Bellisseria 5th Anniversary (04.15.24)

A nice crowd for Bellisseria's 5th anniversary. Photo by Kat.

To tell you the story of last night's fun and sorta wild show at the fifth anniversary celebration for Second Life's Bellisseria community, I have to rewind the clock to May 17, 2023. That's when my manager Maali Beck passed me some information on an upcoming show that I thought for sure must have included a mistake in the date.

It was from Prudence Anton, and it read in part, "Hi Maali. I'm with the Bellisseria planning committee to help celebrate its 5th anniversary on April 15, 2024. The event will run through the month of April 2 - 30, 2024. I'd like to try to book Zak during this event."

At first, I assumed that this couldn't be correct. Typically, a show in Second Life gets booked anywhere from a couple of weeks before the event, to a few days before to, in cases where a venue needs a fill-in for another artist, literally the day of the show. And here was a place that was hiring me 11 full months beforehand.

But no, it was correct, so first, big kudos to Bellisseria for being super ahead of the game in their planning. Also, the timing ended up being terrific; as I've mentioned before, this year -- with its dental and medical issues, and business and family responsibilities -- has been a low point in terms of the amount of time I've had to perform live music, or work on music in general. When the show date finally arrived, I was very happy to have an opportunity to get onstage and showcase my set to a big crowd.

Getting Ready

I wasn't quite sure what to expect at Bellisseria, including what sort of stage setup would be in place for their anniversary event. I don't like leaving things to chance, so the night before my show, I noted that my fellow SL music performer Nina Rose Setner was one of the other people booked to play there, and I dropped by her gig on Sunday night to check it out.

It was cool... a little bandshell stage at one end of a nice open park space. Also encouraging was the fact that there was a pretty good sized crowd there on Sunday evening. One of the things I like about performing at Second Life places that have their own strong community; they tend to bring out their own crowd, and that has a couple of advantages.

First, the artist is under less pressure to populate the venue via their own promotional efforts. I have great fans but there's no way on a given Monday evening they'd take up much space in. large open air venue. Second is the fact that people from that community who perhaps haven't heard you perform often -- or at all -- get a chance to get exposed to you and your music.

Checking out Nina's show the night before mine.

After seeing Nina's show, I felt pretty good about doing my own the following day. It's little things like that which add some extra confidence to live performers. More confidence almost always turns into a better show for everyone... artists and audience and venue management alike.

Running Out of Juice

No, this isn't a reference to O. J. Simpson. I was exactly ten minutes into my show, toward the end of my second song, when something happened that has never happened before during one of my live shows. 

Allow me to briefly explain what an acoustic-electric guitar is. This is a topic I know a few things about; my career for the past three decades has been working for manufacturers of musical instruments and pro audio gear. One of my clients is Takamine Guitars, and it shouldn't surprise you that I use a Takamine for all of my SL shows.

Anyway, my instrument -- a Takamine Pro Series P5DC -- is an acoustic guitar that has a pickup and a preamplifier, allowing it to easily be plugged in and amplified, or in the case of an SL show, plugged into an audio interface for live streaming. The preamplifier runs on four standard 1.5V AA batteries, and they really last a long time. I've had this guitar for nearly eight years, and all that time through hundreds of shows and recording sessions, I've only had to change those batteries two or three times.

The CTP-3 CoolTube preamplifier in my Takamine P5DC.

To be clear, the preamp in this guitar does have a flashing light to warn you when a battery is getting low, but apparently I didn't notice it, or ignored it, or something. Either way, I was playing along and then through my headphones, I heard my guitar quickly get more and more quiet, and then drop out altogether. It was still slightly audible via my vocal microphone, but that was not at all acceptable.

Quick Change

While I've dealt with things like a string breaking during a set, as well as total power outages and, of course, Second Life going down like a sack of bricks, that's the first time I had a preamp die mid-set. So, being an experienced live performer, I knew what I had to do, and it's fortunate that Takamine guitars make this process pretty fast and easy. The incredibly lucky part of this is that by complete happenstance, I had a package of Duracells sitting on my desk in front of me, and there were exactly four batteries in there. Wow.

Hats off to my pals at Takamine for making this process super fast and easy. I had the batteries swapped out and was back up and running in under two minutes.

While telling the large crowd what was going on, I simultaneously popped out the preamp, swapped out the batteries (messing up the order the first time but quickly resolving it), turning the volume back up and voila... I was up and running again. Whew!

Of course, after that process, I was a sweaty mess, but it's funny... the process actually energized me in some weird way, and the rest of my set went extraordinarily well. We maintained a great crowd the entire time, the vibe was good, people seemed to be having fun, and while I'm my own harshest critic interns of my singing voice and guitar playing, both were at fully acceptable levels of goodness as I rocked for the rest of the hour.

Little side note: I don't know who was responsible for choosing the artists that would be playing at this event, but they did a great job for this three-hour music fest with Max Kleene at 4PM, me at 5PM, and Noma Falta at 6PM. While each of us have our own distinct performance styles, none are so different that the crowd would want to leave the event as each performer hit the stage. Well done.

Me with my minimal stage setup. Photo by Kat.

While not everyone is rezzed enough to see in every pic, we had a crowd that passed 50 people during my set, and it was fun to get up in front of a big-ass crowd and rock. Photo by Kat.

What a cool place for a community celebration! Photo by Kat.

Thanks again, Bellisseria. Let's do it again soon. Photo by Kat.

Bellisseria 5th Anniversary set list...

Barely Breathing (Duncan Sheik)

Interstate Love Song (Stone Temple Pilots)

On A Plain (Nirvana)

Better Man (Pearl Jam)

What I Got (Sublime)

If You Could Only See (Tonic)

Wonderwall (Oasis)

Low Key (Tweedy)

Carey (Joni Mitchell)

Any Major Dude (Steely Dan)

Allentown (Billy Joel)

Man of Constant Sorrow (Traditional)

Runnin' Down a Dream (Tom Petty)

Big ol' thanks to the entire Bellisseria community who came out in droves for the celebration, with extra-special thanks to the following who helped support my show!

Callan Handrick, Bevan Whitfield, Xia Xevious, Maurice Mistwallow, not4gods Resident, Alex Zelin, SkyWatcher Questi, Richy Nervous, PamelaRaven Resident, Kat Claxton, stephmgardner Resident, Asynja Xubersnak, Rascal Randt, samuel22200 Naxos, my terrific manager Maali Beck, and PrudenceAnton Resident and the rest of the folks at Bellisseria!