[Sticky] Your first gig - tell us!

Our first gig in the little club in our village next friday (a week :shock: :D). It'll be my first time singing in public properly..

Technically my first gig was a couple months ago for a rock camp, but my first real gig was for Fox news... They did a story on us, and then we played live in the studio... It was pretty cool....

We also have an outside gig on Congress Ave. (The main road in Austin) on August 8th, and we're also playing on August 27th at the Keep Austin Weird Festival in front of about 5,000 to 10,000 people! Also, there will be local popular bands like Grady (Their drummer is Chris Layton, who was the drummer for SRV) and I've heard that Los Lonely Boys and Spoon will also be playing... :)

Hey Yoyo, be sure to tell all when it all happens. It's all in the details! I can't wait! :-) By the way, that's a HUGE crowd expected!

Posted it long time ago but figure I might as well put a small sumary here for completeness sake. :wink:

Anyway, the band I'm in (two dudes on drums and keybord, one girl doing vocals and accoustic guitar and me with electric/accoustic guitars) had it's first 'gig' a few months ago. It was at some kind of 25th wedding anniversary of the drummer's parents were we would perform four of our own songs outside in the garden for about 50 guests or so. We arrived early, except for the keybord player who had to cross half the country. Apparantly the PA was a pretty ancient 30W(!) or so HiFi amp so I decided to use the 30W Vox outside instead of the V-amp so only the vocals, accoustic guitars and keybord would go into the mixer. The only speakers we had would be placed in front of us so the audiance could somewhat hear it, hopefully.

So the three of us we decide to do a soundcheck and without the keybords it went pretty smooth. The drummer kept his volume down and we had plenty of power for the vocals and guitars. I smashed a string on the floyd-equiped Ibanez so I had to step back to We set the volume of the keybord pretty much randomly and waited for him to arrive. By the time that happened we were pretty much supposed to start so we had no time for another soundcheck.

The first few songs were only with accoustic guitars and it went pretty well. Our vocaliste was pretty nervous which you could see easily but her voice didn;t seem to suffer even a bit. None of the songs are really complex but they were played nearly flawless by all and I'm pretty pleased with that. The final song, which was the only song I used my Dean with (we can play most of our songs 'electric' and 'unplugged', we went for mostly unplugged due to the setting) and it didn't went as expected. For some yet mysterious reason had the volume knob of my 'manual' preset on the Vox suddenly decided to turn itself down. So when I kicked in my distortion the volume slightly dropped instead of increased. Major bummer. The song itself went fine and was a pretty upbeat ending of the mini-gig.

Big downside of the gig was that the audience was mostly utterly uninterested and only applauded because they were polite enough to do so. We could have played the best on earth that day and noone would have noticed. Really annoyed the heck out of me and I left pretty fast congratulating the hosts.

Some neat pics on my way, will post them once I get them. All-in-all a fairly good performance of our young band but a gig better forgotten for the rest. I did learn one thing though: keep a high-voltage gate around your gear while you're gone. :twisted:

My first gig was 1971. My dad had to take my guitar and amp in the back of our car and it was a snowy night. We almost got wrecked due to the slick roads.

At the gig we were playing Maggie May by Rod Stewart and it was my first ever lead. OMG, I just had a revelation. I was wearing bell-bottom blue jeans with red and black material sown around the unraveled hem. I had my ever popular flat toed boots. I was rockin'.

How embarassing looking back. Glad they never had cameras back then.

I probably weighed 70 pounds less, wet. :shock: I was also the only one with long hair back then....YIKES!!!

My first gig was technically at my high school's talent show tryouts, because there were about 50 people. But when we played at the talent show, there were a little over 1000 people there. We know because of the amount of tickets sold. It was on 2-2-06, and it was a blast. You can see the video on my web page at http://www.myspace.com/powerbass
I messed up once. My guitarist's mom filmed it, and I didn't know where to look, so I looked at the audience to my left. (She was on my right) But hearing the crowd scream made me feel awesome. I wish I would have moved around a bit more.(I had just been informed on how many people were there) I put a Title and Credits in Myself. We just got it coprighted(Yay!)
Next year, I get to use my Talk Box!

