Unfortunately, I lost my earplugs... - 2003-08-25 5:27 p.m. We arrived early for soundcheck at Paul's Place last Friday night. I used the same setup when I played there the other week, but somehow the sound sucked this time around. I fiddled with the settings for some time but gave up after 25 minutes of trying to find my tone. That's the problem with using other people's amp. You can never get the sound that you really want. But whatthefuck. It sounded okay - at least at that time. Until we played out first song. The tempo was all fucked up, my guitar sounded like an aardvark falling on a porcupine, Mulon's amplifier decided to keep quiet and watch what happens to the song without a second guitar and the mixer sounded like a cement mixer instead. Fortunately there were only a few people watching. Oh wait, Ajeep's buddies just came in, a bunch of 15-20 dudes+dudettes. Well, that certainly puts more pressure on us... But by the third song, we were starting to get a little comfortable on stage, as we started to finally make sounds remotely recognizable as music pieces/songs. We took a break after about 9 songs, and a friend of ours - Ira, played some wonderful tunes on her acoustic guitar. You've got to hear her, she's got a beautiful voice. One of her songs is currently on the Malscene playlist. After her performance, Paul's (owner of that place - hence Paul's Place. Self explanatory, yuhuh?) band performed some blues songs, and we concluded the show with 4 songs. This girl was supposed to show up and sing a couple of songs with us, but she didn't. We were pissed off with her, but that's another story. I was not really proud of Friday's night show. Again, the sound wasn't good at all, and we were not really 100% confident. We spent 2-3 hours practicing every night until 1.00pm, 5 nights before the gig, and as a result, we didn't have any sleep at all. But Paul told us that we "think too much" that day, and I think I have to agree with him on that. We did not relax and let the music flow, instead we tried to force the issue and made everything sound choppy and jumpy. Although the kids say that the show was good, I really think that they were just being nice... But it was a learning experience - playing for more than an hour for the first time - and we are really looking forward for the next 2 hours gig.