July 29th at the Arts & Letters Club, Toronto

Hi everyone – Paul here… just a little recap of how the show went from our perspective.

Unfortunately, John and Rose weren’t able to perform with us this time.  Their cool sounds were missed!

For me personally, this was a big night.  The debut of new additions to my performance rig.  I have begun to use some of the wonderful synthesizers available for the iPad and also started using a new network based MIDI protocol in order to use it to control my soft-synths running on my laptop via a wireless connection.  About a year ago I started learning to play the Chapman Stick and this was my first time using it in a performance.  Yes – I was a bit nervous!

We waited in the bar and started the show from there (a great way to start a show BTW!) using my new iPad setup.  After a few seconds of the audience wondering what was going on (in the recordings you can hear some talking at the beginning), I wandered in trying to play and make sure the audience could see what was going on on my iPad while at the same time trying not to drop it and shatter the screen into a million pieces!  This went well, and the rest of the band along with our guest (Farhad Nargol-O’Neill – Piano & Cello) eventually followed me onto the stage and began to play.

We played 5 completely improvised pieces which were well received by the audience and had a great time.

Follow this link to find some recordings of the event.  Unfortunately, there is quite a bit of distortion at times.  We are reasonably certain that the distortion is as a result of the recording feed coming off of the A&L’s equipment.  It did seem a bit under powered for our style of playing.  This is too bad, because there are some very tasty bits in there and the distortion is very distracting.