Well I just finished playing the Wizard of Oz show (6 performances over 5 days). It was a joint production with the
local high school school's drama department and the elementary school where my son attends (their chorus made
up the Munchkins, Winkies and Flying Monkeys).
It's nice to get paid to have fun playing guitar while watching your son's school play... he was the flying monkey
that captures Dorothy for the Wicked Witch.
As with the last show I played, there are always unexpected things that come up that you have to adapt to on the fly.
Of course, one of the great things about having a live band (vs. CD tracks) is that we can "go with the flow" and adapt!
Over the 6 shows we had to deal with:
* No guitar score - since guitar were not part of the typical pit orchestra back in the day when this play was written
there was no guitar score. So I had to hit musicnotes.com and print off some charts once I checked the conductor's
score to see what keys we were playing the songs in. Of course, it was a test of my improve abilities (and a vote of
confidence I guess) when the band leader first called me and said "I have no score for you but you'll figure it out I'm sure."
* Missed lines/cues (this is pretty typical). Once you know the show you should still know where to come in playing
even if the actor messes up their cue line heading into the song.
* Skipped verse in song (basically the same as above)
* Wrong key for song! This one was harder to deal with but we managed. You see, for the song right before the
wrong key song, the keyboardist had used the synth's Transpose function to change Dorothy's song from Eb to C
(per Dorothy's request). Well she forgot to turn off Transpose so now the Scarecrow had to sing in A instead of C
where he was supposed to sing (he managed to hit the lower notes so it all worked out)! Of course, none of the
rest of the band knew what had happened so we started playing in C and then had to figure out what key the
leader (keyboardist) was in (hey, at least it was her and not me that screwed it up).
* Throwing apples - In the scene where the trees throw their apples at Dorothy (right before she meets the Tin Man)
we got hit a couple of times with overthrown apples... at least it wasn't rotten tomatoes because we sounded bad (LOL)!
* The typical "you need to play softer" from the FOH engineer. We did our own band mix from a mixe board in the
pit and then fed a mono mix to the FOH. Well when they first set it up they didn't take advantage of the separate
bus mixes (i.e., monitor mix is on a different bus than the master mix bus feeding FOH). So when changing levels in
the monitors it was messing with the FOH mix. Once I realized they had set it up wrong I went over and changed it
and the FOH guy was much happier. This is what you get when you have a high school kid who is still learning audio
production running sound (guess it was his first time dealing with a submix)
I did get to try out my new Egnater Tweaker amp and it sounded great with my Strat (very sweet cleans). I also
found out that you can get some really cool "Twister" and "Wizard" sound effects if you turn on your Rat, Little Big
Muff, Flanger, and Delay all at once and tap random strings/notes/pick scrapes... the sound effects really helped the
scenes out (and they are an example of playing beyond what you may find in the music score).
So another show under my belt... these are fun! Here's some pics "from the pit"...
