Re: Pat Metheney-Orchestrion-tour

[Charles Zwicky <cazwicky@earthlink.net>]

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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