OSF Special Festival Show
This weekend we had two daytime shows back to back and it was totally awesome playing outside in the sun.
The first show was Saturday afternoon for the Organization of Special Needs families. They had set up a family festival in a park near the Cupertino Civic Center with lots of bouncy houses, food and vendor booths. There was a pretty big crowd there consisting mostly of families with small children.
The show started with the Number Fox who played a nice set. They had a mellow, but cool weezer like sound. Although the sound system was pretty simple (a couple of drum mics, miked amps, two 400-watt PAs), the sound was surpisingly balanced and clear. Even though our sound guy didn’t do this for a living, it turns out he did a really good job.
Our set wen’t fairly well and the crowd was fairly supportive. There seems to be a critical mass in terms of applause - less than 50 people and there isn’t much applause at all, but once 10-20 people start clapping other people pretty much join in. Stand out songs in our set included Fall, and surprisingly Rich’s new song Guilt got a lot of applause even though it’s still not very tight.
Things to keep in mind in the future: it’s hard to read digital displays in sunlight, so there were some problems getting tuned. Rich’s vocal fx unit is still causing feedback problems which people are complaining about. Sound check and setup took us 30 minutes, and we need to get that time down to 15min. Also I forgot to push record on the video player and to ask someone to take pictures with my camera.
The sound quality was so much better than JohnnyV’s and the show had a much better vibe and I really liked the fact that we weren’t playing in a place where we needed to draw a quota of people who were going to spend XX on drinks. It’s great playing outside during the daytime - we definitely should try to get more gigs like this.
:-) Gigs like this are a lot of fun :-)