Joaquin Gustav returned to Cat's Art MusikCircus for his Friday night gig and he started out by saying he would be playing his hollow-body guitar. That one is most similar to the one his avatar is playing in the picture. I wrote an article last week about Joaquin's guitars and you might want to take a look as he has some highly-exotic instruments. Joaquin Gustav's Guitars - Godin ACS-SA and Fifth Avenue Kingpin
Joaquin doesn't do very much sound modification to the signal coming from the instrument so it's extremely important to him that the guitars have different sounds. The Godin ACS-SA has a jazzy sound that's very precise and a bit drier than the Fifth Avenue Kingpin which is the hollow-body guitar and has a fuller, bluesy sound. In one of the early songs in his set he played both of them and this showed exactly why some guitarists play multiple guitars. Both guitars sound beautiful but they also sound quite different from each other and this makes a beautiful mix.
Voodoo Shilton was to play tonight but he had a real world commitment. He will be back next week at the regular time.
Since the show was booked, I said I'd play. I'm happy to play for Cat anyway and you can't have a show booked but then close the doors. So, set up the stuff and play.
(The picture was from the night before but I don't have one from last night and Vivian aka Rula Rayna took the trouble to shoot it so thank you!)
Things went fairly well for maybe thirty minutes and then the sim crashed. When that happens, you don't know if it's just you, the sim, all of Second Life, or what. (A sim is a large unit of property in Second Life and each will have its own configuration, appearance, etc.)
The strange thing for a performer is that the audio stream into Second Life doesn't go down when your avatar crashes. The best thing is usually to keep playing until you know for sure whether it's just you or everyone. Trying to do that while you're playing can be an interesting exercise.
It turned out the whole sim had crashed so everyone at the show got logged off the system. After some delay, we got back onto SL and got the show going again ... and not so long after that it went down a second time! I'm really not sure what took it down the second time but the sim restarted and everyone was logged off.
Cat couldn't make it back into SL again but I did and I was surprised people came back a second time. That can only mean play some more so the show continued for another twenty or thirty minutes. Kasandra Barony was there for this part and she has some outrageous laser displays that look fantastically cool from the stage. I think she had someone else doing it too as there were lasers all over the place. Just the thing for "I Love Rats!"
As to what was in the set, there hasn't been anything using back tracks in the last few gigs. Even though I recorded the back tracks myself and some of them are fairly elaborate, they're too restrictive. There's no chance I can get as a good a mix of instruments for a song on the looper as I can with tracks but the looper gives me a lot of freedom. With a back track, if I want to go long with a tune, I can't. If I make the back track long and I decide to go short, I'm screwed. A looper has neither of those problems so lots of experimenting is happening in these shows.
Again, Voodoo Shilton will be back in his regular time after Joaquin next week. Don't miss the show!
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