From mate.stubb@gmail.com Sun Oct 15 09:51:58 2006
Subject:First gig with Stage and new BT Productions road case - long winded!

(crossposted to NordStage)

Last night I played my first gig with my Stage. I've had it for about a
month now so I've learned my way around it reasonably well, but had only
been in the basement. I was anxious to hear how it would perform in a band
mix, and let me just say that it totally rocked.

The occasion was a musicians' jam after a wedding. My first problem was that
I didn't have even a gig bag for my 76 and had to travel out of state, so I
rush ordered an ATA case from Tony at BT Productions. Let me just take a
second to pause and give a big shout out to BT who got the thing designed to
my specs, and rushed it through building and shipping in time for me to use
it. I had it a week after I first called! It has a nice little cavity inside
for the legs, built in wheels, and of course it's red.

Back to the gig - there was a real B-3 and leslie there so I used the Nord
for everything but organ. Since this was a musician's wedding, there were
players out the wazoo. I played in stereo through a little Mackie PA head
powering two 2 way Yamaha monitors. After tweaking the graphic EQ to remove
some boxiness, it sounded fine. Besides the leslie and a bass rig, there
were 4 guitar amp rigs brought by the various and sundry guitar players. And
oh yeah, we had liquid lights too . Nothing was mic'ed except acoustic
guitars.

The music was classic rock and blues. The bandleader/groom was calling the
tunes, and I had to cover several synth things by programming on the spot -
the solos to "Lucky Man" and "From the Beginning" from ELP, and the
Mellotronish strings for "Nights in White Satin". In addition, there were
the usual piano/wurli/clav things going on.

In all cases, the Stage performed wonderfully. The piano sound (Yamaha XL)
cut just fine, the wurli was funky and warm, and everybody complimented me
all night long on how great is sounded. As an aside, it was wonderful
playing with a good Hammond player. There were lots of grins from the band
at the wall of keyboard sound coming at them.

If I could come up with anything negative to say at all, it would be about
the synth. The strings drenched in verb that I came up with for "Knights"
sounded so awesome that the singer actually had to stop singing at one point
- but helping out we also had a real flute playing and that magnificent B-3.
The one thing that didn't ring true to my ears was my attempts to emulate
Keith Emerson's big Moog sound for the ELP stuff. The synth definitely had
that somewhat characteristic Nord tone to it, and even using the 4 pole
filter I couldn't nail that open high fidelity fatness of a true analogue.
I'm going to work on it some more, and hopefully if I have more than 30
seconds this time I can come closer.

I also managed to get one tune in at the end of the evening on the B-3. Man,
that is STILL the king of the instruments. I found it funny that when we
were breaking down, the organ player had rolled his organ outside, and come
back and dollied his leslie out to his trailer while I was still removing
the legs from my Stage, and the drummer had barely removed his cymbals! LOL!

Sorry for the long windedness, I'm still basking in the afterglow.

Moe

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