Gig report: Conan's Pizza, Monday 11/19/07

Back at Conan's Pizza on Monday, first show with the new amp. This was a rough one.

I've had some serious noise complaints from my upstairs neighbor who apparently thinks he should be living over a family of church mice, as he calls the apartment management or the police any time I plug in my amp or strum my acoustic with anything thicker than my thumb. So that had me in a mood from early on in the day.

We've got a psychedelic song called "Needful Things", and I've been changing the electric guitar part from simple strumming to a more colorful approach with melodic runs and riffs. It's not quite show-ready yet, though, so I practiced it literally all day long, playing it at 60 bpm, at 80, at 100, 120, and its regular speed of 145bpm, just to get it down.

Until now I've been playing with a cute little padded Kustom amp--

--but I'd always dreamed of having a larger amp. I bought a Vox AD30VT off Craigslist on Friday, so I was really looking forward to trying it out.

Boy, was I ever not ready to use that amp!

I normally use a Zoom G2.1u effects unit and have my sounds programmed, but I decided to use the built-in modelled sounds of the Vox from now on. I mapped out which presets sounded best with each song and built a custom channel for "Needful Things". I figured it'd be simple enough to switch settings between songs.

Thing is, because I'm in an apartment I had no idea how loud this amp would be. I'd never been able to turn it up before! So the first song was too soft, the second song too loud, and I don't think we ever hit "just right" for the whole show!

That was the first challenge tonight. Also, I was nervous about using the new one and didn't get focused enough to know what I was doing, so when I activated the UK 70's model for our rocking tune "Heartbreaker", I neglected to click the "Preset" button. It just used the settings I had on the knobs, and I had the gain way down. I cranked the volume and that helped, but it was nowhere near the sound I wanted and I had no idea why!

Still, the audience reacted really well to it and we got some names on the mailing list we just started. Everybody had a good time, so it worked out well in the end!

Also, we've decided to take the Kustom amp to play with us at our first big gig at the Carousel Lounge on Wednesday. We figured, this little amp has been working its tail off with us for a long time, and it deserves a chance to shine before it gets replaced by the larger model! We just want to have as few unknown or uncertain variables as possible, we want to have a tight, solid show.

We'll have the videos of this show on YouTube soon.

Isaac