rock'n'rill

The King’s Alley

Heya guys,

whew, I’ve been busy in a major way the last couple weeks.

Let me tell you about our concert with DVD recording at Königsallee in Güntersleben on Sunday, August 21. (Btw, Königsallee translates at King’s Alley, hence the title of this blog post.)

It’s an amazingly beautiful venue with real good sound and great light, a wonderful stage and a beautiful outdoor auditorium. A lot of people really enjoyed the show. Some regulars even told me it was the best they’d seen us play this year.

We played a real good gig, we filmed it, and I think we’re going to get a real good DVD out of this. Keep your fingers crossed, there’s still a ton of work involved. Playing the gig was the easy part. Filming and recording it, mixing sound and editing video is the more laborious part of producing a live DVD. Unfortunately, one of the two main cameras we used (there’s footage from two more cameras) gave up the ghost about two thirds into the concert. I’m not sure if we can use any material from the last 7 or so songs – I’d love to at least salvage some material. After all, the arc of a concert is such that you wanna end strong. If the DVD should end before the final bang, it may be somewhat anti-climactic. We’ll see how that goes.

Here’s a few thoughts on that gig …

If we hadn’t filmed this show, I’m sure it would’ve been one of the nicest gigs we’ve played all year. But with cameras in your face and the recording constantly on my mind, it’s hard to just let go and let yourself fall into the moment and just enjoy the live situation. It feels like you’re playing to two audiences at once:

1. the live-in-the-moment audience that you’d like to honor with the reckless abandon they deserve for supporting us so wholeheartedly and

2. the DVD audience for whom you’re trying to stay focused and not get too carried away.

Now, our band has played a bunch of gigs this summer and I have a lot of faith in The Troublemakers – that’s why I figured the time had come to record the live DVD.
But there’s a reason why most bands shoot a DVD in the middle of a tour and preferably film two or three nights in a row at the same venue. That way you’re relaxed cause you know if you mess up a song tonight, you’ll probably get it right the next night.

For us it was one shot and one shot only. The band played excellent throughout with just one snafu on a song that I really wanted to get on the DVD. I wonder if we can fix it in the mix.
Me, however … I encountered a few black holes lyric-wise … which is highly unusual. Usually, I may stumble over one or two lines in the context of an entire concert and that’s mostly if we try a new song or throw something into the set spontaneously. But that night there were maybe three or four minor lyric missteps. In a regular live situation, this’ll happen one second and be gone the next. Now they’re recorded. We’ll find out how glaring or obvious they are when the mixing & editing work is done.

At any rate, I hope these pics show that the video material will look real good. We played well, I’m confident we’ll make a fine DVD.

I’m so indebted to Thomas Herpich for organizing the whole video shoot and Tilman Hampl for helping with the shoot and coming up with great ideas (getting a camera dolly!). I also owe tremendous thanks to our bass player Chris Reiss for recording the entire show and going way beyond the call of duty with his efforts. This was, is and will be a labor of love. Scorsese shooting the Stones it is not.

Stay tuned!

And if you want to catch the real thing, come out on Friday to our gig at Hofkeller Würzburg, a beautiful underground venue http://www.midlife-club.de/html/aktuell.html

See ya,
Markus

30 August 2011 ·