Tuesday Night Square Dance

The evening didn't start out overly well but smoothed out later on. Kent was off his feed so I went to Baltimore to call solo. No big deal. The annoyance however was that I could get my Palm Pilot to work correctly.

Usually, I warm up before a gig by singing and/or calling to favourite square dance MP3s fed from my Palm into the car stereo. A vocal coach I consulted about a year ago recommended the warm-up, especially since I was unused to singing; I also find the warm-up a useful mental tool for getting me in the right showman frame of mind and forcing focus on the calling.

I plugged in the Palm, powered it up and found... nothing. It would not recognize the presence of the SDIO card on which the MP3s are stored. I reseated the card. Nothing. I power-cycled the beast. Nothing. Damn.

After twiddling with the beast for five minutes, I gave up and started my commute to Baltimore. I still called patter figures but it wasn't the same without music for timing.

Overall, the evening went well. I had spent an hour in the afternoon creating class-level mainstream figures for the singing calls and squeezed in three class-level tips. We even had enough bodies for an A2 tip, although it didn't go spectacularly well: I'm going to take a page from allanh to re-examine and simplify my figures. Perhaps I can still keep most of the more challenging calls but insert basic calls between to ease the mental load. Perhaps some figures should be reclassified from medium difficulty to hard. I should probably write a stack more trivial figures as well... even if they prove too boring for the dancers, it wouldn't hurt as an exercise in composition.

During a break, I proposed to the board that Kent & I split up our calling work. Instead of both of us being present on our Tuesday night gigs, it would be one or the other of us. When we share a club night calling, I feel like I'm just hitting my stride when the evening is over: I think I give a better quality experience when I have the entire two hours. I don't recall ever being present when Kent called a whole evening by himself --he has done so when I was off sick-- but I suspect he'd get the same improvement in performance. It also gives us individually more flexibility in our lives as neither of us need feel pressured to head to Baltimore in an otherwise hyper-scheduled week.

The prez & treasurer thought such an arrangement would be fine and would discuss the matter with the rest of the Chesapeake Squares board. Our next club night gig isn't until the middle of October so there's no rush.

ObPromo: The C1 boot camp is coming up Friday. We still have spaces available! :-)

Tuesday Night Square Dance

The evening didn't start out overly well but smoothed out later on. Kent was off his feed so I went to Baltimore to call solo. No big deal. The annoyance however was that I could get my Palm Pilot to work correctly.

Usually, I warm up before a gig by singing and/or calling to favourite square dance MP3s fed from my Palm into the car stereo. A vocal coach I consulted about a year ago recommended the warm-up, especially since I was unused to singing; I also find the warm-up a useful mental tool for getting me in the right showman frame of mind and forcing focus on the calling.

I plugged in the Palm, powered it up and found... nothing. It would not recognize the presence of the SDIO card on which the MP3s are stored. I reseated the card. Nothing. I power-cycled the beast. Nothing. Damn.

After twiddling with the beast for five minutes, I gave up and started my commute to Baltimore. I still called patter figures but it wasn't the same without music for timing.

Overall, the evening went well. I had spent an hour in the afternoon creating class-level mainstream figures for the singing calls and squeezed in three class-level tips. We even had enough bodies for an A2 tip, although it didn't go spectacularly well: I'm going to take a page from allanh to re-examine and simplify my figures. Perhaps I can still keep most of the more challenging calls but insert basic calls between to ease the mental load. Perhaps some figures should be reclassified from medium difficulty to hard. I should probably write a stack more trivial figures as well... even if they prove too boring for the dancers, it wouldn't hurt as an exercise in composition.

During a break, I proposed to the board that Kent & I split up our calling work. Instead of both of us being present on our Tuesday night gigs, it would be one or the other of us. When we share a club night calling, I feel like I'm just hitting my stride when the evening is over: I think I give a better quality experience when I have the entire two hours. I don't recall ever being present when Kent called a whole evening by himself --he has done so when I was off sick-- but I suspect he'd get the same improvement in performance. It also gives us individually more flexibility in our lives as neither of us need feel pressured to head to Baltimore in an otherwise hyper-scheduled week.

The prez & treasurer thought such an arrangement would be fine and would discuss the matter with the rest of the Chesapeake Squares board. Our next club night gig isn't until the middle of October so there's no rush.

ObPromo: The C1 boot camp is coming up Friday. We still have spaces available! :-)