Gig Gap, episode 535 for Monday, May 25th, National Tap Dance Day, 2026.
And before I play the theme music, I'm going to tell you something.
You can already tell this sounds different. I'm going to tell you why. I am, and I'll explain.
Actually, you know what? I'll wait. I'll wait. But I will tell you that it's
not the best, most pristine sound.
There is about 10% of what you're about to hear, maybe less,
5%, that's a little overmodulated because of the microphone that I used,
and it'll all be explained.
But I did something that I've never done.
Uh i listened back to this right after
i recorded it to make sure that it
was going to be listenable and it is
of course if you find that it's not listenable
then skip to you know a different episode
and and i'll be back next week in front of my regular microphone
with uh with actually stew diaz is coming on next week but uh this was an experiment
and uh come along for the ride with me so to speak uh and uh let's see what
happens so yeah gig up national tap dance day 2026 here we go.
Greetings, folks, and welcome to GigGab, the podcast by, for,
and about working musicians here in, well, geez, I don't know,
on I-89 South in northern New Hampshire.
I'm Dave Hamilton, and I thought I'd try and experiment here with recording
an episode as I drive myself home from a gig.
And, you know, the whole idea when Paul Kent, who we had on last week,
obviously, and I started this, was that we wanted something to listen to on the way home from gigs.
Now, obviously, we never were able to listen to our show.
Thankfully, Cover Band Confidential came out. And so we got to start listening
to Adam and Dan, which is awesome.
But that was the whole thing. This is the first time that I've,
if this makes it out, and if it doesn't, well, I'm still doing it.
But I, you know, probably maybe it'll make the archive somewhere.
But this would be the first time that I'm recording an episode on the way home
from a gig, kind of serving the same purpose.
I have about a 90, maybe 100 minute ride home.
And yeah, so we played I played with Casual Gravity tonight at Revo Casino in
Lebanon, New Hampshire.
But I don't think I'm in Lebanon anymore. In fact, if I am, I've done something
wrong because Lebanon's just not that big of a town.
But I've got 46 miles on 89 South here before I turn and then have another 40 miles to go.
As I do that, the first place to start is I might as well start where the gig starts.
Now, this is the second time we played there, so I can't feign ignorance.
But I knew the first time we played there, I don't know what the lack,
I know what, made me decide to bring a mixer to this gig.
But we had always, this was, I played there, I don't know, maybe three or four
months after I joined the band.
And everybody was on ears in this band but
we were just you know plugging into the house mixer that
you know at the mercy of whatever that would be for the night
well something told me when they said oh yeah they have a house thing and i'm
like okay like what's the deal and we couldn't get an answer so i threw my mixer
in the car and before i my um mackie dl32s i threw in the car and before.
Before I left for the gig, I mapped out a scene for the band on there and kind
of, you know, dialed in some general EQs because I just had a feeling and of course I was right.
And I'll explain what happened tonight because it explains the whole story.
Nothing has changed. So I get there and the wonderful house manager.
Introduces himself to me. And, uh, as I'm kind of loading in,
I got there ahead of the bandits, you know, Friday of a holiday weekend,
those guys hit a bunch of traffic on the way up.
I got lucky, uh, which actually worked out great. Cause it's kind of a tight load in.
And, uh, I put up a little reel on Instagram, uh, gig gap podcast.
You can see it if you want to see, but, uh, it actually worked out nice to kind
of stagger our, our load in.
