Well done!
I feel like I should share the (silly) tale of my first gig as well.
My first gig was about 10 years ago. I got a gig at the only place I could which was a TINY hippie-run coffee shop and since I was using Ableton Live (then v.2) I billed it as a live PA, even though I was really just DJing from multiple sources, which I’ll outline in a minute. I got two friends who were guy with a guitar type musicians with a large following to open in the hopes of someone actually showing up and rented a couple pieces of gear that I would need.
So, got this so far? Hippie coffee shop (run by actual hippies), two guys playing acoustic guitar as the openers, small crowd expecting more of the same.
My rig consisted of a PC laptop running aforementioned Live 2, an M Audio Quattro, one Stanton Str8-20 turntable running into a Gemini PS-650i mixer (still have these two!), one M-Audio Ozone keyboard (that isn’t actually doing anything…I was really nervous about being enough to look at onstage, as you will see), and one tv with an Xbox plugged into it running a DVD of “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” on repeat. In a fit of pique I dressed up as Vin Diesel’s Riddick character from Pitch Black/Chronicles of Riddick, goggles and all.
So the first two guys did their things and were warmly received by crowd and coffee shop owners, so it was my turn. When setting up everything for some reason we couldn’t get the second pair of channels on the Quattro to play ball so I had no ability to cue. Now, I couldn’t beatmatch at this time (barely can now) so this meant I was even more at the mercy of the stuff I was going to be playing, and also meant I was going to be twiddling with Live’s XY effects panels to cover up the fact that, really, I was being a glorified tape recorder most of the time with the odd batch of REAL Live PA happening only sporadically. So i get up behind the mic and coax folks to the front, who kindly oblige. I open with the first two tracks from UNKLE’s “Never Never Land” and then drop into a lesser known track thats halfway between industrial and Drum and Bass.
Now in order to understand the crowd’s reaction to this, I’ll have to add in an important gear-related detail that I left out, and that regards the PA. For such a small coffee shop, the PA there was actually quite good. Hippies do love their music. I can’t remember exact specs but I seem to remember a lot of it being pretty vintage. However, this PA was meant to broadcast live acts, people with flutes, etc. For my entry into live electronic performance I was going to need something…special. That something was a 15″ JBL powered subwoofer that I rented and put on the floor in front of the tiny stage.
So when I kicked into that head-crackin’ industrial meets DnB sub bass fiesta it was with the same delivery as Tony Montana yelling “SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND!” In a split second gray haired hippie owner’s face drops with the dawning knowledge of what he has gotten himself into, the previously obliging frat crowd finds someplace to be other than on the floor, and my friends find that they’ve all forgotten something important outside.
Absolutely freakin’ priceless.
The rest of the gig went about how you’d expect. Played a 1 hour set to a couple people who really wished they could be somewhere else but couldn’t leave, got the hell off stage, thanked the owner, and beat a hasty retreat never to return. 😀
Moral of the story is to use caution when choosing to WEAPONIZE ones sound system for the evening. 😀
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