A Day Off
06/04/2011 10:36 PM Filed in: Blog
Finally. A day off. I haven't had a day off since March. Seriously. Either I've had gigs every weekend, cleaned the garage, or gigs every weekend. Sometimes I've even played gigs on the weekend. I've played 18 gigs since May.
Don't get me wrong. I love what I do. That's why I do it.
But a day off is freakin' awesome right now. Today we even went in to Savannah to do a little shopping. We were ready to go home about the time we got there. Savannah doesn't really blow my skirt up like it did when I was younger. For one thing, Statesboro is becoming more self sufficient as of late and Savannah is really a pain in the butt. The "big trip" doesn't impress me nearly as much as it did when I was a kid.
After we got back, we chilled out a bit until we went to the movies. We saw X-Men First Class. Very good take on the story of Charles and Erik. I highly recommend it.
Now I'm back at the house at 11:00 and finally have time to update my blog. It's been a while.
GIG BOOK NO MORE
Ashlee and I saved a lot of trees yesterday and finally solved a dilemma that's been haunting us for a while. We've shared a gig book for about 6 years and it's been complicated. With the band having over 120 songs in it's repertoire and us having well over 70 in our acoustic act, 200 songs is getting hard to manage for ANY size book. We were always re-printing, losing, and re-filing songs by genre, name, and group performance. Needless to say, we couldn't find our music at all. She would pull one of my songs out and put one of hers in its place. I would move one of mine to another book and forget that it wasn't in my main gig book. Not to mention that we had songs that we both sing independently in various keys. That was a real train wreck trying remember who sang what in which key (and we needed two copies of each repeated song).
Our solution? An iPad and a little app called "GigBook". Sweet!
GigBook is exactly what I've been looking for. I wouldn't have written it much differently, if at all. It works exactly like it should. You import songs as PDFs, add them to a playlist (by name), and it organizes the playlist alphabetically. You can search for songs as well (if your playlist is really long). Then when you click on the song title, it opens the sheet music to help you remember the chords, lyrics, or notes to whatever you're playing. The cool thing is, when you view a song in landscape mode, it only views half of the page so you get a full size sheet of paper without any page reduction. I've ordered a Boss foot pedal system to turn the page for us so I can play and FINALLY turn pages hands free! It will turn to the next half of the page or to the next page in sequence (if you're already at the bottom half of a page).
Awesome!
IN OTHER NON-RELATED RANDOM NEWS....
I found that I've got fifty bucks still on a Best Buy gift card. I'll probably buy a video game. Has anyone heard how Homefront is? Of course, I can always wait for the new Battlefield. It's looking pretty sweet.
My garage is immaculate! I spent all day last Saturday (14 hours to be exact) cleaning it - then again about 5 hours on Sunday. Brian, Sean, and I built shelves and cabinets from Lowe's and in the immortal words of Thom Yorke, everything is in it's right place.
I also put new handles on our cabinets, stitched up our bed skirt, and our good friend Danny tiled the kitchen, hallway, and bathrooms.
And now I've got the weekend off to enjoy it.
Don't get me wrong. I love what I do. That's why I do it.
But a day off is freakin' awesome right now. Today we even went in to Savannah to do a little shopping. We were ready to go home about the time we got there. Savannah doesn't really blow my skirt up like it did when I was younger. For one thing, Statesboro is becoming more self sufficient as of late and Savannah is really a pain in the butt. The "big trip" doesn't impress me nearly as much as it did when I was a kid.
After we got back, we chilled out a bit until we went to the movies. We saw X-Men First Class. Very good take on the story of Charles and Erik. I highly recommend it.
Now I'm back at the house at 11:00 and finally have time to update my blog. It's been a while.
GIG BOOK NO MORE
Our solution? An iPad and a little app called "GigBook". Sweet!
GigBook is exactly what I've been looking for. I wouldn't have written it much differently, if at all. It works exactly like it should. You import songs as PDFs, add them to a playlist (by name), and it organizes the playlist alphabetically. You can search for songs as well (if your playlist is really long). Then when you click on the song title, it opens the sheet music to help you remember the chords, lyrics, or notes to whatever you're playing. The cool thing is, when you view a song in landscape mode, it only views half of the page so you get a full size sheet of paper without any page reduction. I've ordered a Boss foot pedal system to turn the page for us so I can play and FINALLY turn pages hands free! It will turn to the next half of the page or to the next page in sequence (if you're already at the bottom half of a page).
Awesome!
IN OTHER NON-RELATED RANDOM NEWS....
I found that I've got fifty bucks still on a Best Buy gift card. I'll probably buy a video game. Has anyone heard how Homefront is? Of course, I can always wait for the new Battlefield. It's looking pretty sweet.
My garage is immaculate! I spent all day last Saturday (14 hours to be exact) cleaning it - then again about 5 hours on Sunday. Brian, Sean, and I built shelves and cabinets from Lowe's and in the immortal words of Thom Yorke, everything is in it's right place.
I also put new handles on our cabinets, stitched up our bed skirt, and our good friend Danny tiled the kitchen, hallway, and bathrooms.
And now I've got the weekend off to enjoy it.
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