And, uh, so I get there and he says,
do you guys have a mixer and i said yeah yeah i
brought a mixer and he says great he says i'll just
take a feed from that and uh and i'm
like okay but do you want how many
channels do you want from us right do you want a you
know do you want some splits he's like no one's fine
like okay but then you
can't control the mix out in the house you
know and he's like well i trust you guys like
you know you guys can do it i'm like what i i appreciate
the trust but it's not so much trust it's we're
blind to what's happening we can't hear what's happening out there
he's like oh do you need speakers i'm like oh no sorry
you misunderstand we're all on ears we can
mix our own ears but we can mix what's
happening out in front but a we're you know busy playing and
b we can't hear ever what it
sounds like out front so would you
like control so that i could give you like a
submix of the vocals and a submix of the guitars and like you know those kinds
of things so you just have a little bit of balance he's like no no one's fine
one one mix you know one one signal from you guys is fine he's like i'll adjust
the volume okay sure enough and uh and so So that was how the night went.
There was some fun little feedback to dial out of their system from the stage.
I'm still not sure why that happened, but, you know, all fine.
So that was, yeah, that was how the night started.
And it actually went fairly well They changed the rule at this club Since the
last time we were there It is a casino And we were informed that The band was
not permitted to have alcohol,
Until after we played And I figured, well I certainly don't need alcohol I don't
need alcohol to play I certainly don't need it after I play I want to pack up
and do this I want to get on the road I got a podcast to record.
So the band, I think it certainly wasn't the first gig that each of us have
done sober, but I think it was the first gig that this band has done sober.
And it actually went really well.
Everybody played well. I think some tempos were a little fast.
The ones that we didn't count to a click, of course, which is yet another.
Man, I can't – I love having a click to count songs off to because it's just
– it's so nice not to let adrenaline distract us and let adrenaline drive.
And adrenaline can go both ways, right? If you're tired, you're dragging.
If you're, you know, amped up, it's like – it makes a difference.
If you haven't done it, if you're on ears, or even if one person's,
you know, if the person counting in the songs is on ears, I recommend trying it.
It's quite a thing, and it makes a big difference, in my opinion.
I made a little list of things to talk about.
We recently did those Boston Cream gigs. Man, it really came together well.
And I learned some things about how to learn some things that I wanted to share.
And a lot of it was actually relearning things. We'll start with harmonies, vocal harmonies.
I, my experience, well, my experience singing started just kind of off the cuff band I was in and,
and I guess it would have been college was when I started as Bangkok Go Figure and we needed, you know,
harmonies and I knew I could sing and, and all that.
And I'm like, yeah, I want to be involved in the harmonies in this band.
And that was, and it worked out great.
It was an original band. And so it's fairly, certainly you can map out harmonies
in an original band and build stacks and all those things make it even better.
But especially in an original band, you can certainly get away with everybody
kind of just singing where they're comfortable and maybe tweaking something
if something is out of tune or you have an idea.
But it's yours to build, right?
Whereas singing cover songs depending on the song depending on the band you
can certainly get away with that kind of thing too but you can also you know
think about and learn intervals and,
building stacks and all that stuff and I'd never really done the building stacks
thing but I did right at the same time in college when I was in this band and learning I was taking,
music theory, I was singing harmony in theory.
And as part of harmony in theory, I had a sight singing lab three mornings a week at 8 a.m.
On the other side of campus in a winter semester in the plains of Connecticut.
So there were some cold mornings and certainly I was not warmed up to sing, but it didn't matter.
It was not about singing with great tone or anything. It was just about singing
in tune, hearing harmonies and singing intervals, all that interval training.
And now you can do this on your phone, man, like that interval training stuff is locked into me.
And, and, you know, I, it's locked in.
Sometimes it's a little beneath the surface, but it is locked in and it makes a big difference.
Just learning some interval training. So I highly recommend that.
But then I, you know, I wound up playing in that original band.
And then the cover bands that I was in, we always wound up just singing,
you know, where we were comfortable and learning how to blend and doing very well with it.
The band that that probably set
me on the path of thinking uh it's
always going to be this easy was fling uh especially
fling doing cover songs well also originals but when fling was doing a lot of
covers which was probably the period you know it ended sort of when covid lockdowns
hit But it was sort of beginning to wind down going into that.
