Waterloo solo show went pretty good I think. Compared to Ottawa bars it was pretty surreal playing for people who were already pretty into my songs. All the laptop stuff went ok. Some show notes:

• I needed to run 6 1/4" outs into the soundboard. The soundboard was unfortunately at the back of the giant room and the sound fellow only had two DI boxes on stage and was running an XLR snake to the back. Luckily I brought along my Behringer UB1204 mixing board (just in case) that I was using for practice. So I wound up doing the sound from the stage, which was an interesting challenge when you're playing guitar. The word is it sounded OK so I guess like... I'm a sound genius.
• It is weird to mess up your own lyrics in front of people who know them and are singing along.
• In rehearsals my song switching method (via a Nostromo n50 I found in a box) worked flawlessly. On stage however as soon as I finished a song I completely forgot what song I had just played and where I was and what was happening. So there were some false starts which nearly blew my whole ruse.
• I need to edit the songs so they cut the vocal delay effect off when they're over. Too many times I was like "thank you! thank you! thank you! .. thank you! ... thank you! what the- thank you! what the- .. what the- thank you! ... what the-"

Those are all pretty minor things it seems judging by the people who came up to get CDs signed or whatever afterwards. So I feel pretty good about it. Waterloo U. students are very smart, friendly and attractive and I was given a Waterloo hoodie by the residence council so now I can pretend that I'm one of them.

And as for travel notes:

• The Super 8 should legally be forbidden from using the word "super" to describe their hotel services.

Thanks to the folks at Waterloo for having me out, everyone in the audience and anyone I met that I of course have immediately forgotten the name of. Fun!

It's been confirmed: Friday November 23rd I'll be doing my first solo show at the University of Waterloo. That's nearly a seven hour drive from my home and will be my first time playing outside of the Ottawa area.

It'll also be my first hardcore test of the laptop + guitar + vocals setup. I'm hoping it goes totally awesome as that would mean I could travel with this sucker when there's no budget to lug a full band around and I could start fulfilling some of those Eventful demands.

The only two huge issues I'm really worried about are:

The laptop could flake out - I'll have the backing tracks on MP3 and CD as well as the laptop which would mean only my realtime vocal effects would be killed if something terrible were to happen to the laptop.

It could be totally lame - A dude singing and playing guitar to some laptop backing tracks -- is that cool? My favorite rappers generally just have backing track -- or a DJ going through the motions if they're rich and want to be super cool. Doing an acoustic show seems like a cop-out, but maybe having backing tracks is too phony.

Of course I'm sure something unexpected will happen instead. Who knows!