Search - Pat Donohue In Concert at the Freight & Salvage on DVD

An off night for Mr. Donohue? Buyers beware.

Gordon Currie | Kirkland, WA USA | 12/31/2007

(1 out of 5 stars)

"I was not familiar with Mr Donohue, but purchased this on reviews elsewhere.

This artist has an obvious command of the acoustic guitar and technical skills. Yet, somehow, the result is LESS than the sum of the parts. None of the pieces sounded smoothly executed - most were filled with fluffed notes, rushed phrases and generally clumsy renditions. Having been a pro musician, I recognized the signs of having a BAD night. It was so painful to experience that I had to fast forward and was not able to bear even one entire tune. It was like watching someone do note for note renditions of tunes that they were reading from tablature.

On top of that, the producers of the video have managed to achieve a remarkable feat - to make a high-end custom guitar (Somogyi) sound like a cheap Yamaha. On my high end system the guitar had mushy lows, brittle highs and a missing midrange. This coupled with no room sound whatsoever creates an effect like the guitar is resting on your head - not pleasant.

Finally, the choice of material - if you don't know anything about this artist, then imagine a surfeit of technique joined together with very trite, standard, middle of the road, extremely safe folk and blues with some Americana thrown in and a dash of faux jazz (think Dixieland instead of swing or bebop). No harmonic sophistication displayed at all!

I do not enjoy slagging products for fun - and I don't want to scare off potential fans for an artist - but this product was a huge disappointment to me. The current standard for steel-string acoustic playing is fairly high, and this does not come close."