Starts today with one of my guitar fav's on stage tonight, Colin James.

We'll have a booth with a system or two and a pile of vinyl, our new TubeDAC-09 will be dealing with the media server on my laptop, USB based, plug and play !. I'll take the baby Droplet 3.1 to spin some vinyl.

4 days of great music and fun. If your there drop in and say hi to Rachel, I'll likley be in the beer tent :) especially for the sunday Jam, that should be awesome.

Calgary International Bluefest
http://www.calgarybluesfest.com/

Schedule and line up is here:
http://www.calgarybluesfest.com/09schedule.php

Cheers,
Ian

Nearly recovered a week later :) Great time. Excellent musicians !

Hi Lites for me:

1. Diunna Greenleaf,
Forecast was for rain the entire weekend and nothing during setup or the first act indicated things were going to improve. I had promised a sundance, but 5 minutes into Diunna's set and the sun peeked out for a look at the show, decided it liked what it saw and stayed out for the rest of the weekend. Fortunately no one had to see my sundance :)

http://www.calgarybluesfest.com/artists/diunnagreenleaf.htm

2. Zac Marmon:

Simple 3 piece blues band, that just did everything right, my idea of blues, pure, simple and just the right amount of dirt.

http://www.calgarybluesfest.com/artists/zacharmon.htm

Everyone else was fantastic, as expected, from full-blown stage full of musicians to the solo acts, I saw every act from various angles and ended up with two sweet spots for sound, 1-almost at the entrance/exit gates, 2- at the stage where you got the stage mix instead of the mains mix. Which leads me to:

Rant:
the sound was decent during the day, but when the headliners came on the soundman just destroyed the magic by over using the subs as if in competition with car thumpers. I rarely go to concerts or clubs anymore due to the poor sound, what part of sound re-enforcement to the current crop of joker soundmen misunderstand. Might be time to kick the guys out and let the girls mix. If you are a soundman who knows how to tell if the audience is into the mix, then I'm not talking about you.

If not one in the audience is even bobbing their heads, let alone dancing to Booker T. or Colin James then you know something is very wrong. The reason you get so much feedback (any after the first song is basically criminal) is because you have created nothing but a thump in the lower octaves, which is creating crap upper harmonics that is filling in and blocking the vocal and instrument fundamental harmonics. Just plain stupid.

End of Rant

Cheers,
Ian