From rockkey@sbcglobal.net Sun Oct 15 19:37:48 2006
Subject:Re: First gig with Stage and new BT Productions road case - long winded!

Moe,

Sounds like you all had a graet time. Regarding
ELP/Moog sounds: Have you checked out the Alesis
Micron? I know most of us want to simplify our rigs
but this little puppy is packed with loads of useful
progs. right out of the box. Programming is a little
tedious but the price is right.

Cheers,

Rock

--- Dave Bradley wrote:

> (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
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been
> removed]
>