Rehearsal Day Two

We jumped right into second half of the show Tuesday. It will once again begin with For All Seasons in which Samvel, Victor and I have solos. I got that same sweaty palmed feeling I had last year when the show was about to begin and I'll have to admit my solo didn't fall into place until the third time through the song.

I am very excited that the multiple pickup/microphone system that I designed has gotten the thumbs up. My hammer dulcimer will sound better than ever this year and I won't have to play as hard in the upper range of the instrument. It also means it will stay better in tune, suffer fewer broken strings, and be physically easier on me. The preamp mixer gives me an extra output that I now keep hooked up to my Peterson strobe tuner so I can make quick tuning adjusments if necessary. This may not be exciting news to any of you but it is a big relief for me.

We worked every song yesterday multiple times and by the end of the day it felt like we were really gelling. Yanni's supply of patience generally gets a bit dry as the hours of rehearsal tick by, but for some reason yesterday he seemed to mellow later in the day, probably as a reaction to quality of the musianship he was hearing. I'm once again in awe of the incredible musicians that surround me and honored to have this gig.

We'll run the entire show today and focus on any areas that need tweeking.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I'm going to keep an accounting of a few seemingly meaningless details while on this leg of the tour. One such detail is the price of the bottled water that awaits us in our rooms. This hotel is on the low end of the bottled water scale, at $3.00 for a 1 liter bottle. I'm looking for suggestions for other items to track. Things I want to remember are which hotels had a guest laundry, how much it costs to get a pair of underwear washed by the hotel laundry, how much the breakfast bar costs, is there internet access and if so is it free. If anyone has suggestions for other items that would be interesting see tracked, not that any of this will be, put a note up on my guest book. For obvious reasons of privacy I will not reveal the names of the hotels in which we stay until after we've already headed to the next city.

I noticed that my guestbook got hit by a couple of spammers yesterday. Unbelievable, why don't they just go away! About the only thing you and I can do is never, never, never click on one of their links. I'll do my best to take obvious commercial garbage out of the guestbook as quickly as possible but sometimes I don't get to see it for many hours. I apologize in advance if any innapropriate garbage ends up getting posted. ¶ 12:38 PM