But certainly for the period of, you know, maybe the 10 years prior to that,
Fling was playing, you know, a couple of at least two times a month,
sometimes four times a month.
And we knew how to sing together. We had just figured out how to sing together.
And we didn't really have to work at it.
We were doing it often enough. So Aaron and I, our keyboard player,
he and I just knew how to sing together from the first time that we sort of stumbled into it.
And then Mike, one of our guitar players, joined that kind of blend.
He was kind of the number three harmony.
And then Russ, our other guitar player, would always take like a low drum, but to fill it out.
And Burke, our bass player, when he was in the band for that long stretch there,
He was good at singing harmonies. He was also good at singing leads.
And so we became a vocal band and it was easy.
And we got confident with it, which was great. We deserved the confidence.
It wasn't undeserved confidence at all.
But it led me to believe that I was capable of doing that in any band.
And that, it turns out, is not true.
In some bands, you need to honor the process.
And I had gotten so far removed from the process that I resisted it for a long time.
And as we were, you know, we do these underground gigs, which was what the Boston
Cream thing was, where we, you know, pick a genre or a band or something.
And we cover them. And it's with a bunch of people that have played music in musical theater.
Some people are more on the musical theater side some are more on the
rock and roll side but everybody's kind of lived in both worlds which is
wonderful and really talented but everybody
there is at least somewhat comfortable uh building vocal stacks and some people
are not at all comfortable just singing where they're where they're comfortable
right they want to be told the, you know.
Here's your part, go learn this part and sing it. And that,
i had been so far removed from all of my
schooling just temporarily time wise that i
wound up you know kind of resisting that
and for this boston thing i was like no i want to be involved with this i want
to be involved in the vocals i know these parts fairly well but i know that
i'm going to have to work at this and so i started i used an app called moises
m-o-i-s-e-s to uh what what that It does,
you feed it an mp3 of a song and it breaks out the tracks.
There's many, many ways you can do this. Of course, Moises just happens to be
an easy one and does it fairly well. And it'll break out if you want it to.
You can choose what you have to break out. You have to break out,
you know, guitars, drums, you know, bass.
And you can pull out vocals and then harmony vocals. I wish you could pull out
more than one harmony vocal.
I've talked to them about this. They say they're working on it,
so we can hope. But I made a mix where the lead vocal, the vocals were,
you know, at 100% and everything else was at 20%.
And I panned it hard left, you know, hard left for the lead vocal,
hard right for the harmonies.
So at least I had some, you know, stereo separation and they were very present. I could hear them.
And then I started kind of just immersing myself in it that way.
And then also grabbing the sheet music for the vocals.
And you can find Sheet Music Direct has a lot of this stuff.
You can sometimes find it on uh ultimate
guitar uh and so i
and i i've played piano and i can
read i can read i can sight read drum music no problem
i cannot sight read piano music it is part of doing a lot of you know every
good boy deserves fudge and all that stuff and then of course with you know
the boston harmonies you do you do your every good boy deserves fudge to know
that the top line is F and, and then,
and then the line above it is A and the line above that C and the line above
that's E and that's where you're living with those Boston harmonies,
um, a lot of the time, but it's fine.
You know, I, I, I know how to do it. I, okay.
Plunk it out either on a real piano or I use, uh, I can't think of the piano
app that I use on the iPhone.
It's a new one that I stumbled into actually a listener. My other podcast,
Matt Geekab told me about it and it's great.
It's got a great organ sound on it. I want to say it's not tiny piano.
Maybe it is. I'll put a link in the show notes. Uh, the show notes will be brief
for this one because I'm not doing them. I usually build the show notes while I'm recording.
I'm not doing that right now. Uh, but, uh, I'll put a link to that,
but even just, you know, plunking it out on, on the piano, uh.
Our keyboard player who takes the role of music director in the underground,
Andrew Stroud, he is great at doing all of this and he will do it for us.
