Tag: Gigs

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I feel gross using the facebook/instagram owned twitter alternative app, Threads. Really gross. 

That isn’t quite enough to stop me right now though. I am such a social media hypocrite/whore.

Anyway, someone asked, “what are your guitar goals for 2024” or something along those lines. I responded with a few. I figured I would port the response over to this post and maybe add a thing or two because I ran out of characters on the app. First, does the embed code work? I tried just sharing a link the other day to see if that pulled anything in, but it didn’t. I found that each post includes some embedding HTML code. Betcha a dollar it doesn’t work…

Post by @reallytallredhead
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https://www.threads.net/embed.js

Based on the preview function in the editor, it didn’t work. Oh well. Here’s the text I wrote:

I want my cover band to finally get back together after a covid-hiatus and an exiting singer.

I want to write a shit ton of songs, record listenable demoes of all of them, and maybe have one or two that don’t objectively suck.

I want to play a bar gig for the first time since Feb 1, 2020.

After getting my 1978 Les Paul refretted a couple of months ago, I want to do the same with my 1979 ES-335 along with maybe getting a new wiring harness so that all four of my guitars will be in gig shape.

Me: https://www.threads.net/@reallytallredhead/post/C1ch8b9LyTx

Yes, kids… I just quoted myself. I dun did that.

Anyway, there are a couple of things to add.

I want to replace all of my guitar straps with heavy, leather straps like the one I have on my 50th birthday present Les Paul Standard. I have amazon shipping one for my Les Paul Custom and it should arrive tomorrow.

I want to buy either a Gibson Les Paul Junior, a Gibson Firebird, a Gibson Les Paul Standard with P-90 pickups instead of humbuckers, or a Gibson Les Paul Deluxe. The order I wrote them is from most wanted to least most wanted. The chances of me buying any of these is about 0.0000001%… so there’s a chance.

With all of these goals in mind, mostly I would just settle for playing more. That’s what I really want to do.

I’m Tired of Quarantine

I’m sick and tired of this whole quarantine thing. It can go suck an egg.

That does not mean I’m going to start ignoring all of the Covid-19 safety precautions, I am still 100% on board. I’m just sick of it.

I miss playing in a band. I miss being on stage, seeing Jen in the crowd with a huge smile on her face. That is a great feeling. I’m missing that feeling.

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So That Went Well (Mostly) Continued

I mentioned in the last post that we did last night’s show for free.  It was Greg’s birthday party and we were just there to help celebrate.

When we were finished, Mike, Kevin, and I all left.  Greg stayed because it was his party.  What kind of party would it be if he left?

Anyway, after the rest of us were gone the manager pulled Greg aside and paid us.  I’m totally surprised.  Not only did we get paid for our free show, but we got paid more than Racks ever paid us.

Well, thank you very much, J. Brien’s!  Any time.

So That Went Well (Mostly)

I’m not going to say that last night was the best gig we’ve ever done, but after the shit show I had at the last one, this was pretty magical.

There were humongous equipment issues, one that was big enough to end the show early, and there were a few bad spots, including a full on train wreck that was thanks to yours truly, but overall I can’t remember the last time I felt this good about a show.

Greg the singer, the purpose of the show was his 50th birthday, recently bought a digital mixer that will replace my old Mackie 16 channel board.  Last night was our first crack at using it and there were problems.  He was able to get one channel working (and it sounded great) but he couldn’t get a second channel into the mix.  We’ll figure it out but we didn’t have time last night so we switched back to the old board.

The train wreck was silly.  We were covering The Cars.  The song opens with me just playing eighth notes (fifth string, seventh fret) with accents on the fourth beat.  At one point I accidentally bumped the sixth string and Kevin the drummer must have thought I skipped a beat.  He tried to compensate, I didn’t, Mike the bass player didn’t either.  Next thing we know we’re all hitting accents on different beats.  Whoops.  I just kept playing eighth notes, without accents, and Kevin counted us back in.  Problem solved.

