Footloose - Rehearsal Night One

Setup for a musical production is always...well a production. It will be amazing to see all the pieces come together...Lighting, backstage, musicians, performers, and sound. Especially when a lot of it is done by students and parent volunteers. Being down in a hole (It's really a nice auditorium/stage and pit.) with a bass I only really care about musicians and sound. It's a smaller group than what I've seen for their shows. We have 3 guitars, 2 keyboards, drum set, percussion, reeds, flute and bass.

There are a few things to sort out before too long. There are two monitors in the pit that aren't doing anything. They are plugged into something but no one knows how to get our own sound to come out of it. From my pseudo-trained eyes, it looked like that the stage mics were being pumped into the monitors. My training is based on years of computer work (Inputs are where stuff goes in and outputs are where stuff comes out) and some experience while touring with BYU's International Folk Dance Ensemble. So hopefully they'll be able to sort that out.

The other issue is that the bass has a lot of exposed parts. More than any of the other shows, I've done. Not that they are all fancy solos, per se, but parts where I'm the only one playing anything of note. So I have my work cut out for me this time around. And some of it has funky rhythms. For me I have to listen to rhythms. I'm not that great at reading syncopated rhythms from sheet music.

In prepping for the show, I listened to the soundtrack and played along. One thing I always forget is that the soundtrack doesn't include the between scene music. Luckily it's usually reiterations of the other songs, so it's not so bad. Mostly I need to run through the songs some more to get my muscle memory up to speed.

Fruit Trees

My wife comes home one day from stopping by her Dad's house. She regales me of how her Dad is buying fruit trees from Stark Brothers and they are currently having a special where orders ship for free. And the special was ending that night.

At first I was a bit resistant to getting fruit trees for our suburb-scape grass patch in the back of the house. Em and I have been dreaming for a while on finding a little bit of land that we can comfortably raise small animals (chickens and rabbits and children) and grow a sizable garden. So she wanted to "practice" with some trees right now. I really didn't want to put in too much effort and money into something we won't get to reap the full benefits of since we kinda want to find a farmhouse and live there. That and our backyard (more often than not) is full of stagnate rainwater that won't drain into the ground due to bad engineering or super clay-ey soil or both.

She reminded me that I have some "ill-gotten gains" (Her words, not mine) coming my way after I play bass in Footloose at my old high school. (Which by the way is going to be really fun to play...several bass solos I need to work on...and I get to hang out with my Mom.) So I sunk about $100 in two apple trees and an apricot tree with some assorted fertilizer and soil enrichers (Our dirt is junk that they used to make the houses sit a bit higher.)

The trees were shipped from Missouri and arrived this week and last night under the light of twinkling stars and my headlamp I dug holes and planted the trees. I was pleasantly surprised that the dirt where we planted the trees is a lot better than the dirt close to our house where we have some small garden beds. (We had to put in manure and topsoil to make it usable.)

And now we have three 3-4 foot sticks in our backyard that will hopefully grow fruit in 2-5 years. I kinda excited.