Let's Head Into The Bright Lights Again...

Hello, people I like!
Meet some other people I like...
Tom Lancaster (Drums)Scott Cawley (Bass)This is my band hQ. We've been playing our brand of bluesy rock and roll for about 3 years and we're planning our historic first album, and dear lord, it's so very complicated.We started writing our own songs about 2 years ago so songwise, we're all sorted for material. But I want our release to be as professional as possible, given our budget which is essentially whatever we can get out hands on.
We have been pooling our money from the last few gigs and built ourselves a fantastic PA system which we tried out at the last gig at the Barnstormers in Horwich and that turned out as one of our best gigs ever. The actual PA came together surprisingly cheaply and quickly, and this is how we managed it...

----doo doo doo dooo----

(That's dreamy flashback music, to you and me...)

About a month ago we decided after a string of techincal hitches and trouble with levels to finally make that historic switch from amps to a full PA system. We tried borrowing a PA system for our first gig a while ago, but due to us not having a clue how to work it everything went a bit tits up and we ended up playing through just the amps for the rest of the gig.

We had a budget of about £450 pounds to build a full PA. And here is how we spent it...
(Cue A-Team like building montage...)
This is some of the hQ garage.
hQ Hq, if you like.
First of all, we made a list of things we needed which looked basically like this:

. Big speakers!
. Mixing desk
. Power amp
. Leads and connecty bits

Not so hard you might imagine. However, for a combination of reasons involving price and my love of building and messing with things we thought we would have a go at building the speakers ourselves.

It is at this point that I should mention Steven Cawley, Father of the hQ bassist, Scott, and our general financial saviour.
He found some 15” woofers on Ebay for around £30-40 pounds and decided to invest in them on our behalf. We paid him for them using money from the hQ budget and the next day he jetted off to pick them up for us. When he arrived in Nottingham to pick up the speakers the seller proposed that we could have an extra set of ridiculously powerful speakers if he could have a lift to a place in Manchester. It turns out that he had been trying to buy a car part off someone who was having trouble with communication, so Steve agreed, and drove him all the way back to Manchester, where he found out that the car part deal had fallen through.

On the way back the seller mentioned another car part seller that he could pick his item up from, if he could get there, but it transpired it couldn’t be picked up until the next day. But Steve decided to offer a lift from Nottingham to Manchester again, as he felt like he hadn’t upheld his end of the deal after the first journey.

So the next day he got a call from the guy asking if it was still ok for him to have a lift, so Steve drove all the way back down to Nottingham, to Manchester, back to Nottingham to help this guy out. Now, that’s just magic, isn’t it? Makes you feel nearly as happy as this does...A lick of paint through the new wooden stencil and...Speakers number 1
Speakers number 2
But wait... It gets better.

In thanks, the seller of the speakers brought out a large square case containing a fantastic mixing desk, and gave it to us in thanks for our trouble. We had just acquired around £750 pounds of hardware for about £50.Now, the moral of this story is, in the words of Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves:

Right. All we had left to purchase was a power amplifier, and we knew a guy who was in charge of a lot of karaoke stuff and was possibly selling one. Short story shorter, we bought it for around £100 and it was ACE.The final bit of the checklist involved a trip to the electronics shop Maplins. From whom we have bought so much stuff we’re considering asking them to sponsor us. As the speakers, power amp, and mixing desk all had a different input method we spent about £50 on mono jack, stereo jack, and XLR adaptors and leads, and 2 large, intimidating speakon cables.
Which lead to this most beautiful of monsters, the homemade Public Address system. (Yeah, I had to google that.)You may also have noticed that we sprayed the logo on the front of the speakers. You really can’t imagine how satisfying that is. We also have an old rolling blind which we’re going to spray hQ on and use as a backdrop for the next gig on the 30th of July, and we’re going to do the unspeakably vain thing, and paint hQ on the front of Tom’s kick drum head. Cliché POWER!

So, hopefully, for the next gig the whole setup will be complete and we will have a rockin’ stage setup. I cannae wait!
In addition, since I wrote the first draft of this blog, it has got better. Today we added 8 lights and 2 huge pole things to put them on, for just £30. We rewired the plugs to go to a switch for the top 4 lights, to create 3 spotlights (one each, woo!) and one will eventually have a UV bulb, just to add an extra tasty layer of awesome cake.The bottom 4 were wired to go in sequence or flash to music, so photos don't quite portray the extremity of the deliciousness.We're adding this to our current lighting rig, which consisted of these:So we're looking forward to our gig this friday at the Red Lion in Blackrod. Pop down if you're anywhere near the area!
We should be painting the backdrop tonight as well, so keep an eye out for the blog about that!
Also, I'm ordering the parts of my new computer on monday, so an album should be well underway sometime in the next month which, if all goes well, should be video blogged, Frost* Report stylee!I will talk to you soon, guys! I'm in a thoroughly fantastic mood now!
xxx