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Under Eden opened the second day of the two-day Heathen Crusade festival in St. Paul. I also provided a couple of Jacksons for two of the Friday bands, and assisted my friend who provided the backline, "teching" as much as I could. Although there weren't any USA Jacksons, the place was thick with imports. Besides the Dinky XL and DK2M that I provided (Ancient Rites' lead guitarist in particular is a Charvel player, but didn't bring his on the plane) I saw a DR7, DXMG and DKMG. I used a JDX-94 with a Dinky RVS as backup, and my brother played a Charvel 550XL. A Peavey 6505+ and JSX were the provided amps, and most of the bands took advantage of that. The only especially unique piece of gear that I saw was an Axe-FX preamp/processor that ran into the power section of the 6505. But considering that most of the bands played pretty straightforward styles with little use of effects, I wasn't expecting anything out of this world in terms of gear. The bands themselves were pretty impressive though, especially Oakhelm and Moonsorrow.
The only real issues concerned Friday's headliners, Ancient Rites. With only a couple days before the festival, they informed the promoter of some very specific gear needs . . . which nobody could find in time. I brought in a Boss ME-50 (they had requested a Vetta II, and when that was a "no" they asked for an ME-30) but they couldn't get the sound they wanted out of that. Somehow, the DD-3 I keep in my bag of spare pedals ended up solving that issue. Of greater potential drama was the fact that they had to run prerecorded drum tracks from an Alesis hard disk recorder to the board because their drummer was back home with his wife who was due to have a baby that very day. Unfortunately, this didn't get relayed to anyone at the venue in advance, so there was a mad scramble to get a compatible Alesis to play the disk they brought. Then some of the actual tracks were somehow messed up, so they had to mess with that for quite some time. On top of that, one of their guitarists is left-handed, and the guitar that was rented for him ended up being a Fender Strat with all single coils. The club owner ended up buying an Epiphone SG just so they could have a lefty guitar with humbuckers. Good times, good times . . .
Anyway, everything ended up going fine both nights. I didn't get any pictures of the other bands, but here are a couple of ours:
The only real issues concerned Friday's headliners, Ancient Rites. With only a couple days before the festival, they informed the promoter of some very specific gear needs . . . which nobody could find in time. I brought in a Boss ME-50 (they had requested a Vetta II, and when that was a "no" they asked for an ME-30) but they couldn't get the sound they wanted out of that. Somehow, the DD-3 I keep in my bag of spare pedals ended up solving that issue. Of greater potential drama was the fact that they had to run prerecorded drum tracks from an Alesis hard disk recorder to the board because their drummer was back home with his wife who was due to have a baby that very day. Unfortunately, this didn't get relayed to anyone at the venue in advance, so there was a mad scramble to get a compatible Alesis to play the disk they brought. Then some of the actual tracks were somehow messed up, so they had to mess with that for quite some time. On top of that, one of their guitarists is left-handed, and the guitar that was rented for him ended up being a Fender Strat with all single coils. The club owner ended up buying an Epiphone SG just so they could have a lefty guitar with humbuckers. Good times, good times . . .
Anyway, everything ended up going fine both nights. I didn't get any pictures of the other bands, but here are a couple of ours:
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