Thursday, January 31, 2013

Practical Tips for Gigging Guitarists


I'm a rusty performer. I firmly believe that 90% of the work behind a performance is in preparation (obviously, apart from memorizing your parts). You may be able to nail every single note down, but if you've forgotten to bring things that are crucial to your setup, all that hard practice may be for naught. My latest gig with While It's Day helped to wake me from my slumber. I made so many mistakes that could have been avoided if I was just a little more careful with preparation and planning.

Here are three tips I'd like to present:

Pack the night before the gig
Common sense, right? Unfortunately, possibly because I've been playing for so long, I assumed that I'll automatically bring everything I need. That was a big mistake on my part. Here's what happened: I lugged my pedalboard onto the stage, I took it out of its case, propped it up and started making connections...and then I realized I forgot to bring the power supply!

Maybe I should have spent that 10 minutes the night before to run through what I needed and pack accordingly. I realized that this wasn't the first time I forgot to bring stuff because of my erroneous assumption. I've forgotten capos, cables, picks; it seems that the smaller the device, the easier it is to forget to pack!



It never hurts to have spare equipment
So now I had a giant pedalboard that was ready to rock but there was no power supply. Thankfully, we were playing at the Woodlands Civic Centre, which was quite near the Woodlands outlet of Standard Value. I hopped into a cab, made my way to Mike's shop, met him there (catching up over a one-minute conversation), bought a power supply, and came back in time for sound check. This incident may just be the most dramatic pre-gig experience I've gone through ever!


This led me to write a staple list of things that should be in my gig bag/pedalboard bag:

  • Guitar strap
  • Picks - the more the merrier!
  • Capo
  • 2 cables (for my guitar and from the output of my pedalboard)
  • Spare patch cables in case of cable failure
  • Spare 9V batteries, in case my ebow runs dry, or my bassist friend needs one for his active preamp
  • Spare power supply (now you know why!)


Know your gear
By the time I hit the stage with the band, I was a little frazzled. I have a Budda Bud wah which doesn't have an LED to indicate its on/off status, and when I used it for a song, I forgot to rock the pedal all the way front to disengage the wah. I remember our stage volume being quite loud, so I think I couldn't really hear that my wah was still on. I only realized this when I came home and starting running A/B tests between my power supplies, and was wondering why there was a nasty spike in the mids that just won't go away. If the wah was on since the first song, that meant I played the next song with the wah on the whole way through! My apologies to Leon (our soundman), I'm sure you were wondering why my tone was so honky!

I wonder if I'll have another gig with this much drama. But on the whole, I had a fantastic time playing with such a wonderful band.



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