Dweezil Zappa World

Hello Everyone,

Our fall ZPZ UK tour is swiftly approaching and along with preparing the music for the tour I have also completed a special project called Dweezil Zappa - Live "In The Moment."

It's a double CD compendium of excerpted guitar solos culled from the last 3 years on tour. I've selected performances that symbolize the musical growth I've made as a guitarist. I also wanted to emphasize the variety of tones and textures I've been working with. Not only have I been able to recreate some of my favorite FZ tones but I've stumbled onto some new guitar tones of my own. The celloesque tone bows it's way on to the scene along with some expressive delay soundscapes and extracurricular dynaflanger madness.

The mixes are from Front Of House References (FOH). For those who are not familiar, FOH mixes also known as board tapes are generally not pleasant to listen to because they are not created for the purpose of delivering a fully formed mix to a home listener. They are generated from the source that is serving the venue audience. In other words, the engineer is balancing the mix for the live audience based on all of the factors of the environment that particular night. If the room is very bass heavy, many of those frequencies will be cut in the mix, possibly making it sound anemic on the reference recording but right for the mix in the venue. If intstruments are too loud from the stage they will likely be quiet in the FOH mix. The reason for this is that instruments need to be fed from the mix console to the PA. If there are loud instruments on stage that are heard well by the audience and engineer purely from the stage volume they will not be included as much in the PA speaker system in the venue. This is a very common variable that is dealt with throughout all of the shows on tour. Each night is different and it's difficult to get true consistency.

FOH mixes can also have other issues. Things like missing instruments where a line to the console has been lost because of a bad cable or some interconnection problem that arises in a live situation. Why does the mix have no kick drum all night? Lost the line and couldn't get it resolved during the festival show because the local crew speaks Italian... With these kinds of considerations one can imagine why FOH mixes are simply used as reference.

But there are other times when the balance is pretty good. Sometimes great! Having listened to all of our FOH mixes I've found some great examples where they are well balanced and made a record out of them. There's even a track where the kick drum is quite deficient and the local crew did speak Italian, nevertheless the guitar solo was inspired and this is the only authorized recording of it. When things cannot be multitracked FOH refs become master recordings and sometimes capture amazing performances. Because of that very reason I chose to examine the FOH recordings that fit that description and make this record.

Dweezil Zappa - LIve "In The Moment" will be produced in limited numbers and will be available very soon! Cal Schenkel is working on the artwork and as soon as that is ready we will be planning to manufacture the discs and plan a release date.

Will it be ready for the UK tour? All crossable parts are crossed...

Will it be available via download? Yes that will be part of the plan as well.

Keep the FOH concept in mind because there is something else exciting headed your way very soon as well. Imagine sifting through a library of single ZPZ tracks and being able to create your own CD compilation from the library.

I'm looking forward to seeing you all out on the road!

DZ