Heh – I’m packed in tight at OCA Mocha – which is a good thing I’m sure. However, it means there’s a lot of people here who’re gonna be shocked if not full-out horrified there’s gonna be a Live band or three. Hell’s bells, I’M a little horrified to realize that on top of my own solo singer/songwriter self there’s at least one other singer/songwriter and then a full band as well. That’s going to be a little bit tricky with all the back and forth inherent in Joe’s usual format. We’ll see how that works out. Still, glad to be the SIMPLE act for a night!
However, the fact that the place is packed makes for weird tension. I’m perhaps overly paranoid about being the old guy – I feel like people are treating me like a parent or something – which is perhaps legit. It’s a college coffeehouse and I’m misplaced by about 25 years outside of the band setting up, and I’m uber conscious of it. Normally I’d endeavour to be making friends there, but there’s a lot of tension on that end too cause the percussionist forgot his cymbals (or perhaps the guitarist forgot the percussionist’s cymbals?) and there’s clearly some anger there.
Plus my hair is a MESS.
My HAIR.
IS A MESS.
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Moving on with the night Afternoon, what have you. There’s been feedback throughout the setup caused by the above big act setting up an amplifier and their own mic. It’s not going through the sound system and I’ve watched the sound engineer hunt the edge of feedback throughout the setup and soundcheck. In all fairness, it’s not going through her system so she’s got no control over it but it clearly had never occurred to her to track down where else it could be coming from. I walked up and pointed out the amp and she shut it off but she got really angry about how she’s been doing this for four years and she doesn’t need someone telling her how to do her job.
I know in this context I’m the old white guy telling a young woman what the problem is, but I tried to do it subtly and feedback should just never be happening for more than a second or three – and she’s been struggling with it for 20 or 30 minutes, and now it was running away.
Sigh – my theory of how I should NEVER know how long you’ve been running sound unless I ask holds true. No matter how long you’ve been running sound, if you’re justifying yourself in any way other than the proof of what’s coming through the speakers you’ve kiiinda lost your argument.
Now that that speaker’s out of the way, she seems to be doing okay, but damn it – I don’t know how I could’ve been gentler with that.
As it comes to my turn to play comes the moment of truth. How does she respond going forward. Is she going to hold that perceived slight against me? Playing it’s immediately apparent that she’s got a heavy compression on my guitar. I ask “hey, it sounds like there might some compression on my guitar – if there is could you turn that down?”. When the compression gets MORE aggressive it tells me everything I need to know.
Get through the “gig” man. Get through it. I’m too old for sound interns that are too sensitive to do their jobs.