Show Prep

I've enjoyed taking a couple of years of from constantly battling to play live music. Though through the years I feel like we learned some valuable lessons about what kind of shows not to play, it still can beat at the heart and the head to keep after an absurdity in modern Los Angeles. That being said I am excited to play tonight in long beach. I feel confident about our level of preparation, at the same time there are enough new challenges in our set to keep me feeling some butterflies. I have to hand it to my brother, when he is in charge of making a set list he doesn't fall back into old comforts. I find that I work harder to just to be sure to keep up. I realized that the other moment after running through the set on my own in my new studio room, "I actually practice on my own now." It was a very nice feeling.
After work last night I drove over to Hollywood, to a vintage clothing store named Iguana, just down the street from Devin's office. I met Angela and Devin there and we proceeded to look for outfits for the show. We didn't really accomplish much except that we held up a lot of stupid articles of clothing to our bodies, called for the attention of the other two and said "Hey, what about this?". For some reason that gag never got old. In the end the shopping trip was really only good for a few cheap laughs and 2 overpriced bow ties.
After Iguana I went to Devin and Dylan's to pick up some amps and speakers. I got to see Princessa again too which was nice.
When I got home I had a quick dinner and then Angela cut my hair.
It's my job to make the live show backing track work together, so I then retired to the bedroom to work on that. We have been working to make the live show flow constantly, without having to start and restart a sequencer or a backing track, so I have been building the track as one long wav form with each song one after the other. In between each song I've added drones and noises, to give us time to recuperate and change settings or tune. I had done one version of the set the night before but Devin wanted more time between each song. It took an hour or two to redo but in the end I am glad I did as I was able to tweak the between song sounds and make them much more evil yet less speaker bursting than they had been the night before.
While I had the file loaded I rehearsed the songs that I thought were my weakest in the set and then I rendered the file and started to sort through the various cords and connectors I will need. Being in a psuedo electro band takes a lot of equipment and each piece of gear has many cords running in and out. I take great pains to make sure I have them all because otherwise I die from the stress.
I wrapped all of that around 11pm and called it day.