And it's great to have it done for you. But the process of doing,
I noticed on whatever the last one was, like he came to rehearsal and just knew all this stuff.
And it was like, he doesn't just know this stuff. He knows it because he sat
down with it. He spent time with it.
He built all these tracks for all of us. So, of course, he knows it.
He played all the tracks. Like, well, I can do that too.
And let me tell you, that's the way to learn this stuff is like suffering through playing the part.
And like, as you do it, you see the intervals on the piano and then it's easier
to know what you're doing. And at least for me.
So, um, yeah, highly recommended.
Uh, uh, uh, so that, that became my process for the Boston cream gig.
And I think it, you know, I'm certainly not too cool to admit that that's going
to be my process for a lot of things.
And it's going to, I think it, I've relearned how to learn harmonies, you know.
So I'm excited about that. And I feel like I've unlocked something,
which I really am stoked about.
We might as well stay on the show.
On the on the subject of the boston cream
thing because it's here and i had another thing i
posted a video on my personal page uh
of us playing foreplay long
time uh live at one of the first of the two gigs there'll be more videos we
have we have recordings the whole thing with with pro mixes and all that stuff
um but this was just a you know proud shot on an iphone it sounded good and
we played it really well.
And, you know, there's those in foreplay, there's those triplets,
you know, and the drums play those along with the organ at times.
And it's crash, snare, snare, crash, snare, snare, crash, snare,
snare is what those triplets, you know, become.
And Buddy Gibbons, who has been on the show a couple of times and is a phenomenal
drummer, commented, he's like, interesting that you're playing those single strokes.
So I was just playing it, you know, right, left, right, right,
left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, which meant I was
going back and forth and I'd play the first crash on the right hand and the
second crash on the left hand and just going back and forth.
And he commented, that's so strange that you're doing that. I'm like,
well, like, what would you do? And he's like, well, I'm just stuck in the marching world.
And so he's like, I would just play all of the crashes with the right hand and
all the snares with the left hand.
So it'd be right, left, left, right, left, left, right, left, left. and in neither
one of these things is wrong obviously you know but it
that seems so i spent a lot
of time in marching too and i think i resisted i mean
i i didn't resist i learned a lot from marching and i like thank goodness for
it my chops are where they are because of it they like that is the thing that
gets your hand chops uh up no question about it but i i was always He's pretty
good at fast single strokes.
So where I have trouble on the drum set is playing double strokes like around the toms.
Uh and that sort of thing on the snare not so much
because again i i did it so much but like when your
hands are in a different spot those double strokes on the toms feel to
me feel very different than double strokes on the snare and it's
something i've been working on that i would never uh that
would not be my default live uh and and
i like it because that feels
like and this is not a slight against buddy at all
again phenomenal drummer uh but that
feels so right-handed to me to do that to hit like all
the accents with the right hand it's like i have a left hand it's it's
it's quite capable and uh i'm somewhat
ambidextrous behind the kid so uh it's like well why wouldn't i want to exercise
that part of my brain and i really like the feeling i'm sure this happens on
other instruments too that feeling that you have in your brain when when you
know both sides of your body are kind of, um, working equally.
It's fun. So, um, I'm curious for the, for the drummers out there,
or really, you know, any, anyone playing an instrument with, you know,
both sides of your body, do you wind up being more dominant with one hand or
do you find that you have facility, you know, because you're a musician,
you have a facility that way. I'd love to know.
Let's see. What else is on my list here?
I need to get, I need to get insurance for my drums. There's,
there's, there's a company we've mentioned on the show many times.
We changed insurance companies that, that for our homeowners and it's no longer
covering our, our stuff.
I'll put a link to that in the show, in the show notes too. There's,
it's a great company and they are the ones that I'm going to go with.
I want to music instrument insurance or something.
It's, it's, it's not that, but that will also be in the show notes. I promise.
I promise. Um.
