a_r_schulz
Group: Members
Posts: 425
Joined: Sep. 2001 |
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Posted: April 09 2010, 04:57 |
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I have seen him some weeks ago here in Bremen (Germany) at the 'Glocke' (which is the name of the famous local classical concert hall and, as an interesting coincidence, translates to English as 'The Bell'...)
He started off with a few nice solo guitar tracks, while most of the gear was still hidden behind a curtain, culminating in the piece for his 42-string 'monster'-guitar.
Then he finally revealed his 'Orchestrion' in all of its crazy beauty - the whole setup apparently optimized for stage and tour conditions, compared to the pictures from the studio in the promo video.
Following were the tracks from the new 'Orchestrion suite' album. As you would have expected, most of the backing tracks in this part appeared to be pre-programmed, filled with the guitar played live.
While he so far had let his music speak for itself, in the 3rd part of the gig, between playing a few older tracks, Pat started to give some explanations about the concept of the orchestrion and demonstrations of its capabilities.
He had, e.g. one (not very long, luckily  ) track with direct triggering of the percussion instruments by his guitar. Centerpiece of this section was an improvisation where he track-by-track built up live the backing tracks of the orchestrion instruments and guitar loops, stating that the backing tracks of the 'orchestrion suite' pieces, though pre-programmed, had been created in a similar way.
Except for a few parts where I, indeed, had wished that Pat had a bit more of Mike's sense of melody, it was, IMHO, in all an amazing gig with (mostly) wonderful music.
Technically, compared to the complexity of the whole rig there were only very few issues during the concert that required action by the stage hands - one drum stick kept hitting its microphone, and one of his robotic monochords seemd to have lost all of its smoke...
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