Saturday night I headed into Gatineau to Salle Odysee to see Les Cowboys Fringants. I haven’t seen them since their release of Les Antipodes which I love and I also missed them last summer when they had to cancel a few tour dates.
The singer Karl Tremblay started treatments for cancer last year and they had to adjust their touring schedule around that. Completely understandable but I fell victim to one of the cancelled tour dates down on the Gaspe coast last year. I was disappointed considering I just missed my chance to see them in Aylmer the week before but decided not to go since I knew I would see them later that summer. Remember folks, always go to concerts when you can because you never know if it will be your last!
Anyhow, I kept my eye open for tickets for their sold out show and the day before I spotted a handful of tickets available and I nabbed a seat in the front row of the balcony. What a great spot to watch a show as long as you don’t want to stand up. I stood up once or twice and felt a little vertigo being so close to the edge!
Found this photo on Facebook
Les Cowboys Fringants are a fabulous live act. The moment they entered the stage 90% of the room erupted from their seats and clapped along to every song the entire night.
I too, was one of those people either clapping my hands or hitting my knee. Let me tell you, I was pretty impressed by the power of music making my heart beat fast!
Actually, let’s digress for a minute. Take a look at this heart rate graph for a moment.
Earlier in the day I went snowshoeing in the woods with the kids. A minor blip in terms of elevating my heart rate.
But sitting down for a Cowboys Fringants concert just clapping along and hitting my knee? Look at the workout! 20 minutes of cardio?! I don’t know how to interpret these results. I’m either in really great shape and I’ve realized that sitting down and clapping along to music is a valid form of exercise, or I’m in terrible shape and just clapping is a chore for my heart! But at the same time I have a resting heart rate of 57 bpm which seems pretty great. I told Vero I’m going to start to just watch concert videos at home and clap along as my exercise routine!
Anyhow, back to the show, the crowd was on fire. The band was on fire. The entire night was on fire. The band brought in a few extra touring members (trumpet, piano, electric guitar) which was a welcome addition. I never realized how much trumpet this band has in their songs until I saw this musician on the trumpet most of the night!
Marie-Annick Lepine is the star of the show musically. She has a table set up next to her with her accordion, violin and mandolin. Plus there’s a keyboard set up right next to the table. She will be starting a song on accordion and switch to the violin mid song. It’s a juggling act and pretty amazing to watch.
Jerome Dupras is always fun on the bass but from my vantage point I realized that he’s a great hype man! He’s getting the crowd to clap along, he’s walking into the crowd with his microphone and having people sing along. He’s throwing kazoos into the crowd (well, every member was doing that at one point. The guy next to me caught one all the way up in the balcony!). Jerome is fabulous to get the crowd going.
Jean-Francois Pauze, from what I know is the prominent songwriter of the band and he’s typically strumming the acoustic guitar but you see him pick up the electric or bass guitar when it’s needed.
Then there is Karl who is always a charismatic presence on stage. Between Jean-Francois and him, there is usually some good banter. Actually, the entire band always has some good banter going on and it’s really a relaxed affair when someone can mention Roch Voisine and then someone starts strumming a few chords to Helene and the whole band picks up on it and plays the song.
They are great musicians and a great time to watch. I thoroughly enjoyed my night out seeing them and hope to see them soon on their tour. Being from Repentigny, they come here quite often but their tickets sell out fast. Go see them!
Recording notes for reference in the future
So this time around, I found out that they offered FM transmitters and headphones as a listening experience. INTERESTING! Could I potentially record a soundboard signal from this transmitter and add it to an audience recording from my iphone to create a matrix recording?
Picking up the FM transmitter was easy. I just had to leave my health card at the ticket booth and walked away with this small device.
I had two phones on me to record the show. One would sit in my shirt pocket which I’ve done a dozen times in the past year and it’s worked out well.
The second phone plugged directly into the FM transmitter using a stereo cable and a TRS to TRSS adapter so they phone would recognize the cable as an input (mic) and not an output (headphones).
I only had two real issues during the recording process. 1) Sitting in tight seats surrounded by folks doesn’t make for an easy recording process when I want to adjust my recording levels. 2) I didn’t really get a chance to actually listen to the FM feed when I was recording. I could only see that when the show started the volume was REALLY low on my recording app. It was barely registering. So I cranked the level on the transmitter to the max (5) and it was still low so I cranked the input gain on my phone to the max as well. It was still recording very low (-30db) which is a whisper. No matter, I would have to adjust it in Logic.
In the end the audience recording came out great even with the cheers and the clapping but the FM recording was a bust. So many things went wrong with it. It was very distorted. Maybe that was because I had the transmitter set to max? But if I brought it down, I would have had a very weak signal. Something to try out in the future. Maybe it’s better to have a very weak signal than distortion.
But that wasn’t the only thing wrong with it. It seemed to drop out of signal completely in various spots. It also had ridiculous amounts of static. Maybe that was because it was stuffed in my jacket pocket under my seat and couldn’t get a good signal?
There was also a constant ticking noise. I’m not even sure how to describe what it could be. But it was a constant drum machine keeping a beat over the entire recording.
It was a good test but I’m glad I had a backup phone to record normally or else I wouldn’t have had anything. Maybe it’s worth trying again in the future in a different situation. It would have been great to get a clear soundboard signal as a recording. The holy grail for tapers!
