This past Saturday Gator O’Malley’s was once again host to the 16th annual AquarianFest.  This long running tradition is largely spearheaded here in Omaha by AquarianFest Formenter Ron Green who developed the event out of an acoustic jam.  Several individuals, duos and bands play popular tunes mostly from the 60s to the 80s that you would have heard at concerts, love fests and such, and spinning your 45s or 33s (yeh, you know – vinyl).  Eric Johnson (who keeps the website and promotion materials updated) and his wife Denise come back each year from the Chicago area to reunite the Fishippies for their performance in the lineup which included Tom & Toni Allen, Mike Brock, The Bishops, Terry Little, 37 Years with Kyle Knapp, and Blues Agent.  John Green (The Bishops) provided most of the sound gear and Tesco Productions added a few other items needed while I did my best to mix an enjoyable house show.  So from the days of the hippies to 2013 the quest for love and peace continues.  Can a flower in our hair get us there?

This Side of Sunday recorded their first CD at Tesco Productions in late 2010 debuting as Crazy World.  The group has seen a lot of mileage, both from the CD and on the road since that time, and it’s time to start working on some new material so a single is being recorded for now.  Scheduling the band members and working around the holidays and flu has made the process kind of slow.  The group consists of three new members and so their sound has changed some but the core essence is still there.  Kristin Riche is laying in a nice vocal line for the song, while her husband Chad is playing out the low end on electric bass.  Keith Wilson – a long time friend of Tesco Productions and musician extraordinaire – has joined in on dobro and acoustic.  We’re putting the newly acquired mics and pre-amps to work and definitely appreciating the enhanced sounds.  There’s some pics up in our photo gallery of their session.

For the past several months you may have read in these postings that Tesco Productions was acquiring a number of upgrade units – particularly outboard microphone preamps. Well the install is nearing completion and was quite a major overhaul. My cohort Allyn once again saved the day (several actually) while burning some of his hard-earned vacation time by showing up and soldering up a storm. The studio was offline for two weeks as we removed old cabling no longer in use, installed about 800 feet of new wire, added a microphone patch bay, replaced three existing patch bays with new ones, and provided 16 additional microphone/line inputs into the control room. It took two days just to make the microphone patch bay connections. Allyn also brought over his construction tools and we made a new double-wide equipment rack which will eventually be highlighted with some remote-controlled LED lighting my friend Danny found at Lowe’s. There’s still some labeling to do but a good part of that is completed now and is even color-coded so an “old” guy like me can follow the new layout more quickly. A portable rack will be put in place eventually to house some of the “misplaced” equipment which will have a new home under the mixing console.
I’m excited to have this long-awaited project well on its way and look forward to us all appreciating the improved sound pallets now available.