Did another "booked open mic" at Martini Blues. This time around, I used nearly all new material. For the past several weeks, I'd been focusing on rearranging my existing act. Now that I'm feeling good about the structure of the "standard" set, it's time to jump out of the plane without a parachute again.
Prior to this set, I finally got around to buying a small digital recorder. This is going to help my progress. No big secret there. I used to record myself all the time. Now I'm returning to the fundamentals. And after only one crappy open mic set, it's obvious that I need to record every set. I learned a lot from listening over and over to a crappy set. For one thing, I learned that my pacing still speeds up at times, to unintelligible levels. That's my #1 thing to work on in the coming weeks...
S... L... O... W...
D... O... W... N!
It's not as bad as it was last year. I'd recorded myself at the Irvine Improv, and was shocked to hear how fast I was going. And mumbling to boot. How can the crowd follow me along for the ride if they can't understand what I'm saying? Duh.
So, I've improved, but need to improve some more.
Mainly, I speed up a lot when I'm filling gaps. And there were a lot of gaps to fill during this particular set. When I'm improvising, I tend to speed up... and mumble. Every once in a while, I caught myself speeding up, took a breath, and slowed down. What I need to do is not speed up in the first place.
Listening to the recording over and over, I also found that there's still a lot of superflous words in some of my new set-ups. As I was listening, I was yelling at the recorder, "Get to the point".
I've already gotten my money's worth on the $90 digital recorder.
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