damomoo

Sunday gig too

Now this is how it should be, two gigs in one weekend. Maybe even three if I can get a friday gig. That would be idea and I can be off and running do this full-time. This was a wedding in Oakland, the one I blogged about that would be in downtown. They had a "fake wedding" on saturday when a tv show designed their backyard and filmed their wedding in the new backyard. It was "fake" in that the tv show didn't know they were doing a "real" wedding the next day so that all their family and friends, over 250, would be attending. The ceremony took place in the courtyard surrounded by a lovely garden complete with a rock waterfall. The restaurant is called Cafe Verbena in the building of the shipping giant APL. You might see their shipping crates on big rigs on the highways. Anyways, I did the audio for the ceremony, complete with a wireless mic for a singer and a pick-up for a guitar player. There was a hard wind blowing and you could hear it in the mic. That was my bad because I didn't use the baffler on the mic to protect it from exactly that. After the ceremony we then proceeded into the dining area for the reception. For entertainment there was a family of musicians who played for the pre-reception. The mother played keyboard while an older daughter played the cello. I was able to plug in the keyboard to my board and I mic'd the cello which sounded great. The cello player also sang some classical songs, but not while playing the cello. Then, the younger daughter, probably no older than 11, maybe even a lot younger, busted out with the trumpet and played some classical pieces as well. Are you kidding me? The trumpet? It was awesome! Then they gave me a cd and she did a jazz piece along the cd accompaniment! This little girl got a huge round of ovation from the crowd which was well deserved. Hooray for after-school arts and music programs! Next was a performance by the San Francisco Taiko. The groom's sister is a member and she's also the person that hired me and who I had been working with for the event. The taiko's powerful drumming brought out a huge excitement in the crowd which was then treated to the entrance of the wedding couple. It was my idea to have the couple enter to the drumming but the emcee didn't bring out the excitement like I was hoping he would. I thought it was an opportunity lost, oh well. The reception went well after that although because of the high amount of speeches there wasn't much time for dancing, just an hour. There wasn't much dancing by the crowd. Maybe it was my fault or maybe the crowd was just beat from a long day. This time, I mainly used the Serato for dancing, no regular cds. I'm kind of getting used to it but I need one big harddrive not two different ones to hold my music. I've got a ton of wires and plugs all over the place. Thanks to Herna for referring me on this one. I met some really nice people from this event and look to maybe get other referrals from this as well.

posted by DJ John @ 9:12 AM