HELLO FROM THE ROAD. For the first time in what feels like a month, I've found a few free minutes to charge my laptop and write a post. In our approach to the tour halfway mark, we've rolled through Chicago, Toronto, Montreal, Boston, and Providence, and finally landed here in Brooklyn, covering a little over 2,000 miles along the way. We've seen sunny days and snow and rain, slept on beds and couches and floors, and drank at least a gallon of Gatorlyte. All of that, and the wheels just keep rolling on! Or they will, after our two night stand here in New York.
First and foremost, the important stuff - my ratings of the tour meals we've had so far (incomplete list):
- Sunny off-day afternoon gnocchi and Guinness in Boston (with Andrea!)
- The exact Pizza Pizza from Scott Pilgrim in Toronto (eaten at his exact table)
- Burger King chicken sandwich somewhere between Ann Arbor and Toronto (with only mayo and ketchup)
- Montreal tonkatsu ramen (shelter from the cold)
- Domino Philly cheese steak pizza in Chicago (they didn't have barbecue chicken...)
- Friskie Fries alley cat parmesan fries in Providence (they were playing 2010s scream emo but showing coco melon on the tv???)
We've been tightening our sound up, and probably played the best show of the tour so far last night in Providence. It was the only show where people have asked for an encore - maybe because it was our only Saturday night show? Or our only all ages show? Or our only sold out show? Or our first show with Can of Bliss? Maybe because of all these factors, the energy level was high - the folks from Rhode Island (and its environs) danced, jumped, and yelled to all of our hearts content. We responded well, and played great, locking in and executing our parts with energy and (at least relative) exactness.
The fun thing about this tour is that even as I solidfy my knoweldge of the parts, the technical quality of my sound post-bass still varies greatly night to night based on the equipment available. My "rig" is a combination of DI and/or a borrowed cab, depending on what's available at the venue. In the best case scenario, I run both: layering the treble-y, fuzzy side of my tone from the cab on top of a sub-ier DI tone for punch and clarity. More often, however, I've been running with borrowed cab only, no extra DI line, and trying to balance this sound into the drums, guitar, and varying combinations of PAs and monitors provided by the venues.
The nightly roulette of all these factors leads to a lot of variation in my tone that feels only vaguely within my control. I buy some measure of consistency by running everything through a cheap Behringer sans-amp clone, which is a combination DI box and amp emulator that allows me to have some measure of consistent EQ and tone scultping going into the real amp or PA. But even this consistent set of inputs plays out differently across different cabs - which usually also have their own EQ set by the bassist in whatever band we're borrowing from. All of this is compounded by the fact that, unless we're also running the DI route, there's no bass in the monitors, and my ears have some difficulty hearing the bass at all beyond just feeling the vibrations in the floor.
It's a fun challenge to try to align these moving parts in a way that both sounds good to the audience and allows me to hear myself well enough to play. It's funny to realize the "hard" part of this (from an outside perspective) would seem to be learning and actually performing the music on the instrument, but that the real difficulty is then conveying that performance accurately and stimulatingly to the audience. It's a huge help when we're lucky enough to work with a real sound person, but even then, their focus is more on the experience of the audience, and not necessarily on making sure I can hear myself.
It reminds me some of the problem of app deployment - you can build a great app (learn to play the song, the notes), but that doesn't matter if you can't deploy it (play it live, with great sound). It makes me appreciate even further the massive amounts of money that the Dead poured into their live sound, and the extent to which they were able to achieve crystal clear transmission of the sonic information of each instrument. I especially see the appeal of the original Wall of Sound concept - each musician hearing exactly what the audience is hearing, and controlling their mix themselves, without the need for any additional front of house engineer. That's certainly not what we're aiming for here (not from a practical nor stylistic perspective), but it's great to have all this practice thinking intentionally about sound, especially on an instrument where I am still developing my ear and sonic palette.