We heard ourselves

Last Sunday was another Bluegrass Sunday at church, which means Hicks With Picks does all the music for the worship service. We performed one from the new CD (and hawked it shamelessly), two new ones we've been working on, and few oldies the congregation could sing along with. After church we had our monthly after-church luncheon and found out some visitors were there just for the bluegrass, so hooray!
Mike hooked up a little, tiny (pocket-sized) digital recorder to an output from our audio amplifier and recorded all of our songs. Robby Dore was the Audio Technical Recording Artist Engineer (he pushed the start and stop buttons). Then Mike lost LOTS of sleep that night figuring out how to digitally transfer it to his computer, which he finally did and give us all dubs.
We learned a lot. We need to work on keeping our sound levels leveller. We need more oomph from the guitar. One highly respected critic said we sound like we're just doing TOO MUCH and need to tone down some. On the other hand, harmonies sounded great, mandolin leads were fabulous and there wasn't anything embarrassing in any of it, so that's huge!
Now that we're done with that event, we have begun rehearsing songs for the Advent/Christmas season. We won't make anyone listen to any Christmas songs, though, until after Thanksgiving. We promise.