Brandon Pace

That was cool. You played solid. Being a drummer that was noticed. Hope your drummer appreciates it. If not, he will.

The camera work was good, too.

I kept waiting for the vocals and then realized there were no microphones. :D

Good job, Brandon. Sorry the crowd didn't like it. :wink: (j/k)

BTW It's been only one year since I started playing bass. I took only one lesson, but decided that teaching myself was faster. I do have 6 years of experience in various instruments, though. Thanks for the comment, bish.

Very good for only a year.

I bet it was a big year with few breaks from playing. It shows.

Keep at it.

The next thing you want to do is start working with the drummer on his foot with your chops and vice-versa. :wink:

Give your guitarist some solid backbone to wail on.

LOL...my first gig was around 1987. I was half of a country duo, and the first gig I remember was singing in the local supermarket! Just me, my friend and our guitars. We stood just inside the entrance and sang as people walked in. Boy, talk about strange looks! I don't remember much (whether we played well or not) but I do remember that we played for 2 or 3 hours, and I made $100! And I thought...."Wow...what an easy way to make money!" I went on to do it for another 12 years (errr...I mean playing in country bands...not playing in the supermarket!)

It was a benefit at a bar down in Bourbanis IL (Wazfest). I think there were about 200 people there. We were the opening band after all of the open mics. I would have to say I wasn't really nervous, not as nervous as I thought I was going to be. We have been practicing for about 6 months on the 15 songs we were going to play so I just wanted to get up there and play because I was soooo sick of practicing them. When I got there the bass player, who played an accoustic set, told me the accoustics were "great you won't even have to crank your amp or nothing everything is coming to you through the monitors."

So we get up on stage, set my amp to like 2 set the mic up, drummer counts off and we start. I start on the right chord and the bass player started on the wrong one. It had to sound like someone was "hitting a bag of cats" for about the first 15 seconds and it eventually came around. I couldn't hardly hear myself playing and we didn't get the levels right for about 4 songs into the set. We were also cramped on the stage because all of the othe band's equipment was up there as well. If I took a step back from the mic I found out that I could get hit with a cymbal.

The highlight of my first gig was when I was just at the point where I realized that the music we were playing wasn't really being well recieved (which I was afraid of, but majority rules right) and I knew that I would never see these people again. That's when we were playing a Misfits tune and it came time for the solo...I just stepped on the WAH pedal and started to shred...and I started to hear applause (????). Just goes to show you just when you think all is lost the audience brought me back and I finished feeling great.

This band decided to go our separate ways after this but both the drummer and bass player wanted me to start projects with them. I decided to go in a different direction and joined another band and I'm having a great and productive time with them.

Great gig story Tommy. :D

My first gig was this friday, 23 June 2006, were a old school metal band. We sound like a mixture of Metallica, Pantera and Megadeth. We have been a band for about two months with all of us, the band has been around since the beggining of the year.

We consist of two guitarists, one bass player and one drummer. I play the bass. The rythm guitarist, (Cris) sings aswell.

We are called Infanteria, we take ourselves extremely seriously, we want to be the next big metal band, were getting flyers, badges, shirts and posters done for us, we got another three gigs coming up, one is a collection of bands playing and the other two are battle of the bands. After that were going to make like a 8 song demo, so i hope it goes all well.

On friday we got pushed to play first, we were meant to play second but it got jumbled up and we were pushed first. I have never been so scared in my entire life, lol. It was good fun, we didnt have to pay for anything, we just played a good show, it sucks that we played infront of a punk rock crowd, not a metal crowd but it was till good fun and we got ourselves some rep.

Event: Going away party
Date: 6/11/06
Name: HemaVenoM
Songs: 3 originals (society, spawn and respawn, and i don't know the other name)

pics
http://hemavenom.tripod.com/pics61106.html
im the guy in the back of the first pic

incase you were wondering the sign says "eating children's souls out of bowls made of puppy skulls" don't ask, cuz I don't know

nice one, u guys play metal?? how many people came to watch?