Playing at the Launch of “The MET”

Acid42 live at the Met launch

The event was a success. On the basis of sheer attendance alone, not to mention the audience feedback. People loved the show, and they loved the idea even more. I played an electronic jazz set for over 2 hours.

The Gig

What happened was this: the Metropolitan Theater Guild (the Met for short) staged three little excerpts at DreamBar@6750. A soliloquy with a modern dance on the creation of the world, the nose speech from Cyrano de Bergerac (in Tagalog), and a song from 2Bayani. In between each segment, the main people behind the Met talked about how this was a bold group taking the plunge and creating a truly professional theater organization which dares to dream big.

The performances were first rate, the visuals stunning, the microphones a bit dodgy, but overall, a good, worthy launch event.

Apart from adding a few electronic touches (sound effects mostly) to the show, I took the stage at 10pm and played till midnight. A full straight 2 hours, which is a first for me. I had my laptop and the Oxygen8 controller I’ve been using for the past few gigs. My partner in Clone, DidipusRex (aka Karlo Samson) decided to sell it to me for a fair price and I accepted on the agreement that I get 2 installments.

Insights While Playing Live

Amazingly enough, despite being instructed to start the set immediately on a high, energetic note, (which meant I didn’t have the luxury of building up to 120 bpm from my relaxing downtempo songs at 80 and 95 bpm), I didn’t run out of songs. In fact, there were still a couple of tracks I could’ve added. Apparently all the composing is now paying off. I have a wealth of material which allows me to play all original tracks for more than two hours– solo.

Had a lot of fun blasting the tracks at full volume, and realized that my EQ-ing in Reason doesn’t immediately translate well once in a large club with booming subwoofers. My tracks all tend to be too bassy which is probably my compensating for my small speakers at home. Still… there is much to learn from gigs like this.

The other enjoyable bit was using the built-in effects on the Pioneer DJM mixer I was using. There was flanger, delay, autopan, reverb, and some others I hardly used. Lovely. I must eventually add an external effects unit into my arsenal. Very very useful. And fun to play with.

Still, the best part of the night was playing live keyboard solos on my Oxygen8 controller. Finally figured out the proper latency settings for it after a twiddling about for some time. Lovely lovely lovely. And it all fits into two light bags.

Had a Starbucks Iced Caramel Marchiato afterwards care of Ali, and talked theater plans till 2:00AM. Took me 25 minutes to get home by bus (till Cubao Ibabaw) then jeep down to Marikina. 19 pesos to get home in 25 minutes? Can’t beat that.

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