The show stopper was a tough one.  There was nothing we could do about it.  We were about half way though the second set (we were only planning to play two) and Kevin broke his snare drum head.  He didn’t have a replacement head.  We hung on for a few songs, trying to make the best of it, but eventually we had to give in to the truth and we wrapped it up.  Kevin said he was embarrassed.  I tried to tell him to not worry about it, but I don’t think I did a good job.  Shit happens.  It was a birthday party and we weren’t getting paid.  If you’re going to break a snare drum head that was pretty much the best time and place to do it.  The downside is that we only played about 75% of our planned show.  The upside is that I was home by 12:15AM.  We’re old people.  Getting home an hour or two early was a pretty sweet deal.

So how did I do personally?  Let’s just say I haven’t been this happy about a performance in a long, long time.  At the last show I was really nervous going into it.  I don’t know if that exacerbated the problems or not, but I started out playing like dog crap and it got worse from there.  About halfway though our one set my left hand had had enough and stopped doing what I told it to.  It’s not uncommon for me to have to deal with a huge amount of cramp-like pain in my left hand (it’s ruined gigs for me in the past) but that was never really an issue.  In this case it was like my hand just went dead.  It was awful.  I thought it was nerve damage, or something horrible and unthinkable like that.  A few days later I read an interview with Little Steven Van Zandt who was joking that the members of the E Street Band are just too old to handle Bruce Springsteen’s four hour shows.  He said he gets so tired he can’t bend strings anymore.  That was exactly how I felt at the last show and it was like taking a load off my shoulders.  I am not broken, I just ran out of gas.

As for last night?  None of that.  I was fine from start to finish.  I never had any of the cramping pain (which might be arthritis) and I never had any fatigue.  By the time we were playing I wasn’t even doing any of the things that seem to hold off the pains (I think squeezing the neck kicks it off so I try to keep my hand as relaxed as I can, which then leads to me cutting back on my lame attempts at shredding) and I was getting as close to showing off as I get.  My playing wasn’t great, but it was good.  My solos were repetitive and sloppy, but they were much more enthusiastic than usual.  It was… fun.

I didn’t have any equipment problems of my own, although there was quite a bit of buzz when all of my dirt pedals were on.  My Fender Bassbreaker 18/30 made its public debut and it sounded great.  As much as I love my Fender Deluxe Reverb, there is just something about having two speakers in the cabinet that just can’t be beat.

I had the Klon KTR on all the time, to put a little hair on my clean sound.  I maybe could have dialed the gain back a smidge to be cleaner, but what I had sounded so good.  That little red pedal lives up to the hype to a level that I can’t explain.  It just sounds fantastic, and it makes everything else I use sound better.

I used the Fulltone OCD (not the new germanium one) for my dirt.  One thing I’ve always noted with the Bassbreaker is it is really toppy.  There is a lot of focus in the treble frequencies.  Is that an issue with the EL84 output tubes as opposed to the 6V6s in the Deluxe (the 30 watt channel on the Bassbreaker is based on the ’65 Deluxe Reverb)?  I don’t know.  I try to compensate for that with both the EQ on the amp itself, but also with the tone knob on the OCD and I might have over done it a little.  I was a little bassier than I normally like to be.  There were a few times when I thought about adding some high end to the OCD but I was afraid I’d mess up the good thing I had going.  My distorted tone wasn’t perfect, it never is, but it was good.  Good for me at least.

I managed to use every pedal on the board at least once.  I used the cheap-o delay for a slap back effect on one solo.  I used the cheap-o pitch shift on a different solo.  The phaser was used for one full song, the flanger was used on another song.  The uni-vibe was on for one solo.  The digital delay was set to dotted eight notes for one full song.  I’m not sure if I like how it came out.  The delay was okay on it’s own, but when I was using it for the U2 style rhythm effect it muddied everything up quite a bit.  I used the wah-wah a few times, but I didn’t over do it like I sometimes do.  Did I miss anything?  Oh yeah, the little digital reverb was on for the whole show.  I found a pretty good setting that I’m happy with and it’s changing my mind on whether I like the TC Electronic Hall of Fame Mini.  I’m still not loving it, but it’s okay.

So in summation, Lizardfish at J Brien’s in South Lawrence was, with the exception of a broken snare drum head, a really great experience.  The band had played there a few times before I joined (I was in the crowd for one of them) but they haven’t been interested in letting us play there for years.  Greg’s birthday was the reason they let this show happen.  At the end of the night though one of the staff members said she was hoping we could do it again.  I agree, let’s do it again.  There are still three more band members’ birthdays to celebrate, right?

