Thrash or Treat IV, summary of a day...

It was an interesting and eventful day for me, Halloween that is. Daniel was Pirate, Clayton was a Ninja and Will was Jason. CARBONSTONE had a bunch of candy bars made up with the bands logo and info in the outer wrapper. The chocolate sucks, but it's a pretty good idea. Anyway, Rachel and I took the boys around the neighborhood for about an hour. As we went from house to house I gave the CARBONSTONE bars out to some of the parents, the ones who looked like they might be into our music. The boys did pretty good on the candy, but oddly not many people came by our house, not that I really care though. After Trick or Treating, it was time for Thrash or Treat. Will and Clayton jumped in the car with me and we took off for the studio where I was about to have my 4th annual "Thrash or Treat" show.

This was the first show I have put on in about 10 months or so. This was also the first show I have put on since acquiring a couple new amps and a compressor for the mains. It took me the better part of the first set to get the compressor dialed in good, but once I did, it sounded great. It was impressed upon me though that I need to upgrade my monitor amps badly. The drummers for the last 2 bands told me that they needed a lot more than I was used to putting into the drum riser monitor, power wise that is. I did it, but noticed some funny smells and inspected the stage rack and found that the channel driving the drum monitor was really cooking, clipping badly. Nothing ever went up though, fortunately. So now I am thinking I should reconsider my plans to put every speaker enclosure on it's own amplifier channel. Instead I may parallel the mains again and use the 2 smallest "good" amps for the monitors and take the present ones out of service now. It would probably be a good idea, who knows, we will see what happens. One of the monitor amps has a little buzz to it anyway.

The first set was Redwud, these guys were really good, not what I was expecting. They were metal, but not as heavy as I might have expected. They are kind of like a metal jam band. It was really good though, they put on a really good show.

The next band was Entropy, I already knew what to expect from them as they are half of a band that has already played for us previously. Kind of Tool influenced hard core. Hard to imagine, but they pull it off.

The third band was New Wives. I don't really know how to describe these guys. It was just 2 guys. Vocalist/guitarist and a drummer. If it were not for the fact that there were only 2 guys on stage, they would have been hard to mix because the guitarist likes to run his amp LOUD, claiming that he gets better tone that way. I don't know how you get good tone out of a Mexican Strat run through a 4 x 8 vintage Fender combo at full blast, but that's the sound he wanted. I will try to keep my personal opinions about his performance out of this, and will therefore move on to the next set.

4th was The Devil's Last Stand, a Christian hard core act from southern PA. There were not many people there for their set, but they played like there were 1000 people there anyway, and they were really good. I can't say enough good things about them. Click the link at the beginning of this paragraph and check them out. I am defiantly going to hire them again.

The last act was Shane Conor, who is a very young kid with a bunch of very young kids behind him, performing some original and some cover songs in the pop-punk genre. I normally don't get into this sort of thing, and didn't expect much, but I was surprised. Shane sings for another band call Buck Fifty. His drummer also plays for The Doug Forester Band, who I have produced in years past. Shane's voice is slightly awkward, but he is on key and has a lot of heart. Between that and his ability to seek out talented musicians to back him up, as long as he keeps his heart, he will go somewhere. By the time he took that stage, there was hardly anyone there and it was pretty late, but they gave it their best anyway.

So how did I do? Well I didn't expect to pack the house, and I didn't. Halloween is a hard night to book, and as such we had 22 people pay to get in. I ended up with more security than I needed (that's a first). I took a loss for the night, but that's not a big deal, it was less than $100 lost, but it would have been nice to at least break even. Maybe next time. It was OK for a comeback show. I just need to get into the planning stages sooner and give myself more time to promote, which is what I always say. Maybe I will really do it this time. Wish me luck for the future...

Neely