Varmint5000

Still at it, playing about once a week now. 89 performances since Aug '07. Really glad I started this blog to document that as much as possible.

July 08 was pretty much a wash

My two performances down in Cottage Grove at the Habitat for humanity and KSOW radio open mic benefints were disasters. The HFH I had allergeries so bad that I could barely even speak but for some reason I tried to play a full 20 minute set. It was hell. A very valuable lesson. What to do if you have scheduled to play and your voice is out? In the future I would likely just cancel since having a bad performance and the resultant poor crowd response really sucks the energy and motivation out of me. I need to be on my game and build positive performance experiences as much as possible because  thats basically the fuel that keeps me going and motivates me.

The KSOW performance was another nightmare. Got up on stage, plugged in my pedal rig, mic check good, guitar test...nothing. Messing on stage for a couple minutes with the audience tapping fingers is like an eternity. I ended up asking the sound guy to bypass my pedalboard and patch me into the console. Still nothing out of the guitar. Hell. Battery check its good. Fuck. Plan C; put a mic in front of my guitar. That always sounds like shit since I'm so used to moving around and getting subtle sounds from the piezo pickup that it was essentailly useless. When I got home it turned out the problem was that the preamp module on the guitar had gotten flipped upside down when I cleaned it a few days prior and I had been so conditioned to push the volume slider in one direction that I never even thought to push it the other way -i.e. the reason the was no sound was that I had the volume turned off. A great lesson.

So no media clips worth posting really, I do still record every performance though. 

Going to try playing at place that I have not played in Eugene yet next week, we'll see how that goes. Getting ready to go on the road playing music in coming months. I will post more on that later.