Almost Elton John

AMERICUS, GA
I just got done with a week of shows with Almost Elton John. We only did a total of three shows, but it was a very busy week, involving a lot of driving and plane rides.

We started out our run at the beautiful Rylander Theatre in downtown Americus, Georgia. Given that it was a “local” gig, backline was not provided for this show. I used this as an opportunity to break out all of the stops and I decided to set up the full rig. It was total overkill, but it was nice to have so many sounds right at my fingertips. This was a good chance to include the Moog Little Phatty as well. Setting all of this stuff up was a bit of a nightmare, though, and I won’t likely do it again for awhile.
The full rundown:

• Yamaha P200
• Yamaha Motif 7
• Yamaha MO6
• Moog Little Phatty played through a Peavey Delta Stomp
• MacBook Pro, Focusrite Scarlett, Korg NanoKontrol 2
• Mackie 1202
  

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GREEN VALLEY, AZ
Our next show was at what can only be described as a high school lunchroom cafeteria (although technically I think it was a “recreation center”). The staff was quite nice, and the setup was decent. There were some limitations given their staffing, and they could only handle 6 discrete monitor mixes. But they had a nice green room, and the place was clean, so I had few complaints.

The rig thim time around was a Yamaha S80 and a Motif ES8. I couldn’t get a line from the FOH for my in-ears, so I just used the provided stage wedge. I also decided to use the audio inputs on the front of the Scarlett as a pass-through for the audio lines coming out of the S80 and Motif, which acted as a mixer to FOH along with the MainStage output.

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PALM DESERT, CA
In Palm Desert, CA, we had the pleasure of doing a gig with our spinoff group, Piano Men, which is a tribute to Billy Joel and Elton John. This time we were joined by the Desert Symphony, a local orchestra who have a 5 to 6 concert residency at the McCallum Theatre in Palm Desert. This was an exhilarating experience, since it’s not every day that I get to play with a 50-piece orchestra. And to hear this material played with real strings and real brass was a lot of fun!

Since I usually play those parts, I was able to relax a bit on this gig (sort of). The venue apparently didn’t think that providing all of my backline was necessary, so I was scaled down to just a single Motif ES8, which worked fine as it happens. I did some pre-game programming in MainStage and managed to get everything split up enough to fit all across one keyboard.