Art Beresheim

Possibly favorite gig ever with the Lt Dan Band was at Star Wars land in front of the Millennium Falcon. As a huge Star Wars fan I was grinning ear to ear the entire time. Even though I was happy to be there, it was a very challenging gig. We loaded in the show 1 hour after the park closed and then recorded overnight til about 5am when we quickly struck all evidence we had been there before the park opened. So overall we had 2 days, about 6 hrs per day to load in, record a 1 hour concert, and strike.

Overall the event went relatively well. We stayed pretty on track, even though load in took way longer than it should have on day one. Part of the problem was we were not allowed to build anything back of house while the park was open. So the light truss towers and stages all had to wait to be built. After day one tho, we had the stage and everything on wheels and we just wheeled it out to back of house. That made day 2 setup go a lot faster.

My job on the gig was monitor engineer, a gig I have done many times. But I also had to be the backline tech, playback op, and wireless technician. The wireless was supposed to be given to us from Disney, but upon boot up and inputting their list to my devices, they simply were unusable. Not a big deal, I know how to use Wireless Workbench, but I had to get special permission from one of their Disney Tech’s. They had to go and cross check my new frequencies with the 3 nearby control hubs to make sure one of our mics didn’t happen to connect to a random announcement mic system somewhere in the park. An annoyingly long process, but as a former Disney employee when I was at ESPN, they got it done and had that Disney can do attitude the whole time. The playback op of this particular gig was just me operating a click track machine, something the band normally doesn’t use on gigs.

Day 2 was also when everyone got crabby from the weird working hours. Monitor mixes that were fine the night before suddenly were not perfect for people the next evening, despite all the gear being the same, and the exact same file being used. Everyone agreed it was the lack of sleep that made everyone on edge, but everyone agreeing that was the issue, didn’t mean I didn’t have a problem to solve. Even after that minor setback, we got all of the shots done and finished the recordings needed for the record. It was probably a one of a kind experience I was lucky to have.