FraKctured

July 23, 2001 Cincinnati, OH / Bogart’s

Haven’t played the show yet. Haven’t even gone to the soundcheck yet. I’m just sitting here in my hotel room playing in my new guitar. Finally I have some space to really play it in. I began with the ritual of playing every single note on the instrument, and letting it resonate. I suppose this is really a “letting it resonate with me” rather them just a general resonating. Meaning that my “own something or other that is just mine” gets an opportunity to merge with the guitar at every available frequency.

It’s quite well known in the classical world that, over time, instruments began to resonate more and more with their respective players. The actual wood cells themselves line up and vibrate differently depending on the players. I heard an interview with the musician who “took over” the cello from Jacqueline du Pres after she passed away. It took him many years to tame it to his own. And I’ve read the same story with the cellist of the Arditti String Quartet who played Pablo Casals cello after his passing.

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Decent debut show of a tour. Some high points and some low. Very, very hot on-stage. It is so unpleasant attempting this music with sweat in your eyes and your hands swollen and fat. But, we persevered and the muse won over our clammy flesh.

This isn’t an easy room to play in. It’s a long square room with brick
walls. By all rights the sound should have been horrible. The word that I got was that we sounded very good in the house. And while the on-stage sound wasn’t great, I now that it was far better then it could have been. We can thank Craig, our monitor dude, for that.

In fact, this tour is the the first time that I have really, really been able to hear everything that everyone is doing, while at the same time feeling a blend between the four of us. It is usually a trade off with the monitors. You seem to get two choices: 1. hear everyone too discreetly, with no sonic connection, or 2. hear everyone mushed together. I hate either of these options. And Craig has found the happy mid-way point. I have moved one of my front monitor speakers around to the back near Pat. This way I am more enveloped in the sound. But, I also get more of the effect of the electronic drums coming from Pat’s actually physical space, as opposed to coming from the front monitor speakers.

I don’t know how Adrian sang in tune tonight. He is a wizard. I had an extremely hard time hearing pitch. What my ears were receiving was something like all the high frequency pitches were slightly sharp and all the low frequency pitches were flat. I kept checking my tuner and I was consistently in tune. Our soundman Paul said that Adrian was perfectly in tune, so it must have been more a psycho-acoustic effect that I was experiencing.

Paul, had a heckler tonight. This guy kept coming up to him and telling him how to change the mix. It makes me wonder what it would be like if someone stood at the front of the stage yelling at me to play different notes: “Eb! No, no, no, Eb! Not F# there! Eb!”