Sunday; New Gear, and Gremlins

This weekend I had the privilege of playing during our main services on Saturday evening, and twice on Sunday morning.

The calm before the storm

A lot of practice during the week allowed me to focus more on the band than my playing. Everything went well, even when our leader threw us a curveball... He decided to merge the second & third song, changing the chord progression of the third to fit nicely with second.

Sure SRH440 headphones 

Ahead of the practice curve, I decided to get all my gear packed up early so I'd be ready to shlep everything to the church later in the day. That's when I realized I had not yet replaced my crummy headphones. After clearing it with the family CFO, I picked up a pair of Shure SRH440, and a Snark clip-on tuner. Why a tuner? During the last Softer Sunday I played my BOSS TU-2 died. The Snark is a great little tuner and is priced friendly enough at $20

Saturday evening I chose to play the Music Man Stingray. While it sounded great, I really missed my G&Ls. This is kind of crazy, since the Stingray has been a real joy to play... so why was I craving the G&L? Maybe because thats all I've been playing the last few months...? Maybe because the 'Ray favors the mid frequencies and the band had a lot of that already happening (two electric guitars, acoustic guitar, keys...), so I chose to take my G&L L2000 for Sunday morning.

  SN8 Super Tight Tuner

Sunday went well enough, though we did have a few gremlins-- one of our guitarists had a battery die in his pedal board, and struggled to ID the offending pedal then to disconnect it and get back to playing. At the same time, our the leader forgot to turn up the volume on his acoustic guitar-- all of this just as we began the second set. Our guitarist was really down about the problems, but took comfort in the stories the team traded about their own surprise miss-adventures.

Since I had practiced enough the week prior, I was able to take my attention away from the chord sheets and just flow with the music. This was great for most of the day, however, I did unintentionally play a few different chord progressions than the others in the band. Thankfully the progressions I was playing fit quite nicely. 

The band in full swing during Sunday's second service-- third of the weekend

Our sound guys have a new digital board to control things on stage, and even set up a camera to film what we were doing. Our leader has asked us to think more about our "stage presence" while critiquing ourselves on our musicianship. I love the idea of being able to watch the film and identify things to improve upon, but this weeks audio wasn't much help. 

This coming weekend I get to participate with our Softer Sunday service, so it's off to the woodshed with me to prepare~