Time to Get Ready

Today is a good day.  I got a bonus from work today.  That’s good.  I got my tax documents from work too.  By the time this posts my taxes might even already be filed because my wife is amazing.  That’s also good.  I just spent my lunch break working on a time sensitive issue and I figured it out with a minimum of stress.  That’s good too.

The RPM Challenge starts in less than nine hours.  That’s good, but I highly doubt I’ll be awake at midnight to celebrate.  We have a gig tomorrow night.  That’s good as well.  I’m not nearly as stressed as I was for the last gig and that is doubly good.

There are some things that royally suck but I am not letting them bring me down.  The triumph of authoritarianism over democracy is progressing in the US Senate right now as the republican party makes a farce out of the constitutionally mandated impeachment process.  That royally sucks.  I am beginning to think that secession is a viable option.  Brexit takes place today.  Midnight Brussels time, 11:00PM London time, That’s 6:00PM Boston time, I think.  That royally sucks too.

I’m weighing the good against the incredibly bad and choosing to ignore the fact that, in the grand scheme of things, the bad is infinitely more important than the good.  Today I am deciding that the good will outweigh the bad even though that is amazingly, shockingly naive.  Screw it, I’m going to Disney in a couple of weeks.

For now though, I have to start planning my packing for the gig tomorrow.  I need my Les Paul and my SG, my Bassbreaker 18/30 and my Vox MV50 with the 12″ cab, my full pedal board, the handful of new cables I bought (bright orange so you can see them from space), a couple of backup pedals (looking at you, Keeley D&M Drive) and power cables for each one, the microphones, stands, and cables I took home from the rehearsal room recently, the little pick/slide holding microphone stand attachment, and a new glass slide.  Then I’ll go to Mike’s house and get the rest of the mics, stands, and cables, my gig bag with all my emergency stuff in it, and the little stand I sit my amp on when we play.  Oh yeah, and I have to change the strings on both guitars!  Can’t forget about that!

Sunday after the gig I’ll put the amp and the pedal board (and the associated cables) back into my room where they currently sit (see the pic from last night), Setup a mic, stand, and cable on that amp and on the Bassbreaker 15 that is not leaving my room for the gig, then plug those into the 16 channel USB interface that I also took home from the rehearsal room recently.  I will plug the USB cable into my MacBook and make sure I can get both mic signals into GarageBand.  Once that’s done, I’ll be ready to record guitar parts in stereo.  When I record the acoustic guitar or a vocal or a saxophone I can just swing up one of the mic’s that will be on a guitar speaker and use that.  I also dug out my little acoustic guitar pickup that I got a few years ago and still haven’t taken out of the package.  I can use that to record as well.  I’ll keep the laptop and my iPad and my iPhone good and charged so if an idea comes to me I can play it into one version of GarageBand or another.  Once that’s all taken care of I just have to… you know… write a shit load of songs.  Yikes.

This year is a leap year so we get a whole extra day for the RPM shenanigans.  So really it’s no problem at all this year.

Yikes indeed!

But it’s still a good day.

 

Post Gig Recap

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We survived another show last night. Barely. We have been lucky over the last year in that we haven’t had any technical difficulties at any of our shows. That lucky streak came to an end last night.

The last time we played at Racks in Plaistow was a couple of months ago. That night we noticed that one of the house PA speakers sounded like it was going to give up the fight. At some point after that it died. That wasn’t really an issue for us last night, but more on the PA later.

I was paranoid as hell last night. We set up all of our gear and then waited. During that wait time I was going nuts. What if we go for sound check and something is wrong. I need to go double check everything. Mike the bass player was feeling the same thing. It was odd. About 10 minutes before sound check we both went up on stage and checked everything out. His gear was fine. Mine? No.

I plugged in my guitar, turned everything on, and nothing. I tried changing the input on the amp. Nope. I plugged directly into the amp. That worked. Okay, so it’s somewhere on the signal chain. Ah ha! One of my overdrive pedals’ power cable was unplugged. Fixed. Just as we were ready for sound check, I was up and running. But why does everything sound so wrong? Oh crap, I was still plugged into the wrong channel on the amp. Fixed.

