I’ve just returned from a 2 week long tour in South America doing FOH sound for Mike Patton’s Mondo Cane project. It was a great experience made even better by the amazing musicians and amazing people that made up the band and the crew. The musicians were just incredible, as you’d expect, half of them from Italy and the other half from the US. Enrico Gabrielli on wind instruments (sax, flute, clarinet, harmonica, whistle, recorder and even glockenspiel), Alessandro “Asso” Stefana on electric, acoustic and nylon guitars, Trevor Dunn on electric and upright bass, Scott Amendola on drums, Willy Wynant on percussions (congas, bongos, woodblocks, timbales, timpano, orchestral bass drum, glockenspiel and toys), Matt Rhode on samplers, Vincenzo Vasi on theremin, samplers and vocals, Enrico “Senza” Zavalloni, Valeria Vasta, Roberta Lizzo and Claudia Puglisi on background vocals and Cheche Alara conducting the 12 string orchestra that we hired locally in the different countries we played in.
We also had an amazing but small crew made up of Niccolo’ “number one” Antonietti on monitors, Jim Stewart stage manager and Tim Mooooooooooooooossss tour managing us.
Patton was the greatest!!! I have so much respect and admiration for him. He simply sings perfectly in tune for hours at a time and he always gives 100%, even during the long rehearsals we did before every show. Plus his interpretations of these great italian classics from the ’50es and ’60es are just incredible. Authentic, tasteful and sophisticated! What a unique show!
Although I was familiar with the record, I had never seen this show before and so mixing it for the first time was definitely a handful but very exciting. There is nothing better than mixing a show you like! I had to have two mixing boards to fit all the channels because with 24 musicians on stage there weren’t enough channels on a regular mixing board (the total track count was around 72). This got even more complicated in Brazil where we played with the Heliopolis favela orchestra, which was made up of 25 people instead of 12 (track count 85).
This was an exceptional show and I wish everyone could have seen it so I am very happy to be able to share this video with you because it was professionally shot by the Chilean TV station Via X. Sadly they just took a board feed from me so the audio never got re-mixed properly for this video and is simply the same audio everyone in the theater heard from the PA.
Mondo Cane will be in Australia in January and hopefully many other countries in the future so people will get to see this amazing show!
Mike Patton rules.
Here’s the full show:
