The moment everyone has been waiting for…. The fall tour!

At last, our first major headlining tour. We’ll be traveling the whole country rocking city to city night after night. Only this time, we get to be the stars. No more sharing or just being support. Life is good.

We’ve got a lot of new, fun toys for this tour. I’ve updated the monitor rig, and we’ve got a ton of new stuff on stage. More on this next in my special behind the scenes blog.

Since this was our first big headlining tour, we decided that it would be best to have a few practice days beforehand. So, 2 days before our first scheduled show, we headed down to a rehearsal space, set up the full production and ran the show a bunch of times. Our new LD Sarah spent both days programming the lights and learning our songs. I spent the time setting up our new gear and fine tuning the setup.

Now, the plan on the second day of rehearsal was to load up the semi, get all of our stuff on the bus and drive down to VA for our first show. But, since things were going so well for the first day, everything should be good for day 2, right? Of course not! We get a call around 4pm that the bus had broken down and was at least 8 hours away. Ok, not a big, we can manage. Around 6pm we get another call saying that the mechanics had broken something else while trying to fix the original problem, and that the bus wouldnt be there until 5am. Now, it’s a 5.5 hour drive from MD to VA without traffic, and we were going to be hitting rush hour traffic on the way there, so there was basically no chance that we would make it there in time for the 11am load in.

So, the bus company decided to fly us out of BWI and over to VA. That meant the crew had to wake up at 5am to make our 7am flight. We arrived at the Norva around 9am and our crazy adventure was finally over.

So, at last, the first show of the tour: The Norva in VA.

10-09 Norfolk, VA @ The Norva
Attendance: 1375
Cap: 1425

After our long morning and hardly any sleep, we loaded into The Norva. What a great venue to start the tour. They have a nice V-Dosc rig installed, and a pair of Yamaha M7CL’s. Load in started with trying to figure out how to fit everything on stage. Our backline setup is 33′ wide, and The Norva’s stage is 34′ wide. The only problem is that the entrance to the stage is at the rear of the stage. So, it was very tight getting around everything. The other problem was trying to fit another drum kit in front of our riser. There was only about 6′ of room in front of our riser. We ended up pushing everything back into the curtain a little giving the opener enough room(barely).

In the end, it ended up being a pretty great first show. Everything went very smoothly and it sounded great. I came out of the gate around 108dBA, and averaged 103-106 for the rest of the set. You just cant beat the sound of a V-Dosc rig…

How sweet doses our stage look?

10-10 Cheswick, PA @ Gravity Nightclub
Attendance: 1500
Cap: 1700

This was an interesting “club.” It was an old skating rink turing into a venue. They still had all the roller blades stashed back in the dressing room, so a lot of guys were out skating around during sound check. This was not a fun day though.

Load in was up 2 flights of stairs into the venue. So that meant they had to carry a complete 48′ semi worth of gear, double stacked front to back up a flight of stairs. To add to it, 90% of the cases were not under 200lbs! And another issue was that the loaders were all younger guys that were the size of me. None of these guys knew what was coming until they saw the truck. Needless to say, load in and load out was long and painful for everyone. It took about 2 hours to load in, and close to 3 hours to load out.

The PA was nice again though. It’s really nice when people actually read my rider. I had another v-dosc rig. 5 mains, and 6 subs per side. Another M7CL out front too. It was going to be a good day. Come show time, it was packed inside, and HOT! 1500 kids in a confined space creates a lot of heat! But, the crowd was great and everything ended up sounding pretty good.

10-11 Allentown, PA @ Crocodile Rock Cafe:
Attendance: 1400
Cap: 700

Yeah, you read that right. 1400 kids in a 700 cap room. Not ideal at all…

This is one of the smaller clubs of the tour. It has an underpowered, tired KF650e rig, with SB1000z subs. It’s not a good sounding venue at all, and the stage is tiny. After 2 nights of V-Dosc systems, I was not looking forward to this. It seemed like most of the subs were blown up, so life was not good. Come show time, it must have been 90 degrees in the room. There were so many kids packed into this small place. The crowd was louder then the PA at some points. I just had to ride it out and hope for the best. The show went fairly well, but it just would have been nice to have more PA.

Oh well, life goes on…

Back to the world of rock and roll…