Tag: guitar

Gear

Vox Pathfinder

Who says you can’t have two of the same thing? A few years ago, one of our friends let us borrow their Vox Pathfinder 15r, a solid state amp with 15W of power, an 8″ bulldog speaker, gain, gain boost, tremolo speed & depth, spring reverb, and 2 band EQ bass & treble. At only 18 lbs and a little over a foot tall, we were very impressed with the sound that came out of this little guy! After we returned the amp to its owner, we just had to get one of our own.

Now, about 3o shows and a year later, we realized that just one Vox Pathfinder is not enough. Its just too sweet of an amp. Hence, our recent addition to the family 🙂

vox
Say hello to #2!

Live

Friday night gig!

Well, after all of our groovy Sunday sets since the birth of the Rungs, (we’re just over a year old now!), its about time for a Friday night gig! We will be hitting the stage at Lot 10 in Ithaca tonight with our local friends, The Fly Rods, and touring rockers, Sool. We have some friends in town who have been super supportive of our music and through them we were connected to Sool, who contacted us to open for them when they came through Ithaca on a summer mini tour. I feel so lucky to have such supportive friends! (I think it helps that they like our music too 🙂 ) And after the shaky performance last weekend, I’m hoping for an awesome night tonight. It’ll make for a perfect end to the week! Plus with this line-up, Fly Rods, Rungs, Sool, its just gonna be rockin with high-energy-dance-to-the-grooves-feel-good-vibes.

Sool sool

Sool: http://www.soolmusic.com/

The Fly Rods: https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Fly-Rods

 

 

 

Music

Elephant Talk Indie Music Festival 2013

Well it was another exciting weekend for us, and of course, it was filled with music!  indie talk posterWe made it down to Atlantic City for the 4th annual Elephant Talk Indie Music Festival. Elephant Talk Indie Music Magazine’s Jerry Ryan organizes the festival each year and brings indie bands together from NJ and surrounding areas to make some noise in two neighboring music venues, The Boneyard and Le Grand Fromage,  just a block away from the shore. The thing I love about Elephant Talk Indie events is how supportive the bands are of each other. It was great to see so many musicians come together and connect!

Now we didn’t play our best set ever, in fact it was our worst yet. Just prior, Diwas had been out of town recording music for one of his other projects and I had been working over-time a bit. By the time we set up at the festival, we hadn’t even rehearsed a Rungs song for two weeks (pretty much since g-roots)! To add to that, our electronics didn’t make the sound system very happy. But regardless, all shows must go on right!? And on it did. We had fun, and the folks in the audience were just radiating with positive vibrations that sent our tiredness and frustrations far out into the Atlantic Ocean somewhere. It’s so great to be surrounded by people who are in it for the music 🙂 plus we got to sign the Elephant Talk Indie guitar!

IMG_3912IMG_3910IMG_3907

Thank you Jerry Ryan and Elephant Talk Indie Music!

Live

Festival of Music and Dance!

Well I’ve slacked a little this month on my posts, but I’m back! I’ve been busy gearing up for the 23rd annual Finger Lakes Grassroots Festival of Music and Dance that took place this weekend in Trumansburg NY.

I’ve been a regular Grassroots go-er since 2005, but this year was the best yet. The Sutras, an awesome indie-psychedelic-pop rock band from Ithaca NY invited me to sing with them! These guys are true rockers and some of the most talented musicians I’ve met, so you can imagine how psyched I was to perform with them. After two weeks of fun practices, we hit the stage around 1am on Saturday night, ready to rock the late night crowd! It was a completely different experience than what I’m used to with The Rungs. My only job was to sing certain parts of the songs, (and let me just say that EVERY song by The Sutras is super fun to sing), so I had no guitar or keys to hide behind, just me and my voice, loud and proud (or at least trying to be 🙂 ).

IMG_3336

IMG_3230_2

The entire set was a blast. I had a funny little moment to myself when I took a look at the set list and realized we were getting towards the end, I thought,”noooo this is so much fun, not ready for it to end yet!!!!” but as the universe rules, everything must start and end. So now I am ready for the next show. Where is it at? Lets go! More music!

Diwas was there too, not performing, but manning our newest purchase, a Cannon T2i. We decided to treat ourselves to the new gadget last week and it was a great choice! Every time I looked up he was like a little spiderman getting cool angles of videos and photos. Soooo hopefully we’ll have a video from the night to share soon! In the meantime, checkout The Sutras! http://thesutras.bandcamp.com/

Live

Thank you June!

Well, June began with a bang, (literally a ‘bang’ – flat tire on the way to Shindig in Brooklyn!) and closed with a mellow Sunday night set at Felicia’s in Ithaca. I’m so happy our friends, The Sunday Vipers, asked us to open for them. I mean, its an honor when anyone asks us to play with them. My reaction is always, ‘Really?! You want us to open for you??!! Yes!’ And then I am secretly flattered forever that they liked our music enough to share a bill together 🙂

This night was particularly special because I’m a huge fan of Sunday Vipers, AND the venue is practically my neighbor. Diwas and I just hop on out the door, guitars and amps in hand, and take about 20 steps to load in. The awesomeness of the night can further be summed up by fun music, delicious cocktails, good friends, a great audience and one new Rungs Facebook fan! (Yes, one. I will take what I can get!)

Here is a live song from the set! This is a new one. It’s called Indecisive. You’ll get what I mean 🙂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXrymtXgