Dustin Tebbutt Tour Diary: Part Two

After the Adelaide shows, I had a bunch of official media duties lined up in Sydney before heading back to my other home here in Australia - Melbourne! I still love getting off the plane here; the city always provides a sense of discovery and adventure that has become slightly addictive. We were straight to sound-check from the airport, and quickly got the setup going. It's a bit of a process, as we are travelling with all our own gear, including a digital console for onstage sound, our own mics and a custom built splitter and patch bay system to isolate our in ear monitor system, but it all comes together pretty quickly!

We were also met at the venue by the new backdrop that will be featuring at the upcoming shows, it's truly an epic, created by Jefferton James who also did the covers for the recent EPs. It's around 5m x 5m, fireproof and has been dubbed Frankenmountains. Pretty cool don't you think! Here's the original artwork

The shows down here so far have been amazing; there was such great energy in the room the last few nights, and the crowds have been close to intimidatingly attentive. After ironing out a few of the minor bugs last week, I was able to turn on the auto-pilot musically, and actually drift for a while on stage and just take in and enjoy the gigs.

One thing they don't tell you about touring, is it's actually really hard work and can be pretty tiring. All the miles on the road or air, lugging the gear around etc: in saying that, I'm not saying it's not worth every minute of it, but the small amount I've done so far has made me realise we've been spoiled this time around! Playing a few shows back to back has made this whole trip easier, as were not packing down after every show, and then hitting the road first thing … so we've had a fair bit of time to chill out, and Melbourne is a wicked place to do that.  I found a great book store up on Smith St, that was hiding some treasures. There was an older guy in the store that I reckon came straight out of a Roald Dahl book or something, he just had that twinkle in his eye, we got chatting a bit, and he pointed me in the direction of the polar section … (somehow the hipster in me that chose these glasses a few years back, just couldn't stay away from those damn orange covered penguin books!), anyway, good reads for the trip home. Earlier the same morning, the lads and I got some 'serious' work done at a café … Carlos was working so hard he forgot to open his laptop! And we even found time for a picnic … yes, a real picnic.

We've got a lot of guitars, and a lot of guitar changes throughout the set, as I tend to write songs in a bunch of different tunings. It keeps things feeling fresh, and there are a bunch of amazing chords you can only play once you reconfigure the strings a bit. The other plus is that if you go far enough, you get to a point where the guitar becomes unfamiliar again, as you've removed the reference points of patterns, scales and chord shapes that can quickly become part of your muscle memory, and at that point it's like picking up a new instrument! When it came to the live show, it took a while to figure out how Jake and I were going to get though all the changes while each having our own setups, while not getting tangled up in 1000 cables, so we came up with this little solution that's basically our switching matrix. It makes sure no matter who is playing which guitar, their current send is going to the right channel on the mixing desk. It took a while to get it as compact as this, but it's been working really well, and is certainly a lot easier than Mach 1, that was missing the ever important label tape!

That's enough from me for this week. Just one show left here in Melbourne tonight, then off to Sydney and Brisbane! I've just found this morning, the last of the tickets for the Brisbane show have now been purchased, making this a completely sold out tour! Pretty incredible. Stay tuned for more news next week!