Chris Preston and New Aquarius Online

Though I’ve most recently dedicated my efforts to recording my material and helping others play their music, I’ve begun to turn a portion of my energies to performing my own material live. There comes a time when I spend too much time in the studio that I simply must get out and make a sound outside of my own head. There’s something very oppressive about recording music in that you are always chasing the definitive version of the composition, striving to capture magic in the performance of it, since it presumably will live forever. After a while, trying to play everything perfectly at all times gets so stale. For magic also happens when you spread your wings musically and take chances, risking mistakes or train wrecks for the possibility of finding something new in yourself or the music.

I figured that it was time I put a band together to play the music I’ve been working on so I can finally let everyone hear it. The problem, however, is that making music as an adult carries with it more headaches, more entrapments, more catches. When you’re a kid, you make music with your friends. You dream together. No one has anything and no one has anything to lose. My adult performing career has been largely solo, so I’ve not butted up against the differences much, but beyond a certain age, musicians of any quality become more scarce. As they age, musicians play for different reasons than simply to become their heroes. They balance music with other responsibilities. They work less for a collective good, such as a band, and even less for a “solo artist” for fear of being exploited. That leaves me with some challenges, since my latest efforts feature full arrangements. Only a band can do this stuff. What’s worse, I’ve become more keyboard-centric, experimenting with different sounds and more complex arrangements.

I’ve written repeatedly about how I’d be quite content simply playing bass. It’s what I got into this for. If I’m going to play my music in a band, I’ve got to be the bass player. But how do I handle all of these keyboards? Keyboardists are very hard to come by. Hence the reason I’ve gotten more calls for keyboards than anything else in recent years. It’s too early to hire a keyboard player outright, though that’s probably what will have to happen if I’m going to get the music to sound right. What to do?

I have a drummer who can sing backup, an old friend of mine. I’m courting guitarists at the moment. After that, I’m putting all of my runaway versatility to work. I predict that when you see me play live, I shall go “all Geddy Lee on your ass.” Anyone who knows Rush knows that Geddy Lee plays bass, keys and guitar and sings too. He often uses his feet to get things played when his hands aren’t free. Good enough for me. I shall be playing keyboards and bass, sometimes in the same song. I have decided that I don’t give a damn. I’m gonna be the bass player or nobody is. I’ve set up my synthesizer so that I can play bass parts with my left hand when I need to have a keyboard in the arrangement. I’ll also be singing lead. I’ll also be working my ass off! :~) However, I’ll be joined by a stampede of unicorns, all wearing necklaces of hen’s teeth. If I think my music is different and special, why shouldn’t it take some heroic measures to perform it?

I toyed with the idea of using a sequencer for a bit. I got together with my drummer friend to give it a whirl. When you play with a sequence, it usually means that the drummer must listen to a click on headphones, so he can be sure not to lose time with the computer. Computers don’t listen to what everyone else is playing, so you’re a slave to their petrified renditions. We got through the song, and yes, I was playing bass and keyboards were coming out of the speakers. But it felt like tracking a record. When my drummer suggested we play through a different song that I hadn’t prepared with the sequencer, I roughed it out alone at the keyboard. Even though I hadn’t split the keyboard to cover the bass parts and it sounded like it had holes in the arrangement, it felt more like music than what we had played before. I had made my decision. I must bring my full abilities to bear and do something risky.

As I prepare for this undertaking, I’m finding it so stimulating that I can’t wait to get at it. I’ll absolutely have something that is worth watching. Let’s see how much damn music I can make with 3 people.

I played a gig the other night. It wasn’t my gig. It was with the other band I work with as a guitarist and keyboardist. The show was at one of the “better” clubs in North Jersey. It’s a big room and it has a nice sound system. We were the opening act for some group from Boston. Though we only had about an hour on the stage, maybe less, I took a few moments as I played to indulge in some introspection.

Music is a very peculiar calling. It puts up a fight most of them time. It’s not easy to play an instrument and sing. It’s even more difficult sometimes to put yourself out in front of other people. A performer experiences a constant emotional push and pull. On the surface, he appears to be an entertainer, attempting to make others happy, to give others some enjoyment. However, there’s very often another force at work, the overcoming of the judgment by those people you seek to entertain, should it be a negative one. So are you really playing for them or you? Does it matter what the audience thinks or not? This push and pull is just a subtext to yet another layer, which is the hope that at some point during the performance the music you’re creating will take on an energy, a significance, a force that transcends all of that ping pong of the ego. When that occurs, there is an event of pure forgetting when the music being produced is beyond the grasp of the mind or heart. Some believe it to be a manifestation of the divine in us. All of the control being exerted as the musicians make their sounds suddenly becomes effortless, beautiful and bigger than any human.  Most musicians live for that fleeting experience and their performing lives become an unending quest to lengthen it.