Maybe that's it i don't know how long
has this been recording here it's an experiment i'm
sure it doesn't sound fantastic so maybe a
you know 22 minute podcast is is enough
to suffer through maybe it's so bad that this will never make
it to the light of day and i might as well save my throat for recording
when i'm in front of my good mic uh yeah that's
that's that's good i'm trying to think if there's anything else were there were
there moments tonight at the gig uh probably i
have two gigs tomorrow uh those are
both gonna be there with monkey fist which
is the i call it the acoustic thing that i play
with everything's amplified these days uh of
course we sing into microphones uh but uh
we um it we
are playing two gigs tomorrow one is like a private birthday
party for johnny d our singers one of
his relatives i think it's for his brother and that's at like an elks
club so that will be a
gig where people can smoke in the same room that we
are playing and i'm sure they will take advantage of that
opportunity and then the evening gig is
at a another private club it's not an elks club but it's similar kind of vibe
great vibe great people salt of the earth it's a biker i think the foundation
of the crowd is is bikers uh i don't think you have to be a biker to join, but, uh.
They will also take full advantage of being able to smoke in doors.
And so, um, this might be the best you hear my voice, certainly for speaking all, uh.
Between now and monday when i'm supposed to be releasing whatever this episode becomes,
um and monkey fist we're just singing all night long like there's no guitar solos really,
there's and i think it's just the three of us sometimes we do
bring a bass player in because it's a long gig it's like a four
hour night we play three full sets and
we're just singing the whole time uh
it's fun don't get me wrong johnny d i mentioned
earlier that fling was the place where i you know
got confident being able to sing harmonies that's also
true with johnny d with monkey fist which kind
of grew at the same
time that fling grew and john and
i it's easier when it's just two for sure to just
kind of jump in and blend but john and i blend together
so ridiculously well um and
it just it becomes it's magic uh and it's
it's wonderful but uh yeah that
also gave me that confidence of just being able to just sort of do it by feel
and and i will continue to do it by feel with john um casual we do it mostly
by feel with harmonies um but there's some that we've like any way you want it,
And from journey, those journey harmonies, it, there's, there's, it's a simple stack.
Um, in fact, my part is the, I take the middle part and it's basically a monotone
line with one note that goes, uh, I think up, uh, anyway, you want it.
That's the way you want it.
That's it. You know, uh, but otherwise it's monotone, which sometimes can be
a really hard, I call that the George harmony, right?
Uh, cause that's what George Harrison was stuck with all the time.
You know, You hear the Beatles breaking things down, and George will come up
with some melodic harmony, and John will be like, or you could just sing the
same note all the way through. It actually worked.
And then George would just do it, and he could find those notes.
That's the hard part about the George harmonies, just finding those notes.
But anyway, we have those monkey fist cakes tomorrow, which I am quite looking forward to.
And then I will peel off my clothes.
I will strip naked outside before I go in the house and put my clothes in a
bag and then bring that bag up to the laundry room, and I will put them straight
in the wash, and then I will put myself straight in the shower.
And wash the smoke off of me.
And I will take everything that was in the club out of my car immediately after
the 20-something minute drive home because ain't no way I want my car smelling
like that the next day. I've made that mistake. Yeah.
So, yeah. So that's that's on the docket for the weekend. I should mention my throat.
I haven't really talked about this on the show.
Starting in September, my throat got really I just started having this thing
where I was like I couldn't do what I'm doing here talking, you know,
solo. The solo episodes that I did for this show were just a disaster for me.
And as was, you know, just talking in general, my throat would get really fatigued
really, really quickly.
I almost felt like I was out of breath. And it took a long time.
We tried all kinds of different things. And, you know, it just came on suddenly.
And it turns out it's mainly driven by allergies, mostly a dust mite allergy.
That's the, I did all the testing and everything.
And uh it that helped a lot and it left me with a little bit of a little bit of asthma too.
