Trust the Work, Not the Air
I am down to hours before running the new set live, and there’s a couple things to note here.
You’ve gotta trust that you've worked with this enough that feel can take over. It’s like writing a song. When you sit down to write you have to depend on your experience and the fact that you’ve done it enough that something’s gonna come out, be it bad be good, but a song will come out. It’s trust in factors unknown.
And I go back and forth with this set: It’s not enough. I just can’t do anything past a minute and then I kind of do the thing I know to turn that off and go to: it’s super deep and I haven’t even scratched the surface.
One safety measure I did not put in the set is deep, dark reverb and delay holes. They can be a crutch. They can get away from you really fast. But the main thing with that is you just really are asking for it if you do it because with the exposure of this stage you’ll lean into it and I don’t think it makes for a very good performance.
Not saying I can’t add it later, but there are things in here that kind of do the same thing without taking the easy way. And it’s been my experience with live stuff in the past that the less reverb and delay you use, use as little as possible in the live situation, because it has a way of taking over.
The other thing is the sound engineering may start adding it so you may get an unintentional band member. You have to solve for that. You never know.
Again, so much is out of your hands that you just have to arrive having done the work.
And I think that’s the major point: that I’ve played with these instruments now enough to where I can trust them. I know my way around and I’m not thinking about “oh this filter when I do this,” I’m just grabbing the filter.
And this being the first show with this particular setup, like last night it produced a beautiful song if I do say so myself.
So I kind of really get to a place hopefully where I am today — I’ve done the work to where I’m just interested to see what’s going to happen and what I’ll make of these.
I’ve got 6 movements written. I need to write one more, which should be easy, and then that kind of exhausts the chord set that I’ve got here.
So it may be in future days I’ll switch out the chords and do custom ones and buy cool ones from people and that’s all good and doable and sounds like something I can work with. But I’m staying in the headspace of this week’s set.
And like I said, I’m interested more than anything to see what happens.
I think it’s gonna work out great. I sure do hope it will. And if it’s not the greatest set ever, I’ve done enough work to where it’ll be a really good one regardless of what’s in the air.
The key is doing enough pre-work to where you do not have to depend on the air.