I believe that I felt it happen once on the last gig. Any insecurities I may have had in using someone else’s amplifier or not being pleased with the monitor mix floated away. I looked out into the room at all those people and in peace I proclaimed to myself that: a) I do not understand this experience. b) I have no feelings about my lack of understanding. c) I feel neither vulnerable nor defensive. d) This is what I was born to do. Not because I’m in this life to perform and make music, but because this is the way that I learn. It is through the eyes and experiences of a musician that the mysteries of my path begin to make sense to me.

This is why I do what I do.

Photo by Scott Higgins

I know that over the years I’ve amassed volumes of knowledge about how to be a gigging musician from a purely practical standpoint. This list is by no means exhaustive and I’ll probably think of more as soon as this post appears, but here are a few golden rules that I live by and still break.

1. Get off the batteries.

If you’re a guitarist, you know exactly what I mean by this. Guitarists are known for these little boxes that they string together on the floor in front of them. Each one is plugged into the next. The guitar is plugged into the one on the right and the amp is plugged into the one on the left. These boxes are called pedals because each one generally has a footswitch that enables you to activate them as needed to mutate your sound in some way. When they are off, they pass your guitar signal without affecting it (mostly).

Unless you’re using some type of pedal board that you leave connected all the time, each one of these pedals takes a 9 volt battery. As soon as you plug a cable into a pedal’s input, the thing is considered “on” and is using battery power.

Each pedal uses battery power at its own rate and you don’t have any clear indication of  when a battery is ready to fail, so you’re constantly buying batteries and going broke or you live in constant fear of your tone going to hell in the middle of a gig when the existing batteries die. To stave off premature battery death, some guys unplug the inputs of each pedal during set breaks. This requires that you power down your amp, or at least turn down your amp’s volume, regardless of whether you have the perfect level. I find myself buying new batteries and most likely replacing good ones “just in case”. The money adds up.

All of this is an unnecessary hassle. Run everything on an electrical power supply if you can. Easy to say for guitar effects. I don’t have an answer for wireless mics and inner ear monitor packs. I suspect that you’ll have to continue spending money and fouling the environment. (Scott, the drummer in the Band of Brothers, had his mic battery fail on a recent gig. The whole universe was powerless to help him. I sympathized, but I was quietly and shamefully grateful that the fate had not befallen me.)

2. Wrap and arrange your cables.

There are a number of reasons why this is good form. The first is that it looks better. If you set up and your performance area looks like a plane hit it, you are unpleasant to look at and wordlessly encouraging people to look elsewhere. To perform effectively, it’s helpful to have them looking at you. Make it nice.

Tripping is entertaining to an audience in a bad way. You want attention for doing what you do well, not for falling on your ass because you were too lazy to get the obstacles out of your way. You (or someone else) could also get tangled up and yank a cable out of your guitar, or knock over your keyboard, or worse. These things never make for a good show.

The other thing is that cables don’t last forever and can get expensive if you have to keep replacing them. Instrument cables usually consist of a conductor in the center surrounded by a shield of braided wire. If you step on them enough times, the wire breaks inside the insulation and creates an intermittent or non-existent connection, despite the fact that the cable looks fine. Annoying and unpredictable are not the conditions under which I like to perform. (I once had a clodhopping troupe stomp all over a stage where my stuff was set up. I had to replace my cable. Now that I think of it, I also left that band shortly after. What the hell was I doing sharing gigs with a clodhopping troupe?)

(The photo is apparently one of a utility installation in Vietnam.)

3. Watch your stuff.

I learned this one early. I arrived early for an Honors Band concert at a strange school in East Orange, NJ when I was about nine years old. I was playing second chair second clarinet. I was instructed to leave my instrument in the cafeteria under the auditorium and wait with my parents upstairs until our teacher arrived. When I went back downstairs to meet all my friends who were getting ready to start, I returned to where I’d left my instrument to find only the luggage tag bearing my name. A hard lesson on a very early gig. My teacher lent me a Resonite clarinet so I could do the concert, but I was pretty shook up. In addition, I’d only ever played my wood clarinet, which my grandfather and uncle had played. Wood vs. Resonite? I also learned an important lesson about tone that day.

I’ve not had anything stolen on a gig since I was nine. When I load into a gig, everything is always in my sight. I lock my car before every trip and always have someone watching my gear inside the venue. Anyone who thinks my routine is excessive has either never seen the blackness of the world envelope him or has unlimited funds. Insurance is no substitute for vigilance. A rule to gig by.