Local Band Takes Fans from Live Stage to Lockdown Livestreams and Back in Las Vegas
You may have visited Las Vegas many times and thought you’d seen all the town’s familiar long-running shows, but unless you are a local, perhaps you’ve missed one of the crown jewels in the City of Lights. Founded more than 20 years ago by guitarist/vocalist Jerry Lopez, Santa Fe & The Fat City Horns features a six-piece horn section, a six-piece rhythm section and five vocalists. The band is comprised entirely of first-call musicians that normally are playing with major league headliners, but on Monday nights, when the big showrooms on the strip are dark, these 15 players get together to perform on their own terms.
After years of performing at the South Point Hotel and The Palms, in 2017 the band moved to its current location, The Copa Room at the Bootlegger Bistro. It’s a big band on a small stage in an intimate setting with a capacity of 175 seated or perhaps 250 when packed on standing-room-only dates. That is, until March of 2020, when Covid restrictions hit and the venue shut down. Without audiences, however, this provided an opportunity to spruce up The Copa Room, both with décor and acoustical treatment, in anticipation of reopening. And in September 2020, the band returned to the Copa, but doing bi-weekly streaming-only shows until a few weeks ago, when Nevada’s governor gave the all-clear signal and live-audience performances at The Copa Room resumed.
Santa Fe’s longtime audio engineer Jim Moran (formerly a touring FOH mixer for bands such as Chicago) explained the band’s philosophy: “The entire band are all top-line professional cats. Our horn section works with Celine Dion when she’s in town; two of the horn players also tour with her; the whole horn section plays with Lady Gaga when she’s in town; and go out with Kanye West when he’s doing his gospel shows. The bass player plays with the O’Jays when they go out and the drummer plays with jazz legend Arturo Sandoval. One of our vocalists sings background with The Righteous Brothers, and four guys in the band played with Donny & Marie for 11 years. But Monday night is the time when they get to play their own favorite music.”
Inside the Copa Room
“This room is really well suited for our show,” says Moran. “The room is 39 feet wide and 106 feet deep and from the downstage edge of the stage to the back wall it’s 81 feet, but we added about eight or nine extra feet of thrust on the stage front so we could fit all 15 musicians onstage. Acoustically, we did a lot of work, treating the walls and ceilings. We ordered a lot of Sonex. And used some acoustical blankets to hang in front of mirrors. We hung about 20 panels to cover some of the corrugated metal ceiling and we built bass traps in the back of the room. There are curtains in the room and behind each curtain we hung dampening material — just to add some absorption, so it wouldn’t be such a canyon.”
The Gear
Moran is mixing on a 32-channel Midas M32 digital console with a DL32 stagebox and a couple X32 racks on stage. “I also mix monitors for a couple of the guys, but the rest are mixing their own through an [X32-Q] app. One of the X32s is just so vocalists can have stereo in-ear mixes; the other lives in horn-land for their in-ear mixes. Then I send them two feeds to their X32s and they can tell me what they want in that. Everybody in the band is on in-ears — four are wireless and all the rest are hard-wired,” he explains. “The singers also have some supplemental wedges up front, which I wish they wouldn’t use.”
The room’s P.A. is simple, but effective. “We brought in a Meyer Sound rig, with four MSL-4 (two per side) and Meyer 700HP twin 18 subs — all groundstacked.” Moran says. “There’s a lot of horsepower there. It does really well and sounds great, especially after all the treatment we did in that room. And when people fill it up, it’s really quite warm sounding. There are also some house speakers hung in the back of the room pointed at the bar. I have them time-aligned and use a bit of them as rear fill speakers.”
Sax player Rob Mader handles the lighting and serves as lead engineer for the livestream video production. Mader mentioned that band members have been using iPads for their sheet music (forscore.co) for close to 10 years, and now utilize those same tablets to control their IEM monitor mixes. Mader uses a second iPad to interface with ETCconnect’s Eos lighting software controller presets to hit the lighting cues.
Crossing the Streams
The livestreamed shows ran from Sept. 15 to March 22, with the band performing every other Monday, spread out and socially distanced around the venue.
“In terms of streaming, our first task was improving the Internet connection at the Bootlegger. Cox came in and pulled new lines to the building and put in a Netgear DOCSIS 3.1 Gigabit cable modem,” Moran recalls.
“When we did our first streaming show on Sept 14 of last year, we tried to go through Facebook Live and YouTube and we had a lot of video problems, where the video would occasionally freeze, while the audio continued. On our next show, we connected with Crowdcast and those problems went away. In the beginning there were four cameras and we’re now using six — all fixed except one roving cameraperson. There was also a video director and a tech doing the switching at the streaming desk.
“I was set up in a separate room and Bob Lentini from RML Labs (rmllabs.com) was with the streaming crew in the main room with the band and he was mixing to live broadcast. He was taking the mic pre feeds from the M32, connected via USB to the SAWStudio DAW on his computer. Bob and I were monitoring/mixing using Sony MDR-V6 headphones. Bob sent his mixes back to me and we sent stereo to the video stream. We had a very vibrant audio stream because of Bob and his system,” notes Moran.
Epilogue
On June 1, 2021 Nevada’s governor gave an all-clear signal for non-distanced performances. The Bootlegger Bistro is back to booking top entertainment (Chicago drummer Danny Seraphine with CTA was there on June 18 as part of his “Take Me Back to Chicago” tour) and Santa Fe & The Fat City Horns have returned to their Monday night home at The Copa Room.
Meanwhile, “we just had a meeting with the Bootlegger management, who will provide a space for the streaming crew, so we will be able to do both streamed and in-person for the same shows,” notes Moran, who like the rest of the band, welcomes a future with both live and livestream audiences. “I’ve known this band for all of my adult life — in fact, my brother played drums with them for three years — and it’s fun to be part of making them sound good.”
Santa Fe and the Fat City Horns
Performing Monday evenings at the Copa Room within the Bootlegger Bistro in Las Vegas
CREW
- FOH Engineer: Jim Moran
- Streaming Audio: Bob Lentini
- Show Directors: Dave Philippus, Curt Miller
- Video Switch Tech: Ryan Harrison
- Camera Op: Arthur Chivas
GEAR
- FOH Console: Midas M32
- Stagebox: Midas DL32
- Monitor Consoles: Behringer X32 Racks
- P.A.: Meyer MSL-4 mains, Meyer 700HP subs
- Streaming DAW/Mixer: RML Labs SAWStudio
- Video Switcher: Blackmagic Design ATEM Television Studio Pro 4K