So we’re bombing through the first set. Everything is going fine. Then someone in the crowd says that Greg the singer’s microphone was cutting out intermittently. Okay. Mess with the speak, the board, the PA amp, the cables. Nothing helps. We even strung together a couple of mic cables to stretch across the stage to use in place of the cables the house had. It worked for one song and then we lost the PA completely. We actually blew a fuse on the power amp. What the hell do we do now? Mike the bass player and his gigantic bass amp rig to the rescue. We ran a 1/4″ cable from the headphone out on the mixing board into a second channel on his bass amp and we sang through that.

It sounded like… what… shit. That’s what it sounded like. That is how it always sounds when you run a vocal mic through a bass amp. It’s supposed to sound awful, that’s why no one does it. The important thing here is that it worked and the show went on. We were halfway through the first set and we were looking at the possibility of going home 2-3 hours early, but Mike’s big yellow bass amp (Big Bird) that weighs 20,000 pounds came through for us and we were able to play the rest of the show.

As for me personally, it went pretty well. I didn’t have any pain in my left hand to speak of. There was a little early on, but I got through it. By the end of the night my hands were protesting and the end of the show was much needed. I think we really went two songs too long for me, but I made it through. Once I got through my own little tech issues everything went fine. My OCD pedal is really noisy, especially when it follows the Tube Screamer. It’s really noticeable when we are practicing in an otherwise quiet room. Last night the noise floor was high enough that I could only hear it when I was listening for it, and I don’t think anyone else could hear it at all.

As for the crappy tone I’ve been getting at practice… I wanted to open things up at home and mess with EQ, but I didn’t. At the show I thought I would tweak on the fly but I didn’t have to. I thought the three overdrive chain worked really well. I thought I sounded pretty good. Not great, but good. I’m starting to think that maybe the issue is just the walls in Mike the Bass Player’s basement. Maybe it’s just the room effecting the tone. I don’t know. I do know that I was pretty happy with everything last night.

There were no other issues. No dropped picks or anything like that. I had the mic stand pick holder with four spares on it. That did not end up being needed, which is exactly the point. It’s there if you need it, but hopefully you don’t need it. I also had a glass slide. Why? Because the mic stand pick holder had a slide holder too, and if it’s there I should use it. I had no plans to play slide at all, but I did use it on the very last song of the night as a goofy attempt at being gimmicky. I don’t think anyone noticed.

One more item of note, the crowd was huge! Well, by our standards it was huge. Probably the biggest crowd yet! It was great! It was also pretty funny that almost everyone left after the second set. So big crowd for the first set, who thankfully sat patiently while we tried to fix the PA, then a bigger crowd for the second set, and then a tiny yet extremely enthusiastic crowd for the third set.

To sum up, it came within a whisker of being a total disaster but it ended up being a really fun night. Thanks, everyone!

Gig Day To Do List

Hello and welcome to June 3, 2017.  It is gig day.  The band is playing in Plaistow again and I need to write a to-do list for myself.

  • Decide which guitar will be the #2 for the night.  It’s always been the ES-335, but tonight I am about 56% set on it being the Fender Strat.  With the exception of Tempest Fero’s first couple of appearances back in 1988, when my guitar was a very cheap Hondo strat copy, I have never played a non-Gibson guitar in front of people.  There were a couple of times when I played my friend Larry’s Epiphone, but that is still a Gibson product.  Will tonight be my first time with a Fender?  Will I take it but not use it?  I have no idea yet.
  • Restring two guitars.
  • Velcro the Tube Screamer Mini pedal to the board.  Right now it’s just sitting there, not tied down at all.  That could be a problem come show time.
  • Set everything up at home for a warm up/practice/find a way to tame the mid range nonsense in my tone session.  Possibly use my new A/B/Y switch to let me play with my Fender Deluxe Reverb and my Fender Bassbreaker amps at the same time.  I don’t expect to do that at the show, I just want to do it because it’s awesome.
  • Pack everything up, including the box of picks, the mic stand pick holding device, and the glass slide.  I don’t have any reason to play slide tonight, but the pick holding device is also a slide holding device, so I am taking it with me.
  • Take a shower.  Very important.
  • Go to Mike the Bass Player’s house and pick up the stuff I didn’t take with me after last weekend’s practice.
  • Go to the bar.
  • Unload the car and set everything up.  Will there be a Fender guitar?  I still haven’t decided.
  • Soundcheck… maybe.
  • Play the show, all three sets.
  • Pack up the gear and load it back into the car.
  • Get paid (assuming we are still getting paid).
  • Go home.
  • Unload the car.
  • Go to bed and hope to sleep for 12 hour straight, but realistically only sleep for maybe four hours.
  • Wake up tomorrow and call it a successful gig.

