K&W in Laguna Beach -- Saturday, 02May2015

Tom told Warren that they wouldn't be down on The Corner this time, so I was ready for an early start. But at the last minute Tom's plans changed so he would be there after all, and planned to stay until 8:30, and he thought the Ukulele Girls would be down there, too. So I figured I'd better get there at 8:00 to be Next In Line. Which worked, but mostly because the Uke Girls made the tactical error of setting up across the street so I was on the bench and closer to swoop in when the Tommies quit.

But the now five-piece Uke band was set up aimed right across at us, and especially the enthusiastic, too-loud, and rhythm-challenged new bongo player was pretty disruptive. Fortunately, they only know 4 or 5 songs, and after a few repeats of each, they got bored and went home.

This was the first outing for the new Magic Bag, since the old one got stolen last weekend. All new bag (which slowed down setup and teardown 'cuz I can't find/replace anything in the new pockets), harmony box (which also replaces the guitar interface), and wireless rigs for guitar and mic. And a new mic, of course, but it wants to hang on to only one ear, which doesn't work, and the boom is short so the mic is extra sensitive and picks up the guitar and feeds back from the monitor speaker. In other words, a disaster. Fortunately, I'd suspected it wasn't going to work and had brought along the old, old, mic, which is huge and obtrusive and squeezes my head, but works well.

But after all that, the new sound is pretty great. The new harmony box has a faster processor and new algorithms that sound noticeably (to me, anyway) better. A lot of tweaking needed still (probably too much vocal reverb on all the presets, and although the guitar sounds good (its main issue of "piezo quack" nicely dealt with), it needs a bit more bass), but it was sounding really good for a first try. And mostly better than the old rig already.

Too bad, then, that it was an inexplicably slow night for a summer Saturday. We had some small gatherings, but it was pretty slow until midnight when the Party People started to appear and we got some dancing going. We ended up playing until 1am, 'cuz that last hour was the best of the night.