chipmusic.org is an online community in respect and relation to chip music, art and its parallels.
You are not logged in. Please login or register.
Think back to your first chipmusic performance in front of strangers.
What did you do to prepare, what was the crowd like, did things go wrong? Did things go oh-so right?
I'd love to hear your stories, and maybe even learn a thing or two about what to do, what not to do, etc.
Well, we made a mistake to close the set with a more downtempo song, which people found a bit strange after some uptempo songs.
Wasn't very crouded but a fun venue in my own hometown. :-)
I charged everything, yet a GBA still ran out of batteries. All I remember was shouting "Can I have the emergency Game Boy to the stage Please!?"
To which my backup arrived and I was off again.
I also tried to use visuals.. bad move. Everything else went okay though!
there are videos on youtube of mine. london 2005 at one of the old micromusic shows. it went fairly well but people knew what they were expecting. it was more pre-prepared rave up dj set though.
Last edited by Jellica (Jan 17, 2013 9:21 am)
i dont remember what was my first solo gig, but remember the first time i played live at all, as part of a performance art show with two of my friends... i was playing guitar and running samples, had been left alone by the other guys for about 2 hours pre-set watching all our gear and drinking hard liquor straight, then arbitrarily taking every potted plant in the room and lining them up as a wall bewtween us and the audience (leaving gaps so we could see each other of course)...second half of the set, we were actually hoping to annoy the crowd, learned that was a lost cause on anyone attending a performance art show
I remember my first show quite well, we smashed up an Atari ST case and threw it into the audience. I remember using a can of premium strength lager as a prop
Here's a short clip of my first show, which was BRKfest 2012:
To prepare I put together a set of tracks I could sort of string together DJ-set like. I think I had maybe two pauses in the music. I have terrible stage fright so I didn't want to have to fill any silence with banter. I practiced my set a bunch.
I did have a technical problem though. During the beginning of one of my 2xLSDJ songs one of the game boys froze and I could not get it to work. I apologized and restarted the song.
I recommend bringing something to drink onstage (water, alcohol, whatev) because I didn't and I got very thirsty.
Overall I think it went well but it was a chip show and the crowd knew what to expect.
Last edited by roboctopus (Jan 17, 2013 2:35 pm)
It was just a simple Open-Stage Performance. One tune.
I only brought one DMG and this one sometimes only plays on Channel through the Pro-Sound (bad soldering), but he worked during the performance and played both.
I wasn't nervous until i got up on Stage and because of that i didn't move'd alot or did stuff. I also thought about changing the Groove before i went up on Stage.
Saddly i did and then when i starting playing realized it was a bad idea, so i changed it back during the performance (which you can hear if you pay attention to it).
Yeah, but they applauded, everything went better than i thought.
I played for a goth crowd, when I used to sing with my chips. It was awful.
My first chip was only a few months ago. The sound technician dropped the volume down when we hit the first bass break on a song, he dropped the singers mike too. People liked it tho. We werent nervous or something, we've been playing together in punk bands for years, but we didnt knew what to do without guitar. So we danced.
It was a 3 song set at an open mic, my music was awful though, and i was using stock lsdj kits for drums. I can't believe how bad it was, and why i wanted to play i don't even know. Hahaha. But the response was surprisingly really good, which was weird.
Mine was at a high school talent show about a year ago. I had just gotten started with making full songs in VGM_MM, but I didn't have the cash to get a Genesis and flashcart or the creativity to do something original that'd sound that great. Since everyone at these talent shows did covers anyway, I covered "I Don't Wanna Die" by Ging Nang Boyz with VGM_MM (running off my laptop) and a guitar. The people running the show didn't care much for my sound quality so they wouldn't let me use the PA system and forced me to route the VGM_MM audio and guitar audio through a single practice amp someone brought to the show.
I got a recording of it afterwards, and it sounded as awful as I expected it to. Most of the attendees responded well to it, presumably since the rest of the talent show was entirely soulful covers of Top 40 hits. (The winner was a girl who covered "Pumped Up Kicks" with her acoustic guitar.) A few approached me afterwards, said I was the only person there with any sort of showmanship. Even if it ended up poorly, performing was fun as hell and I got one or two sales of my crappy first EP out of it. The Ging Nang Boyz cover is on there, and it sounded just as blown out and tinny on stage.
My first full set as Chipocrite was at The Khyber in Philadelphia on Dec. 30, 2009. Tough night for partying but the crowd was decent! The thing I remember most about preparing was that I really only had about 15 minutes of music ready when the show was booked, so I spent like two weeks (I had a lot of vacation days saved up, hahah) holed up in my apartment getting better with LSDJ and coming up with a full set that was at least semi-presentable. The show itself went pretty well, although I do remember a cart crashing in the middle of one song. Incidentally, that is, to this day, the ONLY TIME that has happened to me onstage. I made some joke about how I saw that happen to Bit Shifter so it's OK.
(On a semi-interesting side note, the Khyber is now just a restaurant/bar only, no live music. About a year and a half later, I went back for dinner and they sat me directly where the stage used to be. Weird feeling.)
Played a bunch of WIPs from my first album in front of roughly 15 people, most of them my friends and the rest were the staff of the bar. Huge venue and it felt empty as hell. Got wasted on free beer and then drank a pint of vodka with a friend in the bathroom. Ended up screaming "Fuck Ozzy Osborn" and "Worship Satan" a few time through out my set, as there was an Ozzy Osborn tribute show at the bar connected to the one I was playing in. Went outside for a smoke and then got caught with the leftover vodka in my pocket. Got black listed from my own show. Snuck in from the back to pack my shit and then left with out getting paid.
True Chip 'Till Death
I played one song for a couple of my friends off of my psp wasn't anything special though that was the only time i played live in front of people