So it's short notice...it's our first show evah!!!! And as such, will probably be an amusing technological catastrophe. Still, all Alembicians are welcome.  
 
8901 Sunset Blvd.  
 
April 7
 
11 PM
 
www.myspace.com/fromthelaboratory
 
www.hb3.com

I was thinking that on your mp3's, you played all the parts.

That's true. However, I've put together a fine band, including a very nice Austrian cross-dresser on drums.  
 
Learning the logistics of how we were going to play the recordings was an ordeal in itself.

The guitarist works for Gentle Giant studios, which does figurines for the Star Wars films, etc. He's working on a video for the song Rom, Spaceknight -- here's a still of me on the edge of the robot....
 

 
(Message edited by hb3 on April 06, 2008)

So what is the instrumentation?  Some of those songs have lots of parts.

It's a four-piece -- me singing and playing piccolo and regular bass, as well as playing trumpet on some stuff
 
a drummer playing an electronic kit with a different drum sound for most of the tracks, so we can replicate the various drum sounds on the recordings -- some acoustic sounding, some electronic sounding, some a combination in between. He's very good at sounding like a drum machine when he needs to.  
 
a guitarist translating some of my piccolo bass rhythm parts -- we gave up on him playing the parts on baritone guitar, as this created a wall of mud combined with the piccolo bass. The higher register of the guitar helps even out the sound.  
 
a keyboardist playing bass lines, triggering arpeggios, sound effects, and various other stuff as necessary, including orchestral parts....I have as a goal doing full orchestral pieces eventually -- we've experimented with this in rehearsal and it might, I say might, work live. I have a good software orchestra. For example, I learned a John Barry piece, 007, and translated the orchestration into midi, and it sounded decent. I uploaded that file into the snocap music store on the myspace page -- by double clicking it you can hear 30 seconds of it.  
 
we also cheat and use a sequence on some stuff -- for instance, when there's two simultaneous drum parts, and it just wouldn't sound right otherwise. However, the ambition for the orchestral material is not to use a sequence at all, but do it entirely and completely live.  
 
Oy!