Had a great 3 shows this last weekend. I know what you're saying: "you only listed 2 shows on your calendar!" Well, here's what happened...
My acoustic show with Carolina was Friday night at Vacillate Wine and Beer. Small intimate place, decent amount of people (especially with "the plague" still going on), and we went over pretty well. The people that were there were into the show, and we even had a few sing along moments too, which was pretty cool. The other cool thing about that show was the place had it's own PA, so setup and tear down was SUPER easy and quick.
Saturday, after dealing with some stuff with my truck, I got a text from Daisy, the singer for Electric Mayhem, who is also the singer of Cutler Stew. They had a performance on Sunday and their bass player wasn't going to be able to make it. She asked me if I could come sit in with them. We had talked about me possibly subbing for them at some point, and she was supposed to send me their master setlist for me to look over. Long story short, at first I wasn't going to do it just because I didn't think I would have enough time to work up their songs. She told me that I could just learn as many as I could, and sit out any songs I wasn't comfortable playing. After thinking about it I told her to send me the list and I'd see what I could do.
Of course, I had like no time to practice any of their songs on Saturday night, as I was playing with Reckless Kind at Sandbar. That show was also a really good show, even with having a substitute drummer sitting in with us. He did a great job keeping up with the band, and again we had a nice turnout. After the incident with blowing up a speaker cabinet, I ran both of my speaker cabinets on this show to see if maybe my amp was too much for one cab, and thankfully didn't have any issues. Still not sure how I managed to kill it. Thinking about getting a second (less powerful) head for shows where 2 cabs are too much. Really can't wait for things to get back to normal and we start seeing more people! Hopefully soon! We were finished by midnight, and were packed up and making our way home by 1:30am. I got home around 2 and crashed.
Got up early (9am, which is early for me after a late night gig!) and started working on Cutler Stew's setlist. As I really went through their list, I found that I already knew a bunch of the songs from playing in past bands, and was able to work out nearly all of the songs by the time I was having to hit the road. There were a few that I didn't get a chance to work on, so I found the chords for those songs and decided that I'd use those to get through the songs. Since this was an acoustic show I'd be basically sitting down in one place so I could have the papers on a clipboard in front of me and be able to play. Not gonna lie, I felt pretty confident at this point!
Got to the venue about an hour before show time, and let Daisy know that I had most of the set under my fingers. They were pretty impressed, especially Daisy since she knew that I only had that morning to work on them. As the show went on, I did very well with the songs, only a few wrong notes, even with finding out that a few of the songs they did were in different keys from how I had worked them out. They took a few requests from the audience, and I was able to get through those as well. So even though I could have sat out songs that I wasn't 100% confident on, I was proud of myself for playing on every song they did. The Cutler Stew guys (and gal) were happy with me, and I think that I may sit in with them for some other shows in the future when their bass player can't make the shows. I had a blast this weekend!
And the fun will continue this week. Reckless Kind will be back at Cagney's on Friday night, and Electric Mayhem will be playing Sunday at Pig Floyd's BBQ. The Electric Mayhem show will also be an acoustic show, and I think we're going to have a lot of fun doing stripped down versions of the songs we do. I'll be playing bass and guitar on songs at that show, so It'll be a (somewhat) rare instance of me doing double duty.
Editing of the "electric symphony" piece is coming along slowly, but steadily. I'm starting to think about doing some recording as well. Have to talk to someone about another project that may happen in the spring/summer as well. I'm liking this "keeping busy" thing happening right now...
That Is All...
TB