It’s going by so fast!

Things are moving along quickly with lots of catching up, rehearsals, final plans, meetings – it’s been difficult to keep up with this blog. So first, my apologies. I know now why tour managers tend to take a few days to answer back. Because waking up at 8AM and working till 12:30AM, and having a hotel neighbor talk all night until 4AM, you tend to pick sleep during your free time. 🙂 

On Tuesday, the band set up for a 12-hour rehearsal in a room at the venue. Our opening night is held at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, PA – have you been there? It’s absolutely breathtaking. I definitely want to plan a weekend here in the near future. It’s about 2 hours away from Manhattan. Pictures of the place below!

Soundcheck^

Our first ‘bump in the road’ was an issue with the instrument! Our bassist rented a fold up bass, making it easy to transport on the train and plane, but being the first time this bassist is using it, you have to expect something to go wrong.

So, the bass neck comes completely off, strings come off, bridge comes off…it’s quite a spectacle! You can imagine that tuning and set up time is doubled for our bassist, but that wasn’t the only issue coming up.

About 20 seconds into the first song, the bridge comes flying off of the bass! Immediately we all sank and eyes got wide. Is it defective? Is it broken? Are we going to have to get a regular bass? Are we going to have to ship this back?

We all are wondering! But, the bassist calmly picked everything up and said, “No, this should be fine.” He took a second stab at setting it up, had both me and the sound engineer make sure the bridge was straight, and stuck it out! And so did the bass – no more bumps in the road on that one! Whew!

Lessons learned:

1. If you are using a new instrument (or form of instrument), if you can, try it out before the big day. In this case, we had a rehearsal, but imagine if the first set up was on stage and that happened! Be prepared!