As one of the artists selected to perform on the 2010 Coke Zero Music Tour, Long Island singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Lisa Palleschi will be showcasing her music in front of audiences in 100-plus cities across the U.S—powered by Cerwin-Vega! sound.
An accomplished musician and Berklee School of Music grad, Palleschi's been rocking the NYC club circuit for years, gaining the attention of fans and critics alike. Her 2007 album "Released" resulted in collaborations with co-producers/co-writers Jeff Franzel (Taylor Dayne, Clay Aiken), Adrian Gurvitz (Sheryl Crow, Meredith Brooks), Frank Filipetti (James Taylor, Carly Simon), and Tom Kimmel (Joe Cocker, Linda Ronstadt). Lisa's follow-up CD, "All the Way," is slated for an early September, 2010 release, launching a 105 city tour at venues ranging from NASCAR & NHRA tracks to NFL stadiums. FOX Sports Net featured Lisa's rock anthem "GO!" to open Major League Baseball games in a dozen markets during the 2009 season, and SPEED has used Lisa's version of "Time Has Come," the rocker she co-wrote with Brad Arnold & Chris Henderson of 3 Doors Down, to open broadcasts of the NASCAR Truck Series.
Having the opportunity to perform onstage with a state-of-the-art sound system hasn't been lost on Lisa. One of the biggest challenges she's found is being able to hear her self onstage, particularly playing outdoor venues. Using Cerwin-Vega! CVP-1152 stage monitor wedges on this tour that was never an issue.
"For a singer, the most important thing is to be able to hear themselves onstage," she explained, "and that's always the most challenging, particularly using wedges, when you perform outside. I've never been a big in-ear person—you can't feel the crowd when you have an earpiece on. Also, I had a soundman once tell me, "You know, if that blows in your year, you're deaf for life." He totally freaked me out, so from that day on, I was like, 'I don't know about these things…'"
"Also, if you don't hear yourself," she continued, "the band's just going to overpower you and take over… And that's when you totally lose your pitch and the show's gone from there. It takes you totally out of your element; it takes you away from the song. When your mind is on something else—worrying about things like volume and feedback—you're not giving your best performance, and you're not connected. At that point, you lose the audience. Our last tour prior to switching over to the Cerwin-Vega gear was difficult, to say the least. I wasn't able to hear myself, and then we'd turn it up, and guess what? Feedback."
Palleschi says one of the first things she likes to say to the audience is, 'How does it sound?' "If they can't really hear what you were saying, it kind of defeats the whole purpose of the words that you're writing, you know? The audience can hear a bad sound system. They don't say, 'Oh, her monitor wasn't working, or the mix is bad, or the microphone is bad… If anything is bad, all of a sudden you're bad. None of that stuff matters to them. The Cerwin-Vega monitors deliver great, balanced sound, and then it just comes down to the performance. We were rocking out and you could see on people's faces in the audience that it was good. When the system is right, when the band is right, when the venue is right, and when the audience is connected, it's magic."