Last night was, at least instrumentally, one of our best..I think. As for vocals, I must apologize to the five people who bothered to stay in the room because the Soft Targets, who played before us, packed up their vocal monitor after they played. They let Josh borrow a drum throne so they had to stick around, but they couldn’t leave the monitor so we could have decent vocals? For those who don’t have to sing 3 feet in front of a loud guitar amp and drums, the vocal monitor is essential. As Nathan Arizona might say, “speakers and monitors you got a PA set, no monitors you got dick.” It was at least nice that all the music of the night was pretty good, Soft Targets included, and the Shamrock was comfortable (no smoking inside).

I think I’ve come to the conclusion that I shouldn’t be “lead singing” (or generally the center of attention) in a live band setting. I’m not enthusiastic, an extrovert, an amazingly good singer or guitarist (esp. doing both at the same time), and I’m not physically attractive enough to make that stuff matter less. All I can do live is play a song semi-competently and I can live with that, but why make an audience watch someone be awkward and uncomfortable on stage while a band tries to do with three members what really needs five or six? Even if the recordings do the music justice, the current French Horns live show isn’t going to send people to them, nor is it going to encourage any like-minded musicians to join us, which is what we need more than anything. Unless we can be sure we’ll be in front of people who really appreciate the songs enough to hear them through our badness, playing more shows in Gainesville is a waste of time.

There are a few things we could do to help. We have zero aesthetic appeal so anything would help, projectors, props, anything! It might also just come to us playing to a tape. Since it’ll be nearly impossible for us to sync a recording up to us live (and really hard to play along to for a drummer) we’re just gonna have to have recorded drums and have Josh play something else. At least for some songs this could really be nice, and for others, it would mean we could actually even play them…