Libertine 14th Feb - a retrospective

I played again at the R-T-Y-D acoustic Sunday at The Libertine yesterday (14th Feb). Here's some quick reflections.

Firstly - this is the second time I've played live in oodles of years being encouraged into it by R-T-Y-D members like Colin Gilman and Kenski and especially Toby by him opening up an offer for me to play at these events.

I took on board some of what I'd learnt last time - the set list was a mix of my own material (see my last post about song writing) and a bunch of covers, several different ones from my last set in November. I drop all but one of my instrumentals, as largely they didn't work in a setting like the Libertine.

This was the debut outing of my Yamaha CPX900 as the main instrument, thus leaving my loved LL11 for recording use. I was very impressed with the CPX, I'll post a review of that soon elsewhere on the site. I also stuck my Dean Markley ProMag pickup into my Yamaha (note a theme on my acoustics? Yes I love Yamahas!) FG 12 string. The tuning of the 12 string was a slight issue, it is very temperamental but soundwise it stood up and I'm inclined to soldier on I just need to find a bit more time for getting the tuning stable on it. Another bit of kit that was mighty impressive was my Boss BR-600. This is my little multitrack recorder. When I bought it I was simply after something to allow me to knock up recordings at home and it has proved very capable in that department already - check out my stuff at www.reverbnation.com/grahamhunt all of that is from the BR-600. Well it can be battery powered and has two built in mics. So I thought I'd record the set by simply sticking it on a table and getting my daughter to hit record. More than anything it was so I could listen back to myself however it aquitted itself more than admirably the quality of recording being very good, the only problems being some of the banter between my family ("Stop heckling!") and mobile phones close by causing the odd bip, bip, beep on the recording. It is all a long way from the days when I used to record my bands sets on cassette recorders that would wow and flutter and slow as the motor wore the batteries down or stretched the tape.

Having the recording has allowed me to review the gig. Firstly I need to warm up my vocals, going straight into Give a Little Bit was a slight stretch I think! I've actually never really considered myself a vocalist until now I've at best been the second singer in any band doing the odd number but now being I'm doing this solo I don't have much choice and can't really just rest out a number can I? I didn't do much banter until I was warming up myself but I should do that more at the early part of the set, I actually think it'll help me settle in more and get on top of the nerves. The sound was pretty good all round no doubt thanks to Toby's sound engineering skills. A couple of numbers seem a bit fast - again nerves I think causing me to race away at them.

Overall again I enjoyed it. It's good now having more of my own material that I can draw on and I need to continue writing to add more of my stuff. I'm pleased with the variety of the material that I'm drawing on, both my own and the covers at least it didn't sound like the same song performed 10 times.

Another notch on the belt then - this has all been something of a revelation, at first the Nov set was considered really only as a one off where I was going to at least say "I've done that"... now I'm looking to see if I can get some other gigs lined up as well and I'm still on for the Scooter Forums Radio world tour live event which following conversations yesterday maybe at The Libertine on a Saturday evening in the near future as Four Dinners (the DJ putting this together) has the feeling that The Libertine is a much better venue than the one we'd been looking at originally.