Lessons from the Road

For this blog post, I’m going to borrow the title of the book we did with Nigel, our tour pastor. It fits perfectly with what I’m talking about today. One thing I hope to do with this blog is share with you some of the perspective I’ve gained from doing this professionally for a long time. I’ve got a couple of thoughts about it for now. Maybe I’ll add some more tips later on…

1) ALWAYS keep it going, no matter what happens - This is probably the first thing to learn when doing live shows. First of all, REMAIN CALM. More often than not, the audience has no idea that anything is wrong until you act like something’s wrong. So just keep performing and keep it going. If your tuning’s atrocious, find a natural stopping point to fix it. Don’t stop the show to tune. If your having problems with your rig, be ready with a backup plan that you can act on during ONE VERSE of a song. Have a backup guitar. Have a backup amp. If you’re running a wireless, have a backup cable handy. If something’s not happening with your pedalboard, be ready to plug directly into your amp. Trust me - you WILL need a backup plan.

How can I speak this so confidently? A couple of weeks ago, we were playing the Dove Awards in Nashville. It’s kind of like gospel music’s version of the Grammys. It was live TV, and I only got about 30 seconds to make sure my rig worked. It worked fine. But then, for some reason, we start the song, and my guitar’s not there. It felt like a disaster, but in reality it wasn’t that bad. I had a backup cable, and plugged directly into my amp. Like I said above, I missed about one verse of the song. When I did come in, it didn’t sound great, but at least you could hear SOMETHING. Crisis averted.