February 14, 2010

We’re about to go grab lunch (Brian, Anton, Fred, and I), but I figured I’d post a quick update first. Maybe more info than you’re interested in, but I know some readers out there were wondering what, exactly, this convention is about.

We were up early and at the convention center at 8:30am to attend the first of our “block booking meetings”… and we learned plenty. These block booking meetings are intended for schools to get together and book an act as a collective (schools in the same geographical area), giving the act a nice routing/mini-tour of sorts, and in return, the act charges less per night per school. If an act books 3 shows in a 5 day run, or 5 shows in a 7 day run, all in one state or region, the per-event charge is lowered in return for getting a week’s worth of work without a ton of driving. Sounds great, so we got up early after a late night, and headed to the meetings. We split up, each of us heading to a different region’s meeting (Northeast, West, Central/South, etc.), and waited for our name to be called. They got to “S”… and then… no “SoundRabbit.” Hmm. After the meetings, we asked the organizers why our name wasn’t called, and evidently we were supposed to give out some “block booking forms” all day yesterday. Oops. They only call the names of acts who have forms submitted from interested schools… so, for example, if Boston College wants to book us and potentially go in on a ‘block’ with Boston University, Northeastern, and Wellesley College, they’ll fill out one of our forms and submit it to NACA, who then calls our name at the meeting the following morning, giving schools the opportunity to form a block and discuss the details amongst themselves and us. So… we could have stayed in bed this morning. Oh well. Today we’ll work on getting as many forms out as we can, and we’ll hit the next meeting in the morning and hopefully book some blocks. Okay, time to go grab some clam chowder. More later…

Happy Valentine’s Day, all! I guess for those of you west of the Mississippi, we’re a bit early – but it’s all good if there’s chocolate and caramel involved.

Today was quite the learning experience for us, but I think we came out of it in good shape. We left my cousin’s place not knowing exactly how close the Convention Center was, and the good news is that it’s SUPER close. Took us about 12 minutes to walk over, which will be super nice for the next 4 days. The Convention schedule is pretty rough – 9am checkin and midnight (or in the case of the last night, 2:30am) checkout. Those are LONG days. A short walk over and back from our beds is pretty damn nice.

Anton drove out to western MA to pick up the Reactable from his brother. We planned for it to be a key feature of our booth, but we had no idea how effective it would be. Holy crap. For those of you not familiar with the Reactable, head over to Anton’s blog page and scroll down a bit – you should see a post on it from early 2008, I think. He built it in his garage as an interactive electronic music device. Basically, users can set plastic blocks down on the table, and those blocks trigger different sounds – bass, guitar, drums, synths, etc. Actually, each side of each cube triggers a different sound… so block “A” might trigger one bass part when you set it down, and then if you turn it on to its side, it triggers a totally different bass part. The cool thing is that multiple blocks can be set down on the table at once by multiple users, and the result is a full song with all of the parts playing simultaneously. Watch a demo video of it here, that Anton recorded at his house.

Okay, so – cut to earlier this winter when we were making our plans for our NACA booth. We knew that we had to have something that would get people’s attention, because our booth is completely DIY (“do it yourself”). The other booths will be slick, with big management money behind them, etc. All we have is a bunch of photos, some accolades/reviews, and some t-shirts. And then we thought of the Reactable – what if we were to use the blocks to generate something other than sounds… what if they could generate photos, information about the band, etc.? And thusly Anton got to work tweaking the table to be an interactive listening station!

We set it up today at our booth, front and center, with a sign on the front that says, “Did you know that Anton from the band built this table? Ask us about it!” (or something like that). We have a bunch of blocks that play our songs (or samples of songs), and then some blocks that show photos from Red Rocks, RBT Sticker Gallery, etc., and then some blocks that display text info (cities we’ve played, band bio, artists we’ve played with, etc.).

It looked great, and then we put all of our posters and materials up on the wall behind us, along with our big yellow banner, and we set up a side table with more photos and materials.

Almost immediately upon firing up the table, we had other vendors from the surrounding booths come over, wondering what the heck it was. And when the students came in later on (I’ll explain how the convention process works later – it’s crazy)… they immediately flocked over to check it out. Thanks to the Reactable, we met a ton of great kids the first day, collected contact info, and got holds (penciled-in dates) on shows for this coming fall.

A great first day for sure… and I’m leaving out a lot of the details, but I’ll explain more tomorrow. Here are some pics of our booth from when we set it up (once the convention was running, none of us were sitting down – we run it a bit like the Apple store, with matching t-shirts, iPods in hand, talking with students and showing them our tunes, etc.):

More updates tomorrow from the convention if we have downtime…