Last night, my band did our second gig and the first one in a venue. I'm not sure whether it was a club, pub or bar..it is a small venue above a fish shop with a bar and quite relaxed seating. There were Zappa and Blondie posters with a massive mural of the Who in 60s so that made the evening better!
We rocked up and our keyboardist usually has stage piano + rack synth + Roland synth + home made keytar + amp but we managed to get him to leave the keytar at home (thankfully). The owner of the place had his lovely vintage drum kit there which our drummer was loving, mainly because it has a fully working snare! I was told not to bring my amp as there would be one there, and it was a massively battered Peavy combo 15" I think. The guitarists's Marshall was playing up too, I think the one of the valves is good.
Once we got playing (after a very good support act), we started with a cover of Life During Wartime which went well. We did our first original (Song #3) and that went well. But with the next song, our cover of Drive by the Cars, it went wrong. Our guitarists plays one of the synths on this and he lost the sheet music so had to guess. I also lost track during the song and kept going back into the chorus. Eventually, we ended it and our keyboardist mouthed to me 'let's never do that again'. We had only played the song twice all the way through a few hours before the practise I should add in. We then did two more of our own songs, both of which our singer/guitarist forgot the melody and just sang his own thing that didn't find my carefully crafted music. I spent hours getting words to fit into the music and that went out of the window. By this point, I was wondering why we bothered but we came to Take Me To The River, which I came in late but apart from that, it all came together and it got everyone moving. We also ended with The Studio, the first song we wrote as a band that is kick ass and everyone really enjoyed it.
I spoke to several audience members, most of whom said it was really good and a massive improvement on our previous gigs. Just shows you, does this always happen at gigs? i.e. you find it to have gone **** and the audience enjoy it
We were only told about the gig on Thursday and basically had to double our set from 3 to 7 songs in two days and I had to finish writing three of term in a short period. The problem was that we could only fit in a two hour practise before the gig and we didn't get time to try out the songs with words so it was improvised. That's our main aim for next term, practising singing with the music!
During Studio, my Dano Longhorn lost all its bass, I have no idea happened but I had to knock the bass amp up loads. The ergonomics also killed my wrist and I come home with an aching hand. THe owner of the place said he be putting more nights on next term and we'd be welcome to return and said he enjoyed the set, so that's always a good sign.
So, the result is that I'm going back to using my 'proper' Lakland Darryl Jones as it should be a bit more reliable and I will stomach the extra weight. I might sell the Dano and get a Sadowsky pre-amp to add some extra punch! The Dano also kept falling off it's strap buttons as they are so cheap. I like the look of the thing, and the lovely trebbly tone but I don't think it's up to proper gigging.
We got eight free beers and nothing got broken so it's not all bad. My mate video-ed the whole thing so we can watch back later and see where everything went wrong.
Seb
