Celebrate Christmas VIII

For the past eight years, I have produced a Christmas concert. And, on Friday, December 9th, we held our Celebrate Christmas VIII event. A sold out show at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts in Kingston, Ontario.

My life pretty much shuts down for the three or four weeks leading up to this event. So much work to produce. The blogs that I write take a back seat over this period of time.

My apologies for the quiet time. Back to regular blogging again.

Is all the work worth it?

You bet.

Sharing the joy and hope of Christmas is an honour. I’m not sure how many more concerts I will be doing as I get closer to retirement. I love to play and I hope that I will be able to continue playing well into the future.

Although not RV related, here are a few shots from the event. It gives you a bit of a sense as to my background leading up to that stage of life called retirement.

We used a Midas M32 board. Literally brand new and just out of the box. We have been using these sound consoles over the past several years. We loaded up our show file from last year and we were almost immediately ready for soundcheck. Digital boards are so much faster. This one sounds great.

The next three shots are all about my guitar station. I brought out four guitars for the evening: A custom shop Gretsch Duo Jet, a 1976 Gibson Les Paul Standard, a custom shop Fender Stratocaster and an Ibanez jazz box. Most of the evening I played through my Mesa Boogie stack. For the jazz set I played through my Swart rig.

In the first photo you can see most of my main pedalboard.

A bit of a glamour shot of the guitars. I played the first set with the Les Paul, the second, fourth and fifth set with the Gretsch, the third set with the Ibanez and the other sets with the Strat.

My view of the hall. Although, with all of the lighting, you don’t really see that much of the audience.

A view of the hall from the drummer’s chair. The Isabel is a beautiful property and a wonderful place to host the Celebrate Christmas concert. Their crew is top notch.

It took a full day for me to recover from the event. We started at 7 in the morning and we did not finish until sometime after midnight. With only a few hours to load-in and set up the show, our team of about 15 people had a full day.

A great audience and an amazing evening.

We had a videographer for the event and we recorded it. I will be doing the production work on the videos over the next few weeks and I will post a few. I have a rough of the encore segment that we tried this year. It seemed to work out really well.