Pit Notes: TUCK EVERLASTING

I think this is my 58th musical, if I'm counting right (including repeats). Tuck Everlasting is based on a book that I never knew about or read, and there have been a couple of film adaptations. It is a nice little story, but I'm here to talk about the guitar book, and a bit about the overall musical aspects.

John Clancy did a wonderful job at orchestrating Chris Miller's music. The production I'm in doesn't have all the parts hired, unfortunately, so the (actual, grand) piano is covering some of them. It's nicely balanced, still, with plenty going on without ever feeling thick or heavy-handed. There are beautiful lyrical lines for the woodwinds, and jaunty effects for trumpet and percussion.

The guitar book calls for electric, steel- and nylon-string acoustic, mandolin, and banjo. Most of the parts are pleasingly idiomatic to the instrument; some shows do not offer this at all.

Performance notes

This music is not difficult, and there are many times when I can just park my left hand in one position and play a whole section. The toughest parts for me are the numbers with banjo. In fact, since I had less than ideal time to work on this show, and my banjo's A string popped right before rehearsal one night, I made the decision to "cheat" and change to "Chicago" tuning (DGBE) instead of standard CGDA. I am not really cheating; I am learning a new (to me) banjo tuning.

Much of the book is written out in standard notation. There is some rhythmic notation with chord symbols; and no slash notation. So it's pretty prescribed, but one can still inject plenty of feel (like in the straight quarter notes in "Everything's Golden (part 2)" or the bouncy swing of "Hugo's First Case"). And it isn't piano music shoved into a guitar book, which is a relief.

A curious thing about this score is that some of the mandolin tunes call for the player to tune the mandolin down a half-step (probably because the songs were transposed down at some point, and the mandolin part would have gone from idiomatic to ridiculous). I don't know about you, but I'm not going to be tuning (and re-tuning and re-tuning) a mandolin's eight strings down a half-step in the middle of playing the show. So, I put a capo on for the first two or so numbers that are not tuned down, then take it off for the rest of the show.

There are some cool rhythms and rhythmic interplay in this music. One of the major themes is in compound time (6/8 or 12/8, with some odd 9/8 bars thrown in), but features a quasi-ostinato of dotted eighth-notes, which evenly divides a 6/8 bar into four. So there is a ton of three-against-two (hemiola) in this show. Another trick is taking one of those pairs of dotted eighths, and subdividing the second one into an eighth plus sixteenth (or vice versa), thus nesting compound within duple within compound. It almost feels fractal, and the sixteenth-note is the common denominator that gets recombined into all the rhythm patterns. It all calls for very precise playing (and conducting!).

A couple of the instrument changes are really quick. There's only one in the book I probably cannot do: the end of "Seventeen" on nylon into the Act I finale on electric. I suspect the original player may have done the whole show on a Variax, maybe with an actual mandolin. I could be wrong. And in this production, they added a scene change playoff from a song earlier in the show where I'm playing guitar, and that directly segues into a song where I start in the first measure on banjo. So I'm laying out of the playoff.

Gear

Instruments: For electric and steel-string acoustic, I'm using a Godin xtSA. The piezo pickup system supplies the base for the acoustic sound. I'm playing my Ibanez acoustic-electric nylon string; my Washburn mandolin with a LR Baggs Radius pickup mounted on it; and my Deering Goodtime tenor banjo.

Effects and amplification: All instruments except banjo are plugged into my Neural DSP Quad Cortex (QC), and that then goes into a QSC K10.2 speaker. I'm not sending anything direct to FOH in this venue. The sound engineer has hung a couple of condenser mics to pick up the whole orchestra (we are behind the cyc), and I'm just blending my sound with everyone. My pedalboard has the QC and a Boss EV-30 expression pedal that I'm using as a volume pedal/mute.

For the electric guitar, I made a preset that uses two virtual amps: a "neural capture" of a Matchless Chieftan, and a modeled Deluxe Reverb, each with a 2x12 cab with standard SM57 and ribbon mic pairs. (I can get into the differences between "captures" and "models" in another post or video.) It's nice to be able to play through two amps, and haul exactly zero in and out of the venue. Various songs call for chorus, slapback delay, flanger, and tremolo. I'm pretty generic in my selection of these. I mostly keep the "wet" effects only on the Matchless and leave the Fender dry. One exception is a dual delay for the "U2" sound that's asked for, which I have placed after both amps/cabs in the signal chain. (I know: not exactly how the Edge does it.) And I usually put tremolo at the very end of any chain, so it will "slice" everything evenly and stand out better.

The piezo sound from the Godin goes through an impulse response (IR) file based on a Martin D45. The mandolin pickup needs a lot of gain, so I made my own "neural capture" of my Radial PZ-Pre preamp and put that ahead of the IR (Gibson F-9). And finally, the nylon string signal is passed through a Córdoba Hauser-based IR.

Sheet music and switching: I upgraded to a new iPad Pro 12.9 inch, running Forscore. I have an older AirTurn Bluetooth pedal for page turns. (I haven't gotten into the facial-gesture page-turning feature in Forscore.) But the biggest game-changer is Bluetooth MIDI. I bought this little dongle called a CME WIDI Master, which plugs into the QC's midi ports; then, using a WIDI app and Forscore, I pair the iPad to the WIDI Master, add "buttons" in Forscore, program in the MIDI patch change, scene change, and other commands, and—voilà!—I can simply tap the iPad screen and the QC magically switches to the sound I need next. No tap-dancing! Forscore doesn't support MIDI CC commands directly, but you can use Hex codes. Programming those in feels like some really old computer stuff. One example: B6 00 00 B6 2B 03. (Translation: Channel# [clear] [clear] Channel# CC# Value.) It's arcane and feels ancient and mystical. But the result is very modern.

Roundup

Overall, this is a really fun show to play, and to listen to whilst playing. I can't see it, but I'm sure it's fun to watch, too. It's similar in ways to Big Fish.