Last night I performed for the first time as “Axis Evil” at
the Gopher Hole north of Escondido CA. It went very well given that it was my
first live performance in about four years and given that the PA system sucked.
I was nervous, but I played through my mistakes. I’ve appended a photo below.
I opened the show, so I started with “Talk”. Since the main
band was an acoustic act this surprised the audience a bit, but I wanted to
leave an impression. Nobody expected the sound I gave them. Also, since I only
showed up with a guitar and microphone, no one expected the rest of the band to
come through the PA from my iPad.
I still had to pay for my margaritas though. J
I spent Friday night strategically removing tracks from the
recordings of “Talk” and my cover of Madonna's “La Isla Bonita”; the tracks that I intended to play
live. For “Talk” this was the lead material except for the chorus, which is too
hard for me to play while singing. For “La Isla Bonita”, I cut the chords that
marked the beat and played them live.
I spent all day Saturday practicing. This was a challenge
because I needed to both practice singing and prevent overworking my voice. So
I rehearsed the guitar part a lot by itself between rehearsing the
guitar/singing to give my voice rest.
During the performance my voice shook a little, and I didn’t
“move” with the music like I usually do. This was all due to nervousness. But I
still sang with confidence that was more an act than how I actually felt.
Thinking in terms of “branding” my music, I had to decide what to wear. I decided not to dress “like a rock musician” and instead showed up as I normally would at that particular bar (I am a regular there, which is why they let me perform). I think this too surprised the audience when a nicely, conservatively dressed woman started with the jarring entrance of “Talk” and sang with a masculine voice. Oh well. I don’t hide who I am when I perform music.
For the tech I used an iRig2 to plug my guitar into the
iPad, and used the AmpliTube software to simulate the amp/effects and mix the
MP3 file containing the rest of the band. Then all I had to do was plug the
output of the iRig2 into the mixer.
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