OK, I'll just ramble on. It was hot and humid. I was pretty soaked before we even started. Not too many people there that early as expected. You pulled up on the street behind the stage and roadies unloaded your stuff and brought it up on stage. I got there 2 hours before the gig even though we were supposed to get there 1.5 hours before at the earliest. Didn't get the memo.
Luckily one of the roadies was in his car and let me in. We agreed as a band to get there 2 hours before mostly because our keyboard player takes forever to set up. More on that in a moment.
The first thing I learned is that the led's on my pedals are totally useless in bright sunlight. I'll have to come up with a way to shade them. Has anybody come up with a solution for that?
We sounded pretty good according to the people who commented, so I was happy with that. My only semi major gaffe was starting a song in the wrong key, although I quickly figured that out.
My wife has a video of our last song, so I'll post that as soon as I can.
Back to the keyboard player. He has 2 large keyboards as you can see in the picture. They are big and heavy. Why? I'm sure they make a keyboard that does just about everything. He got there at 10:30 and almost wasn't ready. In the end he only used one of them because there wasn't time to get the other one to work. Remember this was a 12pm gig. If we weren't the first act and had only 15 minutes between bands, I don't know what would have happened. I recall BGU live 2014 when we were scheduled to start at 9am and Griff's keyboard player, Ty Baille walked in 10 minutes before with his keyboard on his back and was ready to roll in a matter of minutes. I can't even begin to tell you how much stuff our keyboard player brought. The worst was the cables to hook everything up. He had a couple plastic milk crates full of cables and was rummaging through them looking for what he needed. I could go on and on but you get the idea. I won't rant on that any longer, but the lesson here is to travel light and have everything organized.
So we never had a soundcheck. I had nothing in my monitor at all. The drummer couldn't hear any of us either. We could have been a lot better if things had gone smoothly in the beginning. We're going to have to have an intervention with our keyboard player. He's a great guy and a great player, but that can't happen again.
So, I may have more to add later as the discussion ensues. The 2nd picture is my wife and I on the left volunteering in the beer tent.
the
View attachment 8388View attachment 8389
