Well, I have done it. I successfully played my first solo set, performing all my own material. A big jump up from doing a couple of tunes at an open mic. This all happened at the musical afternoon that we organised at Astley Hall in their Garden of Remembrance.
Unfortunately the weather was not very kind to us so that affected the numbers of people attending but at least it was not rained off. I had organised the event having been asked by the Hall to set it up. It is always additional stress having to worry about the whole event and not just concentrate on my own performance. Luckily I have had a bit of experience with putting this sort of thing together so it was not my first one but adding in the stress of performing solo for the time for a full set it could have been a lot worse. I have kept up the open mics this month and I think that has helped me to focus my practice and make quite a bit of progress.
In the end, everything went really well (despite a last minute change of performers when one had to pull out the night before). All the acts performed really well, we had some great comments from the people who attended and it was a really good afternoon. My solo performance was not perfect and there is still more work to do on my guitar technique but I was pleased with how it went and feel I am still moving in right direction. I love being able to play my own music rather than covers and am going to stick with it.
The week before the event I managed to get some time to do a couple of videos out in the hills, just me and my guitar playing some original material. They didn’t turn out too bad so I will include a link
I am releasing my second experimental album onto all the usual digital channels. The application ‘Amuse’ that I am using is being a bit of pain, not accepting releases until various hoops are jumped through. One thing that is particularly frustrating is that once you have loaded an album onto their platform you can change very little, so when they contact you to say the names of the tracks is not good enough there is no way to correct it. All you can do is delete the release and start again. I am persevering with it as it is a free platform but even so it needs to be user friendly!
I am still considering doing a little busking. I think that it could really improve both my performance and guitar playing if I just get out and do my live stuff. A few tunes at a open mic is just not moving me on quick enough. Perhaps I will finally pluck up the courage once I get back from holidays and get out there… we shall see.
The sonic journey of Jules Bryant-Funnell 