is this thing on?
Last night Jeremy and I drove down to the CTV studio to set up our gear so we'd be all ready for the morning. Upon arrival Jeremy realized he had, for probably the first time in his life, forgotten a vital cable for his keyboard. But we had Bud, a great sound man on our side, so that was remedied with relative ease. Moments after the keyboard was plugged in Bud told us to play the song and he'd go up to the booth to have a listen.
Wait, I thought. This type of keyboard has no speakers and we didn't bring an amplifier. How the hell do we sound check when there's no sound?
So, Jeremy just banged away silently and I sang what I imagined might be the right note. I did my best to keep in time by counting in my head, vaguely led by the rhythm of the thumping keys. Who knows what an awful mess we made of the song.
We learned a new word too: Foldback. That's what the tv peeps call the monitors. (And "monitors" is fancy musician-talk for "speakers that allow us to hear what we're doing.") In our case, the foldback amplifier was blown.
Thus, we had a silent sound check.
To solve all of this silliness, we'll have a small amplifier with us for the performance this morning. I'll sing in the same key as Jeremy is playing and we'll keep the tempo of the song together.
It'll be magic.
Learning new things every day, I am.