Reasonably fun. We only did two songs, and I'm still not sure why we didn't just pick a third song and do it, once we found out that three was the acceptable number. In retrospect, we coulda done "Water Is Wide", or "Crying", or whatever.
It's kinda OK that most everyone else was pure Amateur Hour. The worse the rest of the acts are, the better we look, right? I wasn't really there to listen -- I was there to play.
'Course, it's nice to see the "competition". I suppose the gauge is whether you'd stay in the same room with any of them, had you encountered them in a back room at a party. For me, I guess the answer for all the acts I saw was "No", although the a cappella guy was intriguing. His songs were all correctly structured to have verses, choruses, and rational chord progressions. Dude, find a guitar player! I could have worked up the chord sheets for his songs in 15 minutes...
And that black lady with the bass player. Ouch. She was personally appealing, but when she tuned her G string down to (almost) D, and her high E down to D -- and then pulled out the tuning machine to fine tune the high string, and proceed to completely neglect tuning the G (now D). Ouch. It didn't help that Tim chose that moment to disappear, just as she was feeding back something awful. Literally painful.
I still feel embarrassed that I don't write my own songs, but last night confirms my belief that good "used" songs beat bad originals any day.
My guitar has a pretty bad tuning problem when I change (or add) a capo. I guess I, as always, am self-conscious about wasting the audience's time with "my problem" of an out of tune guitar. Probably I've sat through guys that spend more time tuning than playing, and you start to wonder why you came... (I saw Riders in the Sky recently, and noticed that they didn't tune once. The whole time. How do they get away with that?)
The small blessing is that we had the foresight to play "People Get Ready" first, where Warren has readily visible solo bits, which left the out-of-tune song to one where he's not so "out front". I really would have tuned more, but I couldn't even hear any "note" in my notes -- just the crunch. It took me way too long just to get the Drop D (for "Five O'Clock World) working (though apparently I was tuning the low string to match a mal-tuned higher one). In the song itself, I was playing by feel mostly, 'cuz it sounded like I was playing washboard, not guitar (gives new meaning to the term "rhythm guitar"). In fact, during the last yodel, I went to change back to D from the Am7 and realized that I was already on the D -- I hadn't been able to hear that I had just skipped a whole chord. Pretty embarrassing, but then I figured that if I couldn't hear it, probably nobody else was gonna mind much, either.
But, the whole capo thing is really getting to be a problem. The current capo has a pressure adjuster on it, but if I reduce the pressure any more, the bass string starts to buzz. It's hard to imagine that one of those spring-loaded capoes would do any better, especially since it's *not* adjustable, but it may be that I need to give it a try. I hate to spend $18 on it just to find out that it doesn't do any better, though. I wonder if I can haul my guitar and tuner into Guitar Center and try 'em until one works. Hmmm, on second thought, this is just the ticket for Shade Tree, isn't it? They won't make me buy one that doesn't work, and may even understand the concept of wanting to stay in tune... Maybe I can get over there on a weeknight next week.
