What a Show at the VA Harmonicafest

I played my second solo electric show, and the first using prerecorded loops on the looper, at the Virginia Harmonicafest last night. It was also my first live show with my new amped setup, which includes three Digitech RPs, two in parallel, one at the end of the FX chain.

It was a good show, though it felt tough to me. I had some gear problems from the start–at one point the rig just started howling, and I still don’t know why. But I video and audio recorded the show, and the tape don’t lie–it looked and sounded good. I’ll be doing more of this.

I spent a fair amount of time getting my setups ready for this gig. Two hours before the show, I took each RP device and loaded the patches required for the songs in my setlist into each device, with the patches renamed for the songs, loaded in reverse order from the back of the user patch area to the front. In other words, all I had to do to line up the patches for the next song in the set was step down to the next patch in each RP.

Some of the electric songs were tricky to handle in performance. But the overall sound was very cool. Especially cool were the single RP setups I used for some of the acoustic solo material–basically patches with reverb or delay or both. I dialed in some great long reverbs and delays for the slow solo pieces, and some nice slapback delays and short reverbs for the fast ones.