Tuesday, March 22, 2016

performance at Mr. Peabody's - 21 March 2016

Last night I performed at a more "professional" open mic in Encinitas. By more "professional", I mean that the sound system and hosting service was more sophisticated than previous venues:



Unfortunately my video recording did not work. It only captured the audio track. Strange.


I waited to play here until I was more experienced, since better musicians and a better sound technician show up at this venue, and I wanted to make a good impression (which I did).

The vocals had reverb added to them, which helped my voice a lot. The only problem with the sound is the buzzing you hear. This is due to the fact that we don't know how to ground an iPhone to the PA. I'm going to research this issue today--may have to buy a better interface or better software.

I took my brother's advice and banged on the guitar during the chorus of "Talk". More precisely, I hit harmonics at strategic points. (He said I needed to be more animated during this section that I currently only sing, because the guitar part is too hard to play and sing over at the same time--although I'm working on it!).

Still getting used to the seventh string. You can hear that I occasionally hit the wrong string because I’m still not 100% certain where I am. This is also because I'm working on not looking at the guitar while I play, since I want to instead face the audience and need to sing directly into the microphone.

Ran into trouble with the Depeche Mode cover. Apparently it could be legally considered "karaoke" since I’m using pre-recorded tracks, despite the fact that they are my tracks and I changed the instrumentation significantly. Therefore the host does not want me to play a cover again using an iPhone. (Had I just played a cover on a guitar it would have been fine--i.e. no pre-recording). So I need to learn more of my own songs to play at this venue again. I think this is going to be an ongoing issue with future venues as I move up the local music "food chain".

Soon I'm going to experiment with filtering out the bass in my voice with filters (to "feminize" my voice). I’ll post a recording of this attempt as soon as I do it.

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