12 weeks and counting...

We've been busy getting things together. We booked our flights a couple of weeks ago, that was a task in and of itself, Tricia had been keeping an eye on flights for quite some time, a decent deal came up so we jumped on it. We're hoping they won't stick it to us when it comes to taking our instruments over there. Travel light is the best plan I guess. It's a bit worrisome when I think about taking my Travis Bean on the plane, I hope I can carry it on. I thought about not even taking it but I love playing that guitar. They've gone up quite a bit in value since the $700 I paid for it in 1997. I've played that guitar for every live show since then. We're planning on having quite a bit of merch to sell at shows. As of now we'll have a repress of Instant Winner that antena krzyku is releasing, the Concrete Bruises 7" is also going to have a limited pressing of 300 with an alternate cover. We'll have a few copies of Punishment Room and also possibly a compilation of tracks from each release as well as comp tracks. They'll be at least one poster, possibly two, and some buttons. I hit up Manual and the band if it was cool to bring along some Leopold CDs so those will be eventually floating around Europe too. I just found out that our friend Will, is going to be joining us. We've met over Facebook a while back when he asked Michael Gerald from Killdozer to be on one of his projects and he ended up recording his tracks at my studio. Since then he's also had Tricia on a track and he's put up David and his wife when they visited the UK. We're trying to figure out rehearsals before the tour. David will have to get over here (L.A.) from Austin for a few weekends. I am an owner in a rehearsal studio business so we'll luckily have access to that and we also hope to rehearse once we arrive in Italy. Usually I'm used to being overly prepared for shows but this one is going to be by the seat of our pants. I think we're pretty confident though since we've all played together before and know we can do it. I've been trying to get pedal setup to take on tour. Since we're not taking our amps, it's kind of rough to rely on pedals. I went to try out a few pedals this weekend with my buddy Dani from Barcelona from Beauty Fool Records. They're fronting the Barcelona show. Luckily he's a guitar player so it wasn't much of an ordeal for us to go check out some stuff. I settled on a Real Tube pedal and luckily found one for really cheap on Craigslist. It sounds ok but I won't know until we land and I plug into whatever backline we have available. I may also take some other distortion pedals like a RAT and maybe even a DS1 or Eq pedal to tailor the sound a bit more. Last time we played I also had a boss noise reduction, Hyper Fuzz, and I'll probably have some kind of delay in there for a few songs where the feedback has a bit of ambience to it. To be honest I'm not a big pedal guy. Once I got my Soldano the search was over for my tone. That was it. I also need to take my Jazzmaster for a couple tracks that need tremolo and that behind the bridge noise. It's a fun guitar to play. I tend to like the Jazzmaster for the Punishment Room tracks and the Travis Bean for the Instant Winner stuff. If anyone in Europe has a Soldano Decatone I can borrow please let me know. ;-)