A Barking Dog

Il Giga

Originally uploaded by Dave Stevens.

Verona, IT

Le Hotel

Originally uploaded by Dave Stevens.

11th century town

Gear Notes Sofia

Venue: Bulgarian State Theater, cap 3800 (sold to about 90%) designed and built in the late 60s during the communist era.

FOH
console: PM3500
speakers: THC line array box, 8 x LA215A hung per side with 6 x SW215 per side and a few PS212 per side. It’s a real “sound by the pound” rig, capable of extreme spl at the expensive of fidelity. More appropriate for hard rock than jazz. Amps were Camco V6s and Crown MA5ks with BSS Omni compact controllers.

MON
console: PM3500M w/ dbx 2231 eq
wedges: THC M115, 15″ and 1″, passive. Amps were Crown MA3600s. The boxes got loud, though had a tremendous amount of distortion in the low end driver and non controlable pattern control, particularly around the 800 Hz to 1.6k Hz region. While able to generate great amounts of spl, the box lacked fidelity and took excessive amounts of equalization to achieve results that were minimally suitable for this act.

The crew, though knowledgable and hard working spoke little english. Pretty typical for this part of the world. We arrived with less than three hours until show and were able to get a basic config up and going in a couple of hours, with enough time for the band to get a chance to slam out a tune or two on the rented backline that only a few pieces were per spec. Considering how late we were and how fatigued we were all in all it went well. The promoters are likely to be planning many more eastern European dates.

4 Hours Late

Originally uploaded by Dave Stevens.

Flight delay into Bulgaria

I’ve had a couple of requests for basic gear lists on the one off dates, so I’m going to try this for a while. It will at least give some insight to those that aren’t familiar with the variables in one off fly dates.

Gear Notes Baku

Baku, Azerbijian

Venue: 2000 seat theater. Built in the 60s during the Soviet occupation. The Soviets occupied the country from about 1920 until 1991.

FOH
console: Midas Legend (small frame, reduced input show)
speakers: Meyer M2D 2x subs and 5 x tops hung per side with 2x CQs for fronts and Dynacord Cobra subs. Subs powered with EV P33000 amps using and XTA 226 controller as sub crossover and line driver/DA for the powered boxes.

MON
console: DM 2000 V2 (not properly configured for the gig)
wedges: EV crappy plastic 15″ x 2″ passive
sides: EV QRx 212/75
power: EV P1200/P2200 (mismatched)

Baku crew largely unprepared, weren’t use to doing gigs at this level but were nice and willing to learn. Time given I’ll post more details later. The entire stay was a cluster, though nice people that tried hard.

Gear Notes Wroclaw

Venue: Market Square, free show in the centrum across from the old church. Approx 10,000 capacity.

FOH
console: PM 4000
speakers: V-DOSC, 8 x tops hung per side, with six subs per side, Camco amps, XTA 226 controllers and Meyer UPA-1P front fills.
MON
console: Soundcraft SM20 w/ DN360 eq
wedges: Turbosound TFM 212 with Meyer CQ2 sides.
amps: Crest 7001

Aviom digital snaking system that was more of a pain in the ass than an asset for us. the tactical Cat 5 running to FOH was cool, but there are some implementation issues with regard to gain structure.

Good crew, world class as well as the promoter. The mon rig was a bit old and hammered but the foh rig was pretty tight. The crew could hold their own against most any crew in the world. Very quality work day.

In a few hours we’ll board a couple of turbo props for a flight to Bulgaria for a late load in and a throw and go. Hope they have what we need.

Polska

Originally uploaded by Dave Stevens.

From the stage

We’re getting ready to put the first week to bed. In the last seven days we’ve logged just over 10,000 air miles and only a few hundred bus miles. We had a Prevost take us from Toledo to Chicago for the overseas flights so we wouldn’t have to schlep the gear on an RJ and do a terminal change at ORD. This morning’s 01:30 airport departure for a 04:20 flight from Baku still has everyone foggy. Over at Dave Rat’s RHCP Euro blog he explains a bit about the schedule and workflow of doing an arena tour or at least a tour with coaches and production. The Monsters of Jazz do things a bit differently in that most of the these type acts aren’t in a position to carry production on many if not most of the legs. We do fly in dates with either rental backline or we are on a coach with a Sprinter full of our normal rented European backline. For single show headliner dates we’ve been know to carry mons and control but doing mostly festivals and several one off fly dates the numbers just don’t make sense to carry any more than our bare necessities and get the rest locally. Some of the logistics of the fly in dates can be a bit demanding. For example, this week I started last Saturday on a 0630 out of LAS and ended up in Toledo later that afternoon. We hung and gigged the next day then departed for ORD in the bus to catch our flights Baku via Frankfurt with a six hour layover. (Lufthansa was very accomodating) We arrived thenight before the first show, did the first show a bit jet lagged, the second the next day then basicaly departed right after the gig to fly to Poland for a couple of well deserved days off making it about 26 hours flying time on five legs in five days.

There was a bit of a scare on arrival in Wroclaw this morning. Seventeen of our 34 pieces weren’t on the belt, most of backline we carry and about half the personal luggage. Luftansa went ahead and sent those pieces ahead, but the baggage department in Poland didn’t realize it for several minutes until we started filing the claim paper work. It had all been there the whole time. Band will have to find somthing else to be mad about I suppose. We started the morning on an A330-300 to Frankfurt, then on a brand new A321 to Munchen and finally a Dash 8 to Wroclaw (which is Breslau for all you white guys following along). We joked that the next leg would either be a Cessna or a hang glider keeping the tradition of the planes getting smaller on each leg. Lufthansa has been spectacular, we’ve been using them for several years over here. We deal with the airline directly and are provided services such as gate to gate transfers and expedited security and boarding access, or as it’s know in the biz, “being Elvised”. Not to be confused with being John Malkovich, though it’s easy to confuse Malkovich and Elvis because they are so much alike. The amenities and service that is provided make these grueling runs much more managable and as fun as then can be under the circumstances.

Old Baku

Originally uploaded by Dave Stevens.

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