South Square – (3rd March)
On Friday 3rd March, we were invited to perform at South Square. At the time we were performing as a 3 piece in quite a small space and therefore organising equipment wasn’t too tough as the keyboard and guitar amp were more than loud enough and the drum kit didn’t have to be mic’d up.
In order to allow us to prepare, I asked Alice (who was coordinating the event) to send over a photo of the venue in order to allows to plan the best set up and to work out what equipment we needed. The space looked perfect for our three piece, however I was quite wary abut extension chords and therefore decied to pack a couple with me.
In terms of equipment, I had my keyboard, keyboard stand, keyboard amp and sustain pedal, Fraser had his guitar, guitar amp and pedal board and Shaun brought his drum kit. We ended up using Shaun’s car to transport our equipment to South square and overall it was very simple.
Mock Gig – 1 in 12 (26th April)
Here is the promotional poster for our mock gig , which I organised to happen on the 26th April. I thought that a mock gig would be great to do at an external venue to college as it would give us all something to work towards and could become an amazing event.
I chose the 1 in 12 , due to the cheap price of hiring the venue and the sound engineer as well as it being a great hub and venue for live music in Bradford. The booking system at the 1 in 12 is very simple in that you essentially go to the members bar and pencil in an event in the event book, therefore as long as the evening is free it should be fine. The 26th April was an ideal date to have the event on as it was four weeks before the final performance, which is quite late on in the project but would allow us to reflect on our performance and brush up on anything before the final showcase event.
I was very excited to be able to add two supports onto the bill which consisted of the prog metal trio called Helios and the rap duo poetic justice. Both of these bands were made up of either current or former bradford college students which was a nice aspect of it.
I decided that it would be best to do pay as you feel as we were aiming towards the student target audience and therefore it would allow people with less money to come down and support us. I was hoping that if we attracted a decent crowd then we might not have to pay for the hire of the venue as we would have made enough on the bar to compensate, however we will wait and see how that turns out.
Overall it is really exciting to be able to hold a gig playing mostly original music at one of my favourite places in Bradford. We will be aiming to perform a set between forty five minutes to an hour, currently it is week five at the time of writing and we probably have about forty minutes so we are well on our way there.
Liaising with the sound engineer – Thom
As I have worked at the 1in12 for a while and been to quite a few gigs there, I was well aware of how the 1in12 was set up and I knew Thom quite well. This made it really easy for me to organise setting up the sound for the evening and I just had to clarify a couple of things with Thom in order to plan ahead for the gig.
The first thing I needed to do was to clarify the instrumentation of each of the bands so that Thom would be able to prepare for the best way to set each band up and so that we knew what we should bring down.
Here is the set up of all three bands.
I also asked Thom to clarify the equipment that was at the club in the form of a back line. This meant that the bassist didn’t need to bring down an amp and that the drummers only needed to bring down breakables.
Thom also said that the keyboard would be DI’d and that there were plenty of microphones at the club which would cover my saxophone and both of the vocals. Fraser brought down his own amp but other than that we were travelling very light which was great.
Here is a video of me talking about the process of the mock gig. We had a discussion in the band about a week before the performance on wether we wanted to go ahead and play the gig as a couple of members of the band didn’t feel that we had practiced enough to headline. I therefore suggested that a support might be better and they agreed to take part. I was a little disappointed not to headline a gig that I had organised, however at least we were still performing and hadn’t dropped out.
Although we did manage a couple more rehearsals on the week of the gig, I decided to make some charts so as to help out the band on the structure and chords of the songs. I also decided to narrow the set down to five songs, Afro blue, stay easy, let me go or take me with you, the beautiful escape and run and hide.
Here are the charts that I made –
Final performance – 16/05/2019
For our final performance, we were scheduled to play at the Delius Arts Centre. I was lucky enough to play there last year too and have attended a few gigs meaning that I already had a good idea of the space and how we could set up as a band.
Luckily, Leah was taking on most of the event management and the only thing we really needed to confirm was our set list. We had been allocated a 30 minute set time, from 8.50pm onwards.
Unfortunately due to the Delius not having a projection screen, we couldn’t do some of the projections that I had thought that we could do.
Our equipment list was very similar to that of our mock gig at the one in twelve, except for the fact that Ian was playing instead of Fraser.
This meant that our instrument lineup consisted of, drums, bass, keyboard, trumpet, saxophone, violin and two vocals.
Most of the equipment required for mic’ing us up was supplied by the college such as the pa system and microphones meaning that we were only required to bring our instruments.
Due to the smaller space, our teacher Nic decided to mic up the bass drum and only to Di the keyboard and violin. This meant that we needed to bring a bass amp for Jordan.
Overall our equipment that we brought down included, my keyboard and saxophone, Ian’s trumpet and Violin, Jordan’s bass and bass amp and Shaun’s kit.
As we weren’t mic’ing everything up, I decided against getting a recording off of the desk as it would have sounded slightly strange and instead decided to rely on the camera footage.
South Square – 18/05/2019
On the 11th May, I was emailed about potentially playing at South Square as part of there wellbeing day and as a support to Kuunatic who were a three piece Japanese band on tour in the UK.
I was very excited about this event, as South Square is a lovely venue and I was interested in watching Kuunatic. I therefore asked the rest of the band if they could play the event.
Unfortunately, Fraser, Shaun and Jordan were unavailable and me and Ian decided to play as a duo under the name Baby Fungus. As a duo, Ian is on the violin and I am on the keyboard and we mainly focus on ambient music.
As it was the same week as the final performance, me and Ian decided to mainly improvise around a few compositions that I had written and therefore our gig wasn’t massively structured.
I was asked to help out Kuunatic who were touring with no backline by supplying my drum kit to help them. The venue supplied a PA and therefore a decided to plug in to that instead of my amp. Ian did the same and overall it was a lovely performance and experience which can be seen in the performance tab.