Mexican Theme ATOS Meeting

And . . . It was a screaming success!

This past Saturday, 12 October 2013, Millie and I hosted our first meeting for the North Florida Chapter of the American Theater Organ Society.  We had 18 folks attending.  I played a short 30 minute set and then had Open Console and LOTS of great Mexican food prepared by Millie.  Being Puerto Rican, and growing up in California, she can do some extreme Mexican style food.  A Taco bar and Spanish rice with pan fried flour and corn tortillas for the Tacos!  Yum!

About half of my set was Spanish/Mexican styled tunes and the others were pop from the 50's and 60's.  Everyone had fun and got along just fine.  We had folks drive as much as two hours to get here from the South and an hour and a half from the North.  Pretty good for us being in a two traffic light town.

The MDS Theater 2D organ performed well.  Just prior to the event I added one stereo power amp, a Pyle 2x80 watt unit I purchased from Amazon to power the Expander MIDI unit separately from the organ amp and speakers.  The Pyle was connected to two Crate K80's; one hidden in a corner and the other hidden behind an end table.  The little Kawai sound module (under the left cheek block) was then removed from the internal amp/speakers and connected to a 35 watt Radio Shack PA amp I had lying around that is about 40 years old and connected to a small 8" speaker cab that is also old and had lying around and placed it behind the music desk to handle the perc and other voices used from the Kawai unit.  The 8" cab was purposely selected because of its' small size and the Kawai voices being used don't produce much bass content anyway.

The Organ voices are coming directly out of the INternal speakers.  So . . . I have effectively six separate channels, amps, speakers.  The sound is great in this small space.  All that needs to be done is get a couple of small reverb units for the MIDI boxes as they cannot access the ADR4 in the organ console any more.

My personal thanks to Gene Stroble for the great deal on a great sounding console.

I have two more MIDI modules that I would like to add to the ensemble as time permits.  An Ensoniq MR Rack and an old Peavey Spectrum Organ (Mainly Hammond patches).

Now to evaluate the responses to the gig here and see if I can be put in the rotation for regular meetings in this area now.