Gig Aftermath
If I were to sum it up in one word: anticlimactic. Nonetheless, I had a good time and it was a first good gig for me. The place where we played is a sports/billiards bar and isn’t set up well for live music, so it’s not the kind of place you go to see a band. The band tells me the audience is unpredictable here—some nights you have lots of people listening and dancing, and other nights it’s as if you don’t exist. It’s probably better in the summer as people partying on the lake may trickle in. The audience last night could’ve been better, but we did have a couple hot chicks dancing to a few songs, so that picked us up a bit. Other things I liked about this gig:
1. We get paid.
2. We have the whole night (3 sets).
3. It’s a regular gig.
I ended up using the laptop. It crashed a couple times, as expected, but didn’t cause any serious problems. Hopefully I can fix that. Right now I think I’m probably making calls to procedures I’m not allowed to while in an event call, which occasionally throws an exception. I played on more songs than I expected to. On several that I hadn’t planned on playing on, I got bored and just followed along with organ chords. I sure wish I wrote down what key they were all in though. Sometimes I spent half the time turning the volume down and trying to figure out the key by trial and error.
Volume was an issue last night. During the “sound check” our leader asked me to play the loudest patch I had and he set the master on that. This was a mistake, as when we were playing later and I had a solo they needed me to turn up but I was already maxed out. Next time, I will sound check at half volume giving me plenty of room to get louder. Where do you guitar players set your volume when you do a sound check? I assume you have your volume knob somewhere near the middle, right?
I’m not sure how long the band has been together, but they seem to be getting frustrated by the lack of paying gigs. The main goal of the band is to succeed as a business, in other words, what kind of music we play doesn’t matter so much to us, we just want to play music that people would like to hear and therefore would hire us to play. I’m completely on board with that goal. Right now I would just like to be a working musician. Once I get my chops back, I may decide to pursue more creative musical endeavors.
1. We get paid.
2. We have the whole night (3 sets).
3. It’s a regular gig.
I ended up using the laptop. It crashed a couple times, as expected, but didn’t cause any serious problems. Hopefully I can fix that. Right now I think I’m probably making calls to procedures I’m not allowed to while in an event call, which occasionally throws an exception. I played on more songs than I expected to. On several that I hadn’t planned on playing on, I got bored and just followed along with organ chords. I sure wish I wrote down what key they were all in though. Sometimes I spent half the time turning the volume down and trying to figure out the key by trial and error.
Volume was an issue last night. During the “sound check” our leader asked me to play the loudest patch I had and he set the master on that. This was a mistake, as when we were playing later and I had a solo they needed me to turn up but I was already maxed out. Next time, I will sound check at half volume giving me plenty of room to get louder. Where do you guitar players set your volume when you do a sound check? I assume you have your volume knob somewhere near the middle, right?
I’m not sure how long the band has been together, but they seem to be getting frustrated by the lack of paying gigs. The main goal of the band is to succeed as a business, in other words, what kind of music we play doesn’t matter so much to us, we just want to play music that people would like to hear and therefore would hire us to play. I’m completely on board with that goal. Right now I would just like to be a working musician. Once I get my chops back, I may decide to pursue more creative musical endeavors.
posted by PlaysByEar at 3:19 PM
6 Comments:
I heard the show sucked so much it set rock & roll back 20 years.
By the way, good on your badgers, they friggin' lost to North Dakota State. Thanks for helpin' Pitt's RPI, wanker.
Since we're playing music that is 30 years old, I guess we're ahead of our time. I'll take that as a compliment!
And I'm glad I missed that game. Uumm.. at least they aren't in our conference? That doesn't excuse Ohio State though.
congrats on your first gig and welcome to the world of professional musicians. I'll warn you ahead of time: the pay will suck for years, but it's worth it.
hey, what do you mean you had to figure out what key the songs were in? this hasn't been a problem before - you're Playsbyear!
I just got home from a gig where we played 200 year old music - probably my best concert in the last year. I'm psyched to practice more now.
I am good at playing by ear, but I don't have perfect pitch. At best I can guess fairly close if I think about it for awhile by comparing it to songs I know the key of. But that's impossible for me to do while the band is playing.
hmph. all this time I thought you had perfect pitch. you probably really have it and just don't know it. the mind is pretty trustworthy when it comes to pitch recognition.
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