Liberty Theater, Astoria
We made another trip out to Astoria to play a concert at the newly renovated Liberty Theater. The band converged at Luke’s Mom’s house on Wednesday afternoon for several hours of photo shoots followed by some rehearsing and some dinner. The next day held more of the same. However, the real accomplishment of our time in Astoria, prior to our actual show, was finally confronting the looming disaster regarding Ian’s Deagan Electravibes. These vibes had never quite worked right since we got them before the Spring Decemberists tour, and at the Outside Lands Festival sound check, the electronics completely stopped working and we had to mic the bars themselves. We could not find any technicians willing to work on such an exotic instrument and with another tour looming, we were dreading the idea of trying to fit Ian’s non-electro vibes into the van with all of our other gear. The answer came when we needed it most: first we decided that with nothing to loose, we would take the instrument apart and try to fix it ourselves. We were able to get good results just by tinkering a bit (the same intermittent functionality as before the failure), but the real solution came with the bold idea to remove all of the built in electronics (this included a preamp, a reverb tank, a vibrato circuit, tone controls, a volume pot, and a power supply). All the bars themselves have electromagnetic pickups attached and these are all wired in series, so we just attached the output from the bars directly to an amplifier and found that the signal was perfectly clean and consistent. By bypassing the electronics module, we greatly simplified the instrument, thereby reducing the future likelihood of malfunction, as well as eliminating all grounding problems. The Electravibes stood up well at the show on Friday night and sounded the best they ever have. This was a huge victory of ingenuity for those of us in the band that care about such things. The Liberty Theater show went well too.
