I was doing laundry and stopped into the coffee shop for the hot beef and got caught up in a conversation with Anita the drummer and the next thing I knew, Dallas and I were at Fort Dodge catching the Soul Searchers and the Weary Ramblers so of course I did guerilla recordings. Typical day.
I didn’t have time to do a thorough inventory of my bag because the laundry gobbled up some time.
I was at that motel a year ago, for the first fundraiser that Friends Of Byron held. I’m not nuts about staying in places like that because I can’t smoke in them (none ever offer an indoor smoking room) but over the years I had attended various things at the old Starlite. Some time in the past year the venue changed hands and is now the Crossroads Hotel & Event Center.
Once at the room itself, getting right up against the stage wasn’t going to work very well because there was a wide dance floor between the stage and the tables where the audience sat. Nobody was using the dance floor, but it was there. I positioned the audio recorder in the middle of the dance floor and it was happy enough to be there, but to do video I wasn’t prepared because the stage was raised and that would have required a tripod that was still at home.
The first hour was the Soul Searchers from Des Moines and nobody thought to move the tables closer to the stage. However, when the Weary Ramblers took the stage, Kathryn cajoled us to do that, and suddenly, I was within range. But I discovered that the SD card for my video recorder was also still at home, necessitating that I use my phone for video recording which meant I had to strap the phone holder thing onto the back of a chair with my broken bendy tripod.
That is not ideal. The sound system wasn’t completely cooperative and toward the end of the show, Chad and Kathryn left one of their two mics and sang into one together. Since I wasn’t on top of my recorder to swivel, that forced Kathryn partially out of the frame but I predict that it will become a regular thing with them and their audiences will see more of that in the future. It’s visually very pleasing and one less electronic thing to plug in.
