to make it” did wear on me. coupled with the argument that kcat and i were having that basically it was crazy for the organizer to still have the show (i mean even half of the headlining act, Scott Tuma, had to back out because his car couldn’t get out of his alley/driveway).
i say this only to describe and remind myself what my thoughts were. i am in no way mad about the turnout. in fact in the end the place actually had a pretty decent crowd. minus the 2 ppl that i could hear talking over my set, the crowd were very respectful. its a rarity that I play out so i was happy i was able to play.
hopefully soon i will have the recording of the set to post here. i completely forgot to bring my recorder but luckily the organizers taped it (as well as a friend of mine). until then you’ll just have these roughly collected thoughts. I spent most of janurary practicing with one guitar tuning that i really like (DGDGbe low to high strings) mostly because I dont really get a chance to play much from like thanksgiving until new years. i felt that focusing on one tuning for the month would be the best to have a concise and cohesive set come feb 3rd. going into the show i felt that i had worked out 3 pieces pretty well: a rendition of requiem (which is mostly a drone piece with the aide of plogue bidule providing A LOT of multi-tap delay), an untitled piece, a version of “lullaby bell star” (which i close out my CHS set with). about a week before the show I came up with a riff and dist/tremolo sound that felt totally inspired by Earth. I found it kinda silly but while working with it over a few practices kcat thought it was a good basis for a piece. I had not intended to play this last piece at this show.
i played through my own guitar amp as well as the house PA which is basically a wall of 4 (5?) PA speakers all piled together. because of this i didnt really use any panning effect on the laptop. i had done a quick sound check before just to make sure signals were going to the right place, but i didnt do a check of the level of the amp w/ respect to the level of the PA. requiem went well and since its primarily a piece that focuses on the guitar being manipulated with the laptop I didnt pay much attention to the sound coming from the amp. it wasn’t until about half way through the second piece that I really got lost and while trying to ground myself noticed that the PA was so loud i couldnt tell what was actually coming from the guitar. not being able to hear myself in a useful way coupled with my own over excitement lead to this piece getting somewhat out of hand. (as an aside: the nice thing about all this volume though was that I could really feel the notes. even at my last show, at a rock club with a decent PA, i couldn’t really feel the vibratations. it probably helped that i was standing infront of all the speakers.) there was a direction i wanted to go with it that i had worked on in practice but couldn’t find that night. i managed to reign it in somewhat and it was at this point i decided to just segue into a version of “lullaby bell star” and began the harmonics. beacuse i had basically put to pieces together i felt it was going on to long so i decided to wrap it up. there was still some time, the next performer was planned to go on at 11pm, and i starting into this silly Earth-like riff. i looped it and did some filtering to pull a pretty heavy beat out of it. i felt it provided a really strong foundation and i worked with it for another 8 min or so. now it was closer to 10:45 so i shut off the amp and closed down all the loops. said my thank yous and sat down.
in my next post i will talk about the other 2 performers of that night. both were very good and very different from me and each other.
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