Moving Day! at Sound of Mu

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Posted by PaulKirby on Sunday, January 18, 2009

We played our first 3-set gig on Friday night. Some observations:

The single AT-3035 worked great in the first set. Sound of Mu is tiny, seats about 25. There were about 20 people there when we started. By the end of the first set there were about 50, and it soon became much to loud to hear anything. With 20 people in the place, you don't really need any PA at all, but with, we could afford to do some much softer singing and get more dynamic range in the quieter tunes.

We played our whole list, about 35 tunes. The second and third sets were not nearly as clean from our point of view, but the audience was pretty wild. They loved the bluegrass tunes, but the non-bluegrass covers we do seem to have the biggest effect: Maggie's Farm (without banjo), Wish you were here, Knockin' on Heaven's Door, Caravan, T.B. Blues, especially.

We played a two-set gig in July, and towards the end of the first set I remember thinking 'My God, I have to play for another hour yet? I'm going to collapse!' Friday night felt great. I felt like I could have played and sung longer than 3.5 hours, but we were out of well-rehearsed tunes. We could have faked for a while yet, but the crowd was getting too drunk to really care, even though they had been on our side the whole night.

The fresh thumbpick: in the middle of us hacking our way through the 3rd-set jungle, my zookies L30 started to slip badly. Put on a fresh cool Golden Gate and I got that feeling that you get when you take a shower after having been on a plane for 12 hours.

We had a great time. No serious problems. A couple of times the crowd was so loud that we got off to a wrong start, but nothing worse than that. The bar broke their record for liquor sales: about 2500$, which is a lot for a place that seats 25. We walked out of there with an invitation from the owner to come back anytime, 2 weddings and an invitation to play on an underground music festival in Oslo. I spoke English the whole night, which makes us a little exotic and makes it much easier for me to be spontaneous. We're developing a sound that's definitely in the bluegrass idiom, but has some other stuff in it, too. My wife, a big Metallica fan, thought that Magge's Farm sounded suspiciously like a Metallica groove.

I'm learning to play fewer and better notes, we're learning to play better together. Next challenge is getting better monitor sound to avoid screaming and over-playing. My vocal cords felt a little thick Saturday morning, had to be a little careful at work last night. I'm hopping in for an ailing friend tonight in a concert of Bach's Christmas Oratorio, the bass player is singing a solo-recital tonight, Schubert Winterreise. No rest for the wicked!

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