So today's school shows/mini-concerts had a combined audience of about 4000 kids, from the little 'uns to high schoolers. We had a long lunch (long for us) in between, which definitely helped!
In one of our songs, Gathering, there's a couple of sections where we clap on the downbeat. Simple and steady. Sometimes the audience will clap along with us. Today, in both school shows/concerts, the kids clapped, alright. Thing is, even if you had 2000 people who were all music majors, a theater that size is BOOMY. Also figure that yeah, most of those kids weren't exactly keeping tempo, so...it turned into a listening drill for us, sort of a watching-each-other's-hands-to-keep-tempo thing. Eep!
We loaded out our equipment afterwards, went back the hotel, and reviewed the tape from the first show. Like I've talked about before, watching yourself on tape - both as an individual and as a group - is very very telling. Nothing horrible on the tape, just us noticing if a transition took too long or timing is off.
One thing we realized is that one's perception of time changes greatly on stage. When one of our members lost grip on their bachi during a solo, only to have it slowly spin in the air above them before they adeptly (and luckily) caught it, it seemed like three or four seconds at the time. On tape? About one second. Odd stuff, that.
Dinner was at the Meat Factory or something like that. Pretty much a ton of meat everywhere. Good molasses bread, though. Needed all that protein after the last couple of days, but I'll be fine after I catch up on sleep tonight.
Tomorrow is pretty light; a 90-minute workshop with about 45 kids, then a 2.5-hour drive to Cedar Falls, IA.
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