2nd Practice Session with Hoster

[Ron Vermillion]

I wanted to thank all of you for your helpful messages on the forum.

I'm not using Hoster to be a KJ. I'm putting together a solo act one man band playing guitar and singing. Used to do this years ago and getting back into it. It's a paying hobby for me but I want to look and sound professional about it. Not taking it lightly, and good enough, isn't.

I've been struggling with programming the JamStation JS-5 and the dinky sound from Band-In-A -Box (the tech at Sweetwater.com suggested a $1,400 MIDI Synth to solve that) and for some reason kept holding off on Hoster because of some stupid ego thing "do I really want to sing over a Karaoke machine for a live performance.. I'm a musician for goodness sake".

Just in the second day of using Hoster for practice and with only (1) WalMart el cheapo CD+G that had about 6 songs I could stand, this is the neatest thing I ever ran across. I've ordered my second CD+G.
Now to the Karaoke Jockey having two CD+G will be a real funny item. I can hear some of these guys now saying - that's nothing, I have 105,000 songs ready to go. OK pardner, learn all the chord changes to them and sing them all to me. LOL

To me that means that I've added a dozen or so songs that I can perform in two days. The band is trained, the sound is great, no one is going to show up drunk, or get mad over anything and quit. If the venue owner or manager comes up and asks me to turn up or down I can comply immediately and everyone in the band will comply without complaining. The bass player doesn't play too loud. etc. etc.

To me a dozen new songs in a couple of days is flat out amazing. I have six months or so of woodshedding trying to get about 30 blues songs worked out with the JamStation JS-5 and now I just click play on a track in Hoster and all the musicians show up and start to play. Absolutely incredible!

The background music doesn't sound like a $5 garage sale keyboard.
I even have back up vocal singers - WOW! How neat is that!

The lead player be it guitar, harp or whatever never misses a beat on the instrumental parts of the song. I either double what the lead guy is playing (as do a lot of bands and almost everyone does in studio recordings) or I noodle something similar to or around what the lead guy is playing. It doesn't bother me at all that there is a studio guitarist taking all the breaks, I can punctuate his playing or play with or around the guy. Or, take a breath and play something really simple while I get my head together.

Handling the song list couldn't be simpler. And I know I still have a lot to learn about operating the program, set lists etc.

All in all day 2 with Hoster has been a blast. Finally I sound like I wanted to sound all along. Now if I could just wear a big hole in the front of my Martin.

Ron