What's this, you say? 3 Fakes gigs in one year? Are you sure?
Yes, I am, although to be fair this was our first 'full' gig in over two years, the previous 2 gigs were at the Baseline and we can play for a lot longer than time constraints usually allow with those guys. Long-term blog readers will remember we completely bombed the last time we did a gig, and I won't lie there has been talk of "If we do a gig that shit again, let's call it a day." I won't go into the reasons why that gig went the way it did, but suffice to say the stakes were quite high for this one.
And we very nearly had to pull it! During the soundcheck it became apparent that our PA was cutting out every 2-3 minutes. We reckon it was because a capacitator had blown in the circuitry; how that could have happened on a PA that I think we've only used 3 times so far I don't know, but it had certainly been a long time since we last used it. Thankfully we knew someone in Wall Heath we could hire a PA mixer from and we went through that. Close call though.
What was different about this gig is that we had our own sound engineer (we usually do it ourselves) called Ryan helping us out. What he was basically doing all the way through the gig, fair play to him, was boosting the vocals when we needed them, so if he could see either me or Matt was about to sing he'd turn up our mics and back down again afterwards to stop them feeding back. The result, we were reliably informed by Bob Drew, was the best vocal mix we'd ever had. The same could not be said for the guitars, though. Ryan had told me to turn mine down, which from where he was standing was probably the right thing to do as I was overpowering the other instruments. However the sound was not carrying across the whole room, which meant for the first half of the gig no one could hear my guitar solos. I turned it up again for the next half of the show, but there was a huge variation of volume I needed for some of the songs and it's a difficult call to make. Seemed to work OK though, everyone enjoyed it...
Highlights? I think that was the best I ever played She Bangs The Drums, and I really like that song anyway so it was good to see people enjoy it. Steve running off the stage to go to the toilet before playing I Wanna Be Adored was amusing, if nothing else. Fire by Kasabian was a good one as well, I think I got an overall better sound by stroking the strings gently with my fingers. Probably shouldn't rule out the whammy bar though. And the gig overall felt better than the last one we did, we really enjoyed it and can't wait to be there again!
Development points: With the levels, I'm just going to have to be really aware of what I'm doing with the lead guitar. The easy option is to buy a boost pedal, but to be honest I'd only really use it in the Fakes (There's rarely a need to boost my sound in the 82s, and I play bass in Aki Maera) and that's a lot of money to spend on a pedal just to use on a few songs in a covers band that at the most does 3 gigs a year. I'd like to get some new songs rolling out for the next gig but that's going to be a little tricky. Things are going to slow down for The Fakes now in terms of rehearsals because Drewey's going to be working away for the next couple of months, and we'll only really have Friday to rehearse - if we can all make it. That's by no means a guarantee, given that I'm off to see Amy every couple of weeks, or she comes up to me, and Steve's shifts not being conducive to a regular practicing pattern! But I'll see what I can do with getting them to play some new songs, or at least some songs we've never played live before. We should get Acquiesce by Oasis out by next gig, I think.
Looking forward to it, whatever happens!
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