Artistically: pretty good. I’m difficult to please, but from behind the mic? I was happy with that. Despite the fact that I seem to have picked up a little bit of a head cold, I felt like I was in pretty good voice. I accidentally moved the bridge in Artefacts on the fly – I jumped to the chorus early and did kind of an improv mini-bridge instead. If you didn’t know the song, I don’t think you’d know. Also, live, I’m still playing my fast songs too fast.
I brought my minidisc recorder (anybody remember those? ^_^ ) to record off the speaker. What I got off that makes me feel pretty good about how I felt while playing; I was in pretty good voice – all up and down my range, really – and the instrument mix did sound good. So I can maybe trust my ears at this point.
Lesson of the day: Artefacts is a duet and I can’t ignore that. Having worked with it enough in the recording studio to really figure out how I should be playing it (and recording it that way for Sketchy Characters), trying to perform it solo just feels… odd. And wrong. Maybe I could do the second voice with some sort of microphone effects pedal. Would that be too weird?
Technical notes: The new-to-me sound equipment performed admirably. The basic sound balance coming out of the instrument preamps sounded really nice (thanks again, John!), so the venue sound guy and I left that output totally alone. He brought up the midrange on the vocal mic a little, then helped me make a couple of small graphic-EQ adjustments to deal with the cement floor and wooden roof of the gazebo (mostly a slight dip at 1khz, a hint of high-end trim, a little very-low-end punch down – picking up resonance, I think). I wish I’d written down his name! Thanks, sound guy with the one syllable first name I can’t remember but might have been Bill but probably isn’t! If you read this tell me your name and I’ll fix it!
My amp has separate monitor outs. I think they’re line level. I’m gonna see whether I can run that as a line in to a recorder of some sort and skip the microphone stage for live recordings.
Recording: Just as I was thinking, “wow, this sounds really good! Maybe I can release a couple of these as donation-or-free live downloads!” the player started belching up garbage. There are bad sectors all over the disc. I don’t have one intact song on the recording – not even enough to edit something together. I have enough to tell me what I sounded like, but the rest is useless.
Stupid minidisc. I’m so mad. I coulda had live tracks. p >_< q
Audience reaction: I heard very good things from the venue manager, which is important because she’s also the manager of the venue I’m playing in Renton, and the sound guy, and I spotted a couple of market vendors and several children bopping about, which is always a good sign. But I’m not the audience! And at least one of you were there! Possibly more, I don’t know! Only one person from here introduced themselves. What’d you think?
NEXT SHOW: June 1st, 2010: Renton, Washington! Renton Farmer’s Market at the Piazza. Opening day! Stage time 5:30pm. See you there!
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