EMUSIC-L Digest Volume 49, Issue 09 This issue's topics: Gig report Your EMUSIC-L Digest moderator is Joe McMahon . You may subscribe to EMUSIC-L by sending mail to listserv@american.edu with the line "SUB EMUSIC-L your name" as the text. The EMUSIC-L archive is a service of SunSite (sunsite.unc.edu) at the University of North Carolina. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Fri, 26 Feb 1993 13:43:02 AST From: Alan Edwards Subject: Gig report Last Monday (the 22th) I presented a concert "Evening of Overtures". The first half was classical music played on synthesizers, and the second half was contemporary music written for synths, including some original material. I had a lot of help from the local theatre crew since the whole show was very technical in nature. We had a large rear projection screen that we put video and computer animations up on, and another 50 lights beyond what was already in the theatre. There were also a few laser f/x, but I did not get them all working... The Music: Most things were played with assistance of the sequencer (Notator), but in a few places I was able to play enough parts to do it all live. I started with some sections from Bach's third Orchestral Suite. The overture was done with imitative sounds, mostly from the Proteus/2. The Air was done with some new sounds that I created on the K-2000, using aftertouch to get really expressive control over the upper tone, and a bass sound that shook your innards. Love it! That was one of the live ones. Next up was Bach's Sinfonia to Cantata 29. This was my tribute to W.Carlos, and I started out with imitative sounds, baroque tunings etc, and over the course of the piece, gradually changed to analog sounds so that by the end, it sounded pretty darn close to the original cut from S.O.B. Mozart's Overture to The Marriage of Figaro was done with mostly Pro/2 imitative sounds. I started out Rossini's William Tell Overture playing the solo cello line on the uWave with a really wild, but expressive sound. The rest was pretty straight forward, until the March, when the trumpet blasted forth from a speaker way up at the back. I wish I could have seen how many heads turned. I finished off that set with a suite of music from Wagner's Rheigold. I used a lot of syntho-sounds here, just because they fit, and I was getting very tired of doing the imitative thing. I was up to 137 parts by the end of it. BIG sound. VERY BIG. The second set started off with Equinoxe I by JMJarre, because it was the first piece of his that I heard, and I have always wanted to play it. We had Trip-a-Tron running on the video screen during that tune, and it looked great. I followed that with the overture that I wrote for the Theatre New Brunswick production of Dracula a few years ago. Actually I padded it out with some of the incidental music, and finished off with the suspense and climax used at the end of act I, just to make it a more complete piece of music. At this point my friend Karl joined me on stage. He is a really talented drummist, and has a DrumKat triggering a T-3 and an R-8. We continued with more Jarre: Magnetic Fields I and II with live improv. stuff between them. This is when the light show started to kick in, and the video screen was used to strobe solid colors. pretty cool. We then played a section of a piece that I wrote for a multi-media show at the opening of a new conference centre here. The video was a steadi-cam fly-through of the facility interspersed with animations of a shiny ball rolling on a track through a castle. There is lots of brick in the building, which sort of tied it together. It was much better with live drumming,than my original drum tracks. The big video number was next: Jarre's Overture to Industrial Revolution. The animations were all industrial sort of things including processed video. I did the solo bit on a Yamaha KX strap-on-thang standing in a cone of laser light, with lots of smoke floating through. We finished the night with Rendez-Vous. Part I we played live. It took some persuading to convince Karl to play keyboards...he wanted to trigger the sounds from the pads, but I wanted him to do the long sustaining aahh things, and he really needed to play the keys to get on and off info. I was on the K-2000 and the EPS. Part II was great. Kathy, my cuter half, came out in darkness, and when the choir sections came up, they hit her with a purple spot with a beam-splitter from behind, and lots of smoke and a big fan. It looked great! Oh ya...it sounded cool too. We had all sorts of processing on her voice, and she did a great job. Then came the Laser Harp section. How did he do that you ask...simple. I just turned on my Laser Harp, put on the gloves, and played. I think some people did not get it. They came up after looking for the wires :-) I did make some mistakes (since I don't get much chance to practice) so for those who were wondering...you could tell I was really playing. The only problem came towards the end, when the smoke got a little thick, and started to trigger extra notes. I decided to cut out of the solo a few bars early, and shut it off. We skipped part III( the laser harp solo)...had to leave something for next time, and did part IV as an encore, me playing the KX-thang again. The concert went really well. The bad news is that the biggest snow storm so far this year hit that morning, so we did not get as many people out as we had hoped. We made enough at the door to cover the rentals, so at least I did not lose money on the deal. Tech. Stuff: This was the first time out in a big public show that I used the laser harp. Overall it worked pretty well. We had some problems setting up on that old stage: There were some soft spots that would throw the lasers out of alignment when you walked past them. We put some wood down to bridge the bad spots, and it kept working for the show. The stage set-up looked great...VERY high-tech. The techs said that they had worked on shows at the Aitken Centre (local colliseum that the big rock shows play at) that had less wiring... I set up with my back to the audience, and the keyboards in a V, EPS, Prophet 600, and poly-800 on the right, and K2000, opus xvii controller plus the STacy on the left. The racks were off to my left, and the mixers on top of them. The big mixer ended up behind the drummer, who was also off to my left. The Laser Harp was to my right and over at the front of the stage, while the RP screen was above Karl, and back far enough that I could see it. We used two smoke machines, one by each of Karl and I, and the one on my side was used for Kathy as well as the Laser Harp. I saw a bit of the video last night. It is alright in places. It picked up the mistakes and trouble spots very well. The review in the local paper was pretty lame. He didn't seem to notice the lighting, animations or laser effects. Said I was using Moog and Opus synths (!) and trivialized the Laser Harp. Oh well...The only Moog was the Taurus, and opus is what I call my own creations: the keyboard controller is opus xvii, and the Harp is xxiii. I wish that he had asked one or two questions... ------------------------------ End of the EMUSIC-L Digest ******************************