We're learning

Our Second Gig

I like to make my wife video tape stuff. Especially when we play out. We learn from it. And this day was no exception to that. We certainly learned a lot.

It was fun all together. We met new friends in the form of bands that we could play with again and we most likely will. Our last song was a train wreck. It was awesome! Mid-song everything just fell apart. Luckily this was a Christian venue and there were no beer bottle's to get hit in the face with. Venues like these are good to start out with because no matter how much you suck and how your ideas of throwing in the towel after sucking (which none of did but it could happen), everyone is very supportive and encouraging. Risen from Reno was a band that were really cool to us that day. We will play with them again.

So on to the lessons that I personally learned.

1) Be prepared for weather when traveling out of town for a gig:
I was so cold. I couldn't feel my fingers. And when you are playing a guitar or bass, that's not good. I remember the beginning of one song (the one that was a train wreck), my mind started on the 1 (first beat) but my fingers didn't kick in till about 1.5.

2) When it's cold or any outdoor venue, tune like a champion:
Several times I could hear a note off, sometimes it was me, sometimes it wasn't. But cold weather can really screw with your tuning. Especially when you are scrolling through 4 different tuning formats for 9 songs. I didn't have my "in-line" tuner that day...big mistake.

3) Know what we want for sound:
I'll get into this on the fourth thing, but playing at church has spoiled me. 90% of the time any of us in the band play in front of people, it is at church. And we have the blessed by Jesus himself Aviom where you have an inner ear monitor and you can change your setting to whatever you want. So if I don't like the way I'm hearing in the sound check, I change it myself. During our sound check I couldn't hear anything but guitar, guitar, and drums. No voices. But instead of saying anything to the sound dudes, who were the band Risen from Reno, we didn't say anything probably because we are so used to controlling it ourselves.

4) The 'I learned in church' factor:
You will definitely see in the video that we don't 'entertain' very well. Or we don't move around or anything. We need to work on this. The band before us had sequenced head banging sessions. I'm not saying we should do that, but some movement would be cool.

5) Don't get frustrated:
We are going to have more gigs where we suck. It's part of band life. Just beware of flying tomato's and we'll be fine. Plus we will still like each other after sucking, so we might as well have fun while we are sucking. We just have to get it on tape. :)




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