A new guitar and So Brazil's concert

So Brazil, the duo I've created with Brazilian singer Juliana Areias, has had a great debut last Saturday (25/7/09) at a newish venue in downtown Perth, called Canton Lounge Bar. We had a great time during the gig, and so did the public, at nearly the venue's full capacity (they could fit up to 120 people, and we had a 110-strong public).

My main concern was to be able to make a nylon string guitar have as much presence as possible. To that end, I did get a new guitar (a Jose Ortega CE Lina Australian/Chinese design/make , which was fit to better action/playability by master Luthier Graham Hawkes), and a new acoustic amp (a cute Laney LA20C). For the concert, I put a Shure mic in front of the amp, and pulled a cable from the amp's DI output, both onto the sound board. The two signals were panned full to L and R. I also used a Zoom guitar effects pedal to get the guitar through some compression, a little reverb, and delay and flanger (!) in a couple of songs.

To my delight, all worked well, it was incredible to see that people were getting up and dancing to the rhythmic sounds coming out of the guitar (the presence of the instrument did fool them to think I was a band! :) ).

I'll soon post in So Brazil's Myspace site some samples of how it all sounded like during the gig.

The only disappointment after the concert was to find out that a JVC Everio HD camera we had filming the open plan of our gig was a lemon for filming indoor environs, with dim lighting. The video came out of focus so that our facial features were not very clear. But it did provide us means of checking our stage positiong etc. What saved the day was having a little Olympus digital still camera, which has a 640x480 video recording capability at 30fps, sitting beside the stage. The video from that camera came out really well, which means we might be able to post at least one songs' video to our web site soon.