Fort Worth Opera’s production of Angels In America was one of those trial by fire events. Produced at the Scott Theater, I was fortunate to have spent a great deal of time in the venue working with other clients so I was probably the most qualified person to coordinate the event. Even so, there were a lot of growing pains that mostly revolved around the limitations of the venue’s sound system and the use of (4) Kurzweil K2600 samplers in order to cover all the virtual instruments and sound cues. To make matters worse, the keyboard rigs couldn’t fit in the pit with the rest of the orchestra so both keyboard players had to be located remotely in a hallway relying on a black and white conductor video monitor to play in time. The Kurzweil keyboard company has a few things that set them apart from most keyboard manufacturers. Their keyboards all seem to be made of lead and the user manuals typically contain hundreds if not thousands of pages. A Kurzweil keyboard is typically incredibly flexible, sonically unrivaled and very complicated. By the time the last note was played, a great trauma had been experienced by myself and my volunteer virtual instrument tech, Kurt Howard.