How do you prepare for bigger gigs?
All gigs are great. Some gigs are what I call 'casual'... Meaning that a band that rehearses regularly can play their set well and be happy with the performance.
We (Beau Hodges Band) rehearse at least once each week, we play shows at least once each weekend (even when we made the conscious decision to 'slow down', we still ended up playing pretty much every week... We rocked a show recently and were very happy with our set (Opening for Reverend Horton Heat). We are at a place in our playing that is very good. We are tight, we have good energy, and we all know our parts!
We have a show coming up that is not quite as 'casual'...
This year marks the first Life is Beautiful Festival featuring Music, Art and Food. It is going to be one of the biggest festivals to ever take over functioning city streets as Downtown Las Vegas becomes the festival grounds! Headliners include The Killers, Imagine Dragons, Beck..... the list of acts playing this festival is just great! We feel that this event calls for a little MORE. Not more people, although we briefly considered trying out a keys player for this particular gig...
We have decided to change up our set. To really find a good flow of songs that takes the crowd through the range of our styles. We have been playing a variation of the same set for most of our two years. It's a good set, but we've never really stepped back to see if we could come up with a better one...
We have decided to bring a crew. Yup. We'll have our own camera guys grabbing video and photos, a 'manager' friend who has been helping us spread the word through social media and guitar techs. That's right... We're going to play Rock star a little bit. We've lined up musician friends to tune our guitars and prep them for guitar changes (by October 26 the temps will be peaking in the 70's - By having our techs 'wear' the guitars for the song before the change, they will get the body and neck acclimated to the conditions they will see when being played... There's nothing worse than grabbing an in-tune guitar that is cold and then promptly putting it out of tune with your body heat... )
We have decided to step up rehearsals. In the coming weeks we will schedule a round of rehearsals to go over the new set, guitar changes, everything with our techs and with each other so that all of our transitions are smooth and all of our info/cues for the techs and each other are as clearly stated as needed.
Of course, I'll let you know how the LIB show goes!
All gigs are great. Some gigs are what I call 'casual'... Meaning that a band that rehearses regularly can play their set well and be happy with the performance.
We (Beau Hodges Band) rehearse at least once each week, we play shows at least once each weekend (even when we made the conscious decision to 'slow down', we still ended up playing pretty much every week... We rocked a show recently and were very happy with our set (Opening for Reverend Horton Heat). We are at a place in our playing that is very good. We are tight, we have good energy, and we all know our parts!
We have a show coming up that is not quite as 'casual'...
This year marks the first Life is Beautiful Festival featuring Music, Art and Food. It is going to be one of the biggest festivals to ever take over functioning city streets as Downtown Las Vegas becomes the festival grounds! Headliners include The Killers, Imagine Dragons, Beck..... the list of acts playing this festival is just great! We feel that this event calls for a little MORE. Not more people, although we briefly considered trying out a keys player for this particular gig...
We have decided to change up our set. To really find a good flow of songs that takes the crowd through the range of our styles. We have been playing a variation of the same set for most of our two years. It's a good set, but we've never really stepped back to see if we could come up with a better one...
We have decided to bring a crew. Yup. We'll have our own camera guys grabbing video and photos, a 'manager' friend who has been helping us spread the word through social media and guitar techs. That's right... We're going to play Rock star a little bit. We've lined up musician friends to tune our guitars and prep them for guitar changes (by October 26 the temps will be peaking in the 70's - By having our techs 'wear' the guitars for the song before the change, they will get the body and neck acclimated to the conditions they will see when being played... There's nothing worse than grabbing an in-tune guitar that is cold and then promptly putting it out of tune with your body heat... )
We have decided to step up rehearsals. In the coming weeks we will schedule a round of rehearsals to go over the new set, guitar changes, everything with our techs and with each other so that all of our transitions are smooth and all of our info/cues for the techs and each other are as clearly stated as needed.
Of course, I'll let you know how the LIB show goes!