Happy long weekend y'all. Hope you're traveling safely and avoiding Double Demerit points.
Double Demerit Points? Yikes! What a scary concept. It had me managing my speed and driving carefully, which is more than I can say for the owner of a large blue sedan who was tailgating people at 110 on the way to the gig on Saturday.
I was behind him for a bit and he jammed on the brakes and i thought 'WTF?' so I changed lanes and saw that he was less than half a car length from the car in front, obviously trying to bully his way past.
Its just poor form and downright dangerous. Anyway, after my rant about the poor driving manners of some folks, on with the gig report.
Oh almost forgot to mention, Elsa lent me a copy of Fettlers new album 'Fiddle:The Devils Instrument' which I was listening to on the way to the gig, its terrific. Jeez, the Banjo./Manodlin player (John Kane) is brutally good, not to mention some outstanding Fiddling from Fettler. Hmmm..that sounded kinkier than I had planned...but, I digress, right, back to the gig report.
A shout out to Smokey (thank you for your service), Chris, Geoff, Pete & Rani & family, mika and all the folks who spent the evening with us.
A special huge thanks to Henry for coming and helping with the P.A (we misss you carl, come back soon) and to GC for reminding me what the combination was to the mike case :-)
With Redline (Mike Rix) back in the Bass chair for the evening I decided to try and use our nifty new technology to record demo's of the new songs live at the gig - ah - that leads me to another huge thanks to Monte, who surpasses even me in Jedi Geekiness.
I spent the afternoon preceding the gig with Monte working out the vagaries of the Tascam US1800 and Windows 7 - for all you folks who wind up trying that bit of gear, so far its great but make sure you get the Win 7 64 bit drivers!!! (thats if you're running Win7 64bit or Vista 64, if you don't update the drivers the playback doesn't work properly)
Thank you Monte for the loan of the Laptop and the brainpower for the fiddlier bits I couldn't work out.
I suppose we should have considered our desk placement a little more carefully, no this picture is not me trying to crack an ATM with Cubase :-)
The Riverside Inn is definitely more family oriented since Chris took over, and it turns out that we are playing music that appeals to the prime 3-12y/o demographic. I suggested to the boys that we learn some wiggles songs, but it seems our present material is perfectly fine.
Naturally, Little Big Bird proved popular, even without the puppet :-)
Between doing the music stuff and running back to mess with the mixing desk, I didn't get too many shots in for the evening but take it from me, we had Dads dancing with kids, Mums dancing with kids, kids dancing with kids, Mums dancing with dads, People dancing on their own; in summary, there was a lot of dancing.
Of course, the minute we added the recording equipment, the boys stress levels went up, but they'd better get used to it, we'll be recording as much of our live stuff as possible over the coming months as we work towards SC5 and SC6. Despite some degree of 'we'll kill you later MJEB', we even tried Black Crow, unrehearsed, and by and large it wasn't bad. Still some arrangement issues but it's nice to have a new song with Cojones Grandes (as those of Spanish heritage might say), however, even the slightly more 'romantic' songs (as Mika would say) proved popular, with The Way That She Smiles and Sunshine In The Rain (from Carl's Chair) receiving an excellent response.
All in all, a good night spent in good company, thanks to everyone for spending the evening with us.
We have the coming weekend off, which is good, considering that we then have a three gig weekend following on from that in Bathurst and Oberon, with a live recording session planned with 2MCE.
With 8 songs ready (more or less) for the next album, we'll be introducing another few each couple of weeks at the live gigs as we test them. Once again, we look for your guidance in the form of hoots, hollers or stony faced silence to determine how we're going, so come on out for an evening and let us know what you think.
Rgds
MJEB