Coffee House Music – I have a short gig on Sunday at church. I’ll be doing some of my songs before service in the atrium. We have a coffee station there with some pastries available and there are chairs and tables scattered around which makes it like a coffee house experience. If you’ve never played something like this, it is a strange way to present music. People are not really expected to sit quietly and listen. They are sipping on coffee, eating their donuts and talking. We will play and sing and not expect much direct attention or feedback. This can be both enjoyable and disconcerting. It’s enjoyable in that there’s a certain amount of security in performing and not worrying if anybody cares or not. On the other hand, it’s disconcerting for the same reason, you wonder if anyone really cares if you’re there or not and whether it’s worth your time and effort. It doesn’t really matter to me. I’m just thankful I have a place to play and sing and I hope someone listens to at least some of it and enjoys it. I like playing with my buddies because their contribution makes the music come alive and makes it more fun for me. When you’re sitting at home alone writing music and then practicing it, it can sound a bit hollow and weak. But when you add a bass guitar and some ‘lead’ guitar behind it, it really becomes what you’re hearing in your head.

Dennis and I practiced a while last night. He’s played some of the songs so it didn’t take much to get them down pat, but a couple of the songs are written in a folk/country style and he’s never played that style before. It’s an alternating bass pattern that is used by finger pickers and I’m wanting to do 3 songs that use that pattern, so it took us a few times on each song before he got the hang of it. He’s very talented though and after a few runs through he had it down pretty well. I’ll record them tonight at home and email them to him so he’ll have something to practice with at home (the wonders of technology).

I’m also using a new set-up for presenting the music and that’s a little bit of a challenge. I have a new amp that I can play the guitar through with built in chorus, and I can run my vocals through it and use delay on them, plus it has an aux-in to use with my IPOD. That will be nice because I can record a drum pattern on my Mac using Garage Band, import the track into Itunes, then download them onto my IPOD. It’s really not as confusing as it sounds and shouldn’t take me more than an hour to have a track for almost all the songs we’re doing. But, the challenging part is to balance all the music coming out of the speaker while playing it live. I want to set the levels once and not have to tweak it during our performance because the amp will be on a stand about a foot or more above my head and will function as the P.A.

All of this takes careful planning, a lot of prep work, practice and more practice and not a small amount of fretting, but it will be worth it if it comes off like we want it to. We’ve been doing this long enough to be prepared for most any problem that arises and work through them. Plus, we’re doing it before friends and they are very forgiving.