Grateful Dead Music Forum

Fun having another texture to play off of ... had a pedal steel player sit in on Saturday.

Finally got our bass player to turn it up, too, he sounds great.

http://playingdead.net/eyes.html

That sounds fantastic. Nice to see that smile your Weir guy cracks after the sax player lays a little phrase on ya'. Good stuff man!

Very nice indeed, Jon. Thanks for posting.

Nice. I sent this on to our sax player to provide a little inspiration. We're trying to get Eyes into our repetoire.

Sounds great, guys!

How did you get such great sound on a video? Must have a little more than the standard digicam going on...

Nice work...

We play a lot at this venue -- it's a pretty big place, holds about 350 or so. The sound guy is a nice guy, he likes the Dead, too.

Lately, we've been doing two night runs. This time, the week before we played, the sound guy (Jason) was listening to a bunch of Dead soundboards, sort of carefully listening to some of the things Healy used to do back in the day. So he shows up for the gig with a bunch of extra microphones, mikes every single tom on both kits, pans them across the speakers from right to left, matches the levels on drummer A's high tom with drummer B's floor tom, etc. etc. He takes the bass direct, and mikes the bass cabinet. He puts a Rode mic one of my E-120s, and a Sennheiser on the other one, and has those panned, he's doing some live rotary panning with the organ sometimes, just really getting into it. And he absolutely cranked the bass, which is what we've been looking for. The Eyes was from the first night, by the second night it was all dialed in, crowd was even bigger, place was packed, and he was really having some fun with it. Two nights earlier, he mixed 13 different bands on New Years Eve. This was like a walk in the park for him. He loved it.

He also took an XLR direct out of my Focus 2R power amp, but he didn't use it in the mix, he wants to experiment with EQ'ing it at soundcheck next time we play there.

We plugged the board feed into the hi-definition camera, but the levels were too hot, I just synced up this one tune from my own board feed. Audience tapes came out terrific, too. I'm about to order Logic Studio for the Mac, I might try some 5.1 surround stuff on the DVD, put a little audience recording in the surround speakers.

The soundboard tapes are really, really good ... I'll post up a couple of audio samples later. He was talking about getting some gear that would let us get 32 tracks recorded individually ... now that's some scary s---!

Now that was really enjoyable!! Thanks for brightening up my morning.

First few songs of first set ... man it's nice when it's all there for a change!

http://www.playingdead.net/010309unclecumberland.mp3

http://www.playingdead.net/010309bertha.mp3

http://www.playingdead.net/010309mrcharlie.mp3

I am really happy with the guitar sound now, too. Now, if I could only make the rig smaller and lighter ... LOL

That's some good stuff there ! You ever come R.I. way ??

We've played down in Newport before ... and we keep getting asked to come to Providence, but I'm not sure how the scene is down there ...