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.