And i believe it and i've asked every doctor that i've seen now that we've kind
of figured out what it is why do you think i have this and they always ask me
well did you move did you know this change this change i'm like no nothing changed
and i let them go through their 20 questions until i get sick of it.
And then I tell them, look, what I should tell you is in June and July of last
year, I had Lyme disease.
And instantly they're like, oh, that's the reason. Lyme disease messes with
your immune system and resets some things.
So right now, and so presumably that's why this started,
But it also means my body hasn't been in this habit for very long,
and I don't want to let this habit settle in.
So I'm on antihistamines with the thing that really helps me currently.
But I also got on immunotherapy, which is like a long-term thing.
You do it for probably between one to three years. I'm doing these daily drops
sublingually under the tongue. You know, and they, you know,
after I did the allergy test, they cooked up whatever the concoction is that
gives me like low doses of it.
It's like almost homeopathic, but, but it's actually the real,
you know, it's, it's more than one step beyond homeopathic, right?
It's, it's the actual stuff, not just like pieces of molecules and stuff.
And, and I'm on the like ramp up dose right now, but I think in June,
I go to like the five times the ramp up dose.
And uh they say with the drops and especially
for somebody in my condition that you know i should
start actually seeing an improvement and maybe
i already am like i i i am seeing
an improvement i don't know if it's just antihistamines or whatever but i'm
uh i'm eager to retrain my body that it doesn't need to be allergic to this
stuff and i'm really stoked that like my throat came to just before we started
rehearsals for these Boston Cream gigs.
And I was so happy to be able to sing all those high harmonies and the falsettos
where I needed to and just be comfortable with it.
But yeah, so...
And notice what your body is telling you, I guess, is the thing.
As we get older, sometimes we can just chalk things up to, well,
you know, I'm older, so my throat's going to change.
Like, we've all heard singers have their throats change. We've heard radio announcers
and DJs have their throats change. And, of course, my throat's changing.
My body is aging, like, better than the alternative, you know.
Uh but um my throat
and you could well not this recording on
this microphone but you can probably listen back to
gig gabs from you know september october november december
was bad uh and my
throat's finally it takes a long time for the throat
to heal which is why it's tough to to like
figure out what what the cause is because you've got to
like treat it for a month before it chills out
like starts to actually be good again but uh yeah listen to your body folks
it's we're you know we're all in this together and share if you've been through
something like this that's like impacted your performing all that stuff share
because somebody else guaranteed somebody else in the audience is going through
it and doesn't know why and might just be chalking it up to,
you know we're getting old like you know it's older uh so.
Please, we'll share. We're not going to make a, like, not going to be a crazy,
we're not going to obsess about it, but we'll share, you know,
like I did here, maybe even in a more compressed way.
I have all the time in the world. So, and I like this.
It's not that I like the sound of my own voice. I like the fact that my voice
actually works. So I'm kind of stoked, but yeah, all right. I'll let you go.
Thank you for bearing through this. I hope it's good enough to release.
If it's not, well, I'll do it again.
You'll never hear this. Or maybe you'll hear bits and pieces of it.
Thanks for listening. Thanks for everything. Thanks for subscribing to the podcast,
of course, and also with what we're doing on the socials.
We have the GigGap Greenroom, too, on Facebook. I don't know that that's the right place for it.
We'll see. But for those of you that have joined that, it's awesome having you
there. We're having a blast chatting about it. It's five bucks a month.
And it's kind of a, you know, it's the green room, right? It's the safe haven
on social media from, you know, the mania that's out there.
Oh, you know, I will say, and I mean, like I was saying, what Mike Schulte was
on, the vast majority of comments on all the reels that we're doing are very, very positive.
I'd love that. And you call me out when I put something stupid up. So I love that too.
Thanks for everything. Really. It's been an amazing run. And I feel like every,
you know, every six months, I feel like we're just getting restarted.
There's more to do. So thank you.
And always be performing. Woohoo! Later.
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