colleya

After all the worry, it was great! Really cool venue, The Acoustic Lounge in Poynton. All the good things you want from a venue - easy to find, car park right next to load in doors, loads of plug sockets, great staff, first drink free and they have bands on every weekend so people know to come for live music. By no means full but with a decent crowd for a Sunday night and even some dancers. A very civilised 7pm start and 9.30pm finish meant I was in bed for just after 11 - bonus on a school night. Easily the best we've played - this was only our 4th full gig as a band and 2nd as a 5 piece with sax. Rig was Fender Jazz 5 Kazuki Arai --> (new) Xvive P58 wireless --> HX Stomp --> PA. Footwear was Vans classics. Lots of positive feedback from punters and venue, including a guy from another band who recorded pretty much the whole gig and sent us the 4k files. Brilliant stuff! Don't know if Jon from Loop & Swing is on here, but thanks a million if you are! Here are some of his clips: And I'm even going to risk submitting a bit of me attempting some slap:

It's always the innocuous stuff that gets you isn't it? We've got a gig tonight - first one at what looks like a very promising venue. Midweek I put my hand in my pocket and got my right index fingernail caught in the clip of a pen - nearly took the whole nail off. After some emergency nail file work from my better half and daughter we saved it and it feels ok when noodling around this morning. Phew! According to the band WhatsApp this morning, the drummer, sax and singer are all suffering from heavy colds. Could be an 'interesting' one......

Acoustic Lounge 6 Feb Promo (1).mp4

Another friend of the band rocked up with his trumpet, jumped in for a couple of songs and absolutely blew the roof off. He also stood on the end of the line and hogged the camera angle! Here's a quick clip:

And after 30 mins of fettling - simplicity.

Our resident keys player/tech wizard has a cool solution. He's customised one of these stage boxes for each of us. I take a balanced jack to XLR from stomp to stage box on my pedalboard. Also plug my mic XLR in there. A single cat 6 cable then runs to the desk. One of the stage box ports has been reworked to act as a return signal, which then goes to my wired IEM adapter (a little Behringer power play). My pedalboard looks like this (the MXR pre/DI isn't used, it's purely a backup). TBH, I've stripped my use of mid song octave/chorus back now, so I could probably ditch the TC tuner and use the onboard stomp one. Which would mean I don't need the additional FS4/5 pedal either. Hang on........

First gig for 6 months, first gig as a 5 piece and only our 3rd in total for TTFC - a 30th birthday party at The Lescar in Sheffield. Cool place, great acoustics and staff. Went ampless with my Fender jazz 5 into a HX stomp - easy peasy. The birthday girl was the bass player in a previous band with our keys, sax and singer. So the crowd was made up of lots of their mates, a proper home fixture. We played well, I was happy with my end, my improved discipline in practising and staying focused onstage is starting to pay off. Recorded the whole thing, I'll post some stuff once it's all edited down. Birthday girl got up on bass for a couple of times, so I got the chance to listen to my own band and take a few pics. A great room for photography too. We've already got more gigs coming in, very gratifying after an extended period spinning the project up and getting the set sorted.

I've just ordered a Nordstrand 2 band preamp replacement for my VM5. Everything else about the bass is phenomenal but my Fender absolutely bosses it tonally. The Sandberg wins hands down on playability, just want it in the same league sound wise. Of course YMMV.

I found that signing up for one of the SBL courses has improved my practice. I'm practicing more because I've bloody paid for it and the stuff I'm working on is more focused.

Get the ball rolling properly with my band Tea Time Funk Club I think we've got something really good going and they're a super talented bunch. This year I want us to find the right venues and get our foot properly in the door. We've got 4-5 bookings already so hopefully things will snowball from there. Personally, I've been working hard on my playing and practicing a lot more, so I want to keep that up. Gigs in the calendar always helps me with motivation in that department too.

Double gig bag. Fancy strings. Plus my present to myself - a couple of SBL courses that I bought back in November. Time to bite the bullet and make a conscious effort to improve.