Tonight will see the first performance of Seussical the Musical at the Elgiva Theatre in Chesham, Bucks. I’m really excited about it because the music in it pretty varied in style, but I’m also covering two guitar parts. It’s really challenging, but great fun.
The show has rock, funk, latin, and blues genres in it, and a handful of lovely ballads too. I have to play electric and acoustic guitar as well as banjo which is a real treat!
There’s a great deal of uptempo stuff in the music – your counting has to be spot on especially because the time signatures change around quite a lot.
Managing both guitar parts isn’t too difficult either – I’ve marked both pads up where I need to swap from one to the other, and any instrument changes as required. I do find myself playing parts from both pads in a single tune, and some changeovers are as short as a couple of bars, but it’s great fun and I wouldn’t want to do it differently.
Gear-wise I’m using my trusty Ibanez RG3120 for the electric stuff. It’s a really versatile humbucker-driven guitar, and I can get some really sweet out of phase single coil tones out of it too. This is plugged into my pedal board, and out into my Blues Junior which does a great job in these settings. My acoustic is the Martin OMC16Aura which sounds lush through my AER Compact 60 acoustic amp – the mic algorithms sound fantastic. I’m also putting my banjo through the AER since I fitted a K&K Banjo Twin transducer pickup to the head. This sounds really good – beyond all my expectations. The banjo is also holding up well in the pit – it’s a Deering Goodtime Special and I’ve tuned it to G D G B E which means my chord shapes on the top four strings are the same as the guitar stuff. I feel a bit ashamed doing it as I’d love to same I can play it as it’s meant to be played, but alas! needs must. It’s doing the job and sounding great.
I’ll keep you posted how it goes!
