Had fun today and thought I’d share my perspective on it. I’ve done well over a hundred open mics and am finally confident on stage, minimal nerves and feel relaxed.
We live near a very small town, just over 500 population. A couple of years back the local post office had a morning pop up coffee shop that was open only on Saturday mornings. The building has a large verandah (porch) running along the front of it and I would go there regularly with my guitar and play some tunes (unplugged) while having my coffee.
Sadly the pop up shop didn’t last. The local community association contacted me this week saying they have a monthly meet and greet with a cake stall at the post office and would like me to come along and play some tunes similar to what I used to do at the coffee shop. They said they want to create a better vibe for their cake stall.
I spent the week working on my set list and rehearsing in particular the songs that weren’t strong in my memory. I resurrected a handful of songs that I used to play regularly but hadn’t played them in so long that I couldn’t play them from memory. With all of the old songs I only had to play a handful of times before I could play them from memory again. I never perform publicly with song sheets or tablet, always from memory,
The gig today went well. I had 3 sets of songs ready, ended up only playing 2 sets as there just wasn’t time to get through all the music I’d practiced.
One thing that stuck out to me is what I call “match fitness”. I’m no perfectionist so it’s not that I’m trying to be at an unrealistic skill level. But it still takes a LOT of work to be on top of an extended number of songs. I ended playing 22 songs in total.
I struggled a lot with low energy levels which impacted my performance a lot. I have battled chronic fatigue for many years so I knew this would be an issue today. Unfortunately my energy levels all week have been worse then they usually are. Sigh. It mostly manifested with small mistakes especially towards the end of the 2nd set. I dropped several of my more difficult songs because of the fatigue. In the first set I did manage to do one of the harder fingerstyle songs I do, If you could read my mind, the Gordon Lightfoot classic.
This gig was the first decent test of my new amplifier, the JBL Eon One Compact. I used two channels, one for the acoustic guitar which has the LR Baggs anthem pickup / preamp and the other for vocals using a Sure SM58 mic. Previously I had an AER acoustic amp (Domino) which is high end and always just sounded great without much fiddling.
I’m quite happy with how the Eon One went. Two big bonuses over the AER were: 1 - Battery powered. 2 - Full mixer app on my mobile phone. With the AER to make any adjustments I’d have to reach behind the amp to make changes. With the EON One it was so easy, I had my phone on the table just beside me so it was easy to mute and to change levels. I play mostly fingerstyle, about a quarter of the songs are strummed and for those I had to drop the guitar and overall amp levels as my strumming is a LOT louder than my fingerstyle. The guitar I used has a jumbo body and rehearsing in advance with my amp was critical as that guitar in particular is quite boomy in the low end with my alternate bass note playing during fingerstyle songs. I really had to pull back how hard my thumb hits the bass notes.
I was determined to keep the amplified volume as low as possible. My perspective was that I was not a feature act, I was simply background music and as such needed to ensure my amp volume didn’t prevent people at the meet and greet from being able to carry on conversation easily. As I played I was able to see that was the case. I also had my wife drop in and she agreed the levels were nice and low and yet she could hear my playing across the road. From that I take it that while the amp didn’t project high volume, yet it did carry across the distance.
In one song only, I noticed a fair bit of a buzzy humm with my base notes. After that song I dropped the guitar channel volume a little bit and it was fine after that. I really do not enjoy fiddling with amps / mixers so it was a relief I didn’t have to do much of that. A bit of foldback would have been great.
I play a mixture of folk songs that are a little more obscure and a fair number of covers of popular songs. I noticed one or two of the dozen or so people there singing along (more like mouthing along) to some of the folk songs. The reaction to the popular covers as a lot more noticeable. I did a couple of Credence Clearwater songs in a row and one lady exclaimed to others there “He’s playing my normal playlist”.
So I’m pretty happy with how it went. They want me back next month. I’m a LOT more exhausted than I hoped I would feel. It does feel pretty magical to have pulled it off. I often mention to newcomers to the forum how special the reward of being able to play songs is. And for me, playing for others is even better. 15 years ago, when I was still only dreaming of being able to play guitar, I could never have imagined doing this. When I was doing open mics in my early days as a performer I had horrific problems with performance anxiety and crippling nerves. Nerves did not exist at all today.
Here’s a couple of photos. You can see the size of the verandah in the wide photo. I was situated on the far left side of the verandah.
It is completely natural that you are exhausted, you had a long time on stage.
. I can imagine how satisfying it must be to be able to do something like this, above my level currently unfortunately but something I would love to be able to do 
.