Right so a mate of mine asked me to go and dep with his covers band. Yea, cool, no worries.
Set list? Check, no worries. Pretty much all new to me but no major dramas.
Can I go to a couple of rehearsals? No probs.
First one this evening and so far so good. A little polishing to do but no dramas.
Conversation turns to the gig and it turns out its for an audience of 4000 if the weather is good. I am now officially bricking it. We set up about 20 mins before start, no sound check other than strum a couple of chords and no clue about back line etc.
So can I ask for advice on rocking up, setting up, playing a festival, with unknown pa and sound engineer please. It's my biggest gig and I am used to a somewhat smaller approach!
An official Foo liked guitarist since 2024
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Regarding the PA/Engineer - you have to assume that they know what they're doing and that you'll be able to hear yourself and the rest of the band OK.
To put your mind at rest, find out exactly what the situation is, ie. backline, etc.
Sounds damned cool to me
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Treat it like a normal gig and it will be fine.
You can never tell with these things till you get there. Could be huge PA and competent engineer but might be underpowered gear and everyone sharing one aux send. My advice is keep your setup simple ... make sure you can read your tuner in sunlight as a a lot of them aren't visable in sunlight. Make sure you take a small mains extension to power anything you might need up front like a pedal board. New stretched in strings, keys to songs stored in memory or written down.
I do a lot of festival stuff in the summer and prefer to use IEM's so I have a secret weapon on my board. I can control the level of my vocal and guitar and ambient level of things around me independently of the PA engineer. The design of this came about last summer when I did 4 festival gigs in one day all with bad monitoring
Other than that, just treat it like you would a small pub gig, except that you have enough room to be sure you're not dodging the bassist's headstock half the time, and it's unlikely that the singer's going to step on your pedalboard.
reminder to self- don't forget to breathe!
big crowds are much easier to deal with IME
Oh and if you can take some pics of the crowd from the stage!
Supportact said: [my style is] probably more an accumulation of limitations and bad habits than a 'style'.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
And like the other say, its much better playing to a ton of people than playing to 10 for sure.
There will be a plan for frequencies on site - and if there are multiple stages, this can be quite complex. It's not cricket to come along with a system and potentially interfere with other stuff on site.
In this case, it probably won't be on your advance as you're a dep - and it sounds like it might be a smaller affair - take enough cable to do without, take the wireless and ask when you get there nice and early (be prepared for a no..!)..
Could be a gas! Hope it works out for you
Seriously: If you value it, take/fetch it yourself
30mins change over between bands, so we were there ready when the band before us went on. So we pre-built the drum kit and got ready. At change over time the guitarist in the last band lugged his amps off stage and I got mine up there....only to discover that the sound engineer just wanted to use a DI box of some sort straight from the guitars or pedal board, so not mic'ing up the amps. That meant every amp brought along were literally just stage dressing. Lucky I use my pedal board for various sounds, and the feed I was getting through my monitors sounded fine, although when I turned off my OD pedal (a Thorpy Gunshot) the clean sound was pretty flat, as usually that's my amp running clean.
Still I don't think the punters enjoying a day in the sun were that bothered, and it was great fun.
Only issues we had were a last minute change over of set as the band on before us played a couple of tracks we'd planned to....but then I think we did that with the band on after us as well!