I started last year a Rush tribute (on which I was to play the Geddy role), for which I assembled a nice rig with what I already had, and a couple toys to add to it. A Roland JV80 (lower tier) and a Juno-2 (uper tier) in the front keyboard stand, a Yamaha KX61 (lower tier) and a Roland D-50 (upper tier) on the Left keyboard stand, in the middle of those an 8 spc rack containing an ac rack strip, a line mixer, a Peavey Spectrum Bass, an Alesis NanoBass, a Midiman BiPort 4x2 MIDI interface, an ART Multiveerb unit, and a rackmount PC running a nice VSTi host and several VSTis, and finally found a nice MIDI Footpedal (at the floor of the front stand) to play the pedal bass parts while playing keys with my hands. Not a PK-5, though -which I found real big and heavy by the way-, nor the Korg one that Geddy uses, but a cheaper one that some guy from Miami makes and sells over the 'bay. It has buttons instead of levers, is smaller and lighter but nice working nonetheless, and it has a wooden box (which makes it look like some sort of Floor Minimoog thing, I even thought of making some kind of funny metal plaque -it has no visible brand badge anywhere- to customize it), to add to my bass rig and voila. Unfortunately, due to several reasons not worthy to disclose here, it only lasted two wonderful rehearsals. The set was working wonders (The VSTi host is capable of handling and sorting out every MIDI in and out from every device and acts as a router, so I can play any source -rack unit, keyboard or VSTi- from any surface, be it any keyboard or the footpedal, once I had the pre-production work done song by song). The hard part was -literally- doing my best not to fall while doing the whole singing-bass playing- keyboard playing- footboard tap-dancin' thing. So I realized Ged is not only a hell of a player and singer, but a wonderful acrobat!
