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Re: Pat Metheney-Orchestrion-tour



Title: Re: Pat Metheney-Orchestrion-tour
It's quite a contraption.   I spoke with Pat at his wife's art gallery near my home here in NYC.  Pat said that the piano has 500ms of latency...  The Orchestrion is quite a tough "axe" to master..!!

Last saturday I´ve been at a show of Pat Metheney´s Orchestrion. (Köln,Germany - Philharmonie)
Very funny. He had a lot of instruments (drums, percussion, piano, vibraphone,bass) in
a big wall of shelves behind him. It looked like a "toys r us" store. Pat "Alice" in wonderland.
The instruments were hit/played by magic ghosts (computers). And it all was a big
orchestral sound of a ghost band. Some good moments, some no good ones.
After playing 2  longer solo-acoustic guitar pieces (good), he performed his new album
with the ghost-band (not good mainly, few feeling).
The more interesting part for me was the encores, where he used a lot of looping
and also some string-sounds with the guitar and midi-playing with the Orchestrion instruments.
His looping device was quite a big one with pedals looking like organ-bass-pedals. Maybe a
special custom looper made for Metheney!? Don´t know.
Metheney made some vague explanations of the technical side of his Orchestrion,(the roots of
this are somewhere in the beginning of the last century in Germany),
which was sympathetic and gave the whole thing "a not too serious character".
Like I said : A little boy in toyland.
So this was helpful and entertaining. Otherwise it would have been a bit boring and
too statically night. But all in all I liked it and could enjoy at least half of the show.
Christo
www.christojota.de
 


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