And that's now _not_ to do it.

[solarbird]

I need an icon for when a gig sucks.

First set, we kind of stank up the place. Rehearsal in the AM went pretty well, but then we got there and played like we'd never met before. Second set was significantly better, after a break, but still not great.

I dunno why; it was stinking hot, which does make me stupid so couldn't have been helping, and they had us play right in the sun, so we couldn't keep instruments in tune for more than about one song. (Literally. First set, we kinda put up with it until we had to stop, second sent we were retuning every song.) Plus, there was this weird gusting wind that wasn't really enough to cool us off - much less keep the instruments from inventing new keys - but was more than enough to knock things over - repeatedly - and screw with my ability to keep tone control over my flutes. Still, the show went on.

A friend of mine (who does this for reals) told me there'd be gigs like this, and he was right, and I was prepared, but god damn, it's the kind of thing where you just want to slink away and never appear in a venue again. We did get some applause second set (no, not sarcastic, we also got more money), so I guess they sympathised. But damn that sucked.

Comments

[rmd.livejournal.com]

yeah, there are gigs like that. doesn't mean they don't suck, tho.

here's to that being the worst evar. none shall be worse! all else will be better!

[solarbird]

I sure hope so. Thanks.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

but look at this! it's full of green screened awesome!
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3z2ua_naive-new-beaters-live-good_music

[solarbird]

That's very good use of a very cheap effect. I like it.

[wrog]

Did I ever tell you about my Bb Piano Gig?

[wrog]

one of the things about being a keyboard player back in the Dark Ages before cheap/portable digital synths and "electric piano" meant Fender-Rhodes, exclusively, never mind being in high school and thus not being able to afford stuff even if it had been available, was that one was essentially at the mercy of Whatever Was There.

"They have a piano!"
"Yay" (well okay, that was a prerequisite for pretty much anything)
"They just had it tuned"
"double yay"

Get there.
Play a C. Hear a Bb. Uh oh.
Play a D. Hear a C. Oh shit.
"Umm... did you say this was tuned?"
"Oh yes."
Play a C major scale. Hear a perfectly in tune Bb major scale.
"Why is it ...?"
"Old strings. Tuner said he'd break them all if he tried to tune it up to A-440, so it's down a step."

No big deal. Provided one doesn't have a sense of Absolute Pitch.

The one saving grace was the other instrumentalists were trumpet and tenor sax -- both Bb instruments -- and we all read out of the same fakebook, them playing as written and me transposing on the fly.

so, with a Bb piano, all I had to do was play as written myself and everything would work out. Just make my fingers form chords as indicated on the page and not listen to anything I was playing.

It was a long night. Fortunately it was a New Years Eve gig, so after the first hour or so, people were too wasted to care.

[solarbird]

Awesome. Also, well done. ^_^

similarly

[solarbird]

No big deal. Provided one doesn't have a sense of Absolute Pitch.
I don't have absolute pitch, but I experience a similar phenomenon when, say, playing a song I'd normally play on a D flute on an E flute, and I have actually failed to be able to make this work. But I can throw a capo onto my mandolin and play things just fine, which kind of implies that I'm storing these two things in different ways in my brain. Hm.

Re: similarly

[wrog]

For me, none of the D-flute technique would be applicable on an E-flute, because for me, a "fingering" is really "Here's what you need to do to produce a particular sound" rather than "Here's what you need to do to produce a particular note",

...Meaning, in this case, all-holes-closed is a concert D sound, end of story. An instrument that does something else for all-holes-closed is just a completely different instrument that I can't play at all

... i.e., assuming I actually did know how to play a D-flute, which I don't. Though actually, I probably do have some chance at being able to play a C-flute, because I learned C-recorder once upon a time and I'm told those fingerings are similar. Which means I can play soprano and tenor recorder (both in C) equally well/badly, but I'm entirely hosed on alto or bass recorder since those are in F.

Which is completely different from being able to read the music for an alto recorder, which is trivial because I had to learn how to do that in order to survive playing French Horn, right from that very first day in lessons ("play a C... no, no, lower... there you go." "That's not a C, that's an F." and thenceforth the note between the 2nd and 3rd lines of the staff that would normally be a C in treble clef is really this note that sounds like an F -- like a different clef, really.

So I can play an alto recorder part just fine; ... as long as I don't have to play it on an alto recorder.

- - -

Admittedly, there is this weird slack in the system, probably having to do with having grown up in a house with an A-400 piano, in that I actually am able to treat a 400Hz sound as being an A. Meaning that, in general, if things are up to a half step flat, I'm fine. But a whole step flat was too much. Also, weirdly, I can't tolerate any sharpness at all.

Meaning the range of notes that I can treat as being "A" runs something like 395-445. A capo I couldn't handle since that makes everything sharper, but if there were such a thing as an anti-capo that flattened everything a bit, I probably could deal with that, i.e., if I had any guitar technique at all, which I don't.

[solarbird]

Meaning, in this case, all-holes-closed is a concert D sound, end of story. An instrument that does something else for all-holes-closed is just a completely different instrument that I can't play at all
Huh. Okay. Neat.

Though actually, I probably do have some chance at being able to play a C-flute, because I learned C-recorder once upon a time and I'm told those fingerings are similar.
Hum... mostly, for the first octave of inline flutes, but not at all for transverse (metal keyed) flutes. Otherwise all bets are off.