How gig fit are you?

Is there ever any real substitute for getting out there and rocking out? Does rehearsal even qualify? How important is being gig fit to your playing?
Fact is, you play how you feel. I know when I feel rubbish I can barely play a note, but when I'm on form, well, let's just say I play alot better. I was invited down to the Music Man party at the London Guitar show to see my friend Brian Kellner perform. The guy exudes pure joy when you talk to him. He's one of these guys that says 'do what you love, and stuff the rest', and he loves playing the guitar. The guy is also incredibly physically fit. So at the end of a very long day the party begins and a few guitarists take the stage. The first two guys were great, I mean what do you expect from Music Man endorsees?, they knew their stuff. Then Brian gets up and is also great, but he takes a different approach. He wasn't their to impress or show off his amazing ability, which he has, he was their because he just loves to play guitar. The joy that was so apparent really made a connection with the people in that room. It just felt really good, and to be able to turn it on like that at the end such a long day of trade is no meant feat. Then i realise at that point, if I was to play right now, I would sound like a complete turd for the simple fact that i was exhausted. The experience has made me rethink my approach to being 'gig fit'. It's not just about sounding great on the third night of a string of gigs, it's about having enough in the tank so that even when you don't feel like it, you can just turn it on and connect with that part of you that wanted to pick up the guitar and rock out in the first place.

Great tone moves serious air!

We had a small moment of epiphany this weekend at the International Guitar Show in London. We had set up TheGigRig to do some EXTREME switching. We set up a Two-Rock Jet, Matchless Chieftain, 65 Amps London and my 62 Vox AC30, and had a Pro-14 switching all combinations of the amps + effects, wet/Dry/wet set examples, basically everything you'd expect from the best floor based switching system in the world. But here's the thing that really struck me. If you've ever been to a music trade show there's one common factor - ambient noise. Constant unrelenting noise. So, I start doing this demo, and people quite a way from our stand prick their ears up and head over to check out what's going on. At first I thought that it may be because we were 'shred free', but then a mate who was there with another company comes up and tells me that we could be heard clear as a bell through the ambient noise all the way over to his stand, about 150 feet away.
Hmmm, I thought, so I set up our young gun 'Handsome Dave' on our rig during a noisy period playing a Grissom/Mayer type feel which wasn't loud (you could still talk with no probs at our stand), and went for a bit of a stroll. Through all the noise and chaos, I could hear this tone beckoning. It was a revelation. It really moves air and those toneful frequencies that give us so much joy find their way through the contaminated void, into our ears. This is why great tone can always be heard in the mix.
It does kind of justify the ridiculous efforts many of us go to to get this right. Great tone does connect with people, and that's what it's all about, right?