No problem!

Boy Scout Fail aka Gig Recap

The band played out last night. It was our fourth show at Racks Bar in Plaistow, NH. Overall it was a decent show. The two day long snow storm kept a lot of people away so the turnout was lower than we’ve gotten at previous shows. Also, I think the success of the first three shows has left me a little over confident.

Mike the bass player owns one bass guitar. I own a cheap bass too and I’ve brought it to all of our shows so Mike would have a back up. I forgot to bring it last night. That was dumb of me. That was one thing that I look back on and wish I could do over.

There was one other thing that I felt was a bad move done in the spirit of over confidence. Picks. At every gig I’ve ever done in my entire life I have had a pick in my right hand and a bunch of spare picks in my pocket. In some cases there were picks taped to my microphone stand too.

Last night during one of the first couple of songs it occurred to me that I didn’t have any spare picks on me. I had a box full of them in one of my guitar cases, but nothing up on stage with me. I told myself that before the second set started I would fill up my pocket with spares.

A couple of songs into the second set it dawned on my that I never grabbed that box of picks. I started getting nervous. What the hell am I going to do if I drop this pick and can’t find it? There was another pick with my second guitar, I could grab that one if I needed to. Still, that would suck. I told myself I’d get that box out of my Les Paul case before the third set.

Fast forward to the third set. Did I get those picks out of the case? Of course not. Sure enough, we were playing one song that has a great solo section where I always try to come as close as physically possible to shredding like a demon. As the moment approached, I stepped on the pedal I was using as a volume boost for solos and…

Whoosh, out of my hand went the pick. I knew it was going to happen eventually, and there it was. Fortunately it landed right at my feet and didn’t get lost, but I had to finger pick through the rest of the song. I lost my chance to shred like a madman and then I had to get down on my knees and pick the stupid thing up. I should have just been able to pull another pick out of my pocket and keep going like nothing happened.

I did screw up a lot last night. There were some small miscues all through the first two sets. The third set… I train-wrecked a little. The other guys held it together but I was off the rails once or twice. I think I know what happened to me. We had a lot of snow overnight Friday and I was planning on getting up pretty early to dig out so that we could drive up to see my step daughter perform with the all-state choir in Concord, NH at 1:30. The stress of it all must have popped me awake at about 3:30 am. I couldn’t get back to sleep no matter what I did. So when the third set came around I was at about the 20 hour mark. I didn’t feel tired. There is too much adrenaline pumping for that, but I think I was really mentally fatigued. Things that I usually do without a second thought suddenly escaped me. Guitar parts that I usually nail became challenging, or I just flat out forgot them. It pissed me off, but I took out my frustration on a couple of solos and it got better. Still, stupid snow storm.

We booked two more shows for later in the year so we have three booked now. Every show we’ve done and every one we have booked has been at the same bar. That’s not really a good sign, but I am too old to care about such things. My days of seeing music as a career are so far gone that I can barely remember when it was an actual thing.

The next show is in early June. I promise I will have spare picks at all times.

Gig is Getting Close

The band’s next gig is December 30th. With Christmas and everything happening between now and then, the date is actually much closer than it looks on the calendar. Our drummer sent out a rough draft of a setlist today. Let then arguing begin! Personally, I like to wait until we’ve actually played through a set before I suggest changes. I just like to know how it all feels, you know?

I am going to be using my Fender Deluxe Reverb for this show instead of my Marshall. I really love it except that when I use my two Big Muff pedals together it sounds like an over compressed mess. I’m going to see about swapping out the second muff for an overdrive pedal and try to use it as a clean boost. I already have one setup that way in front of the first Muff pedal in order to give the signal a little extra push. Now I want to add one after the first Muff to try and get a volume boost for leads. I’ll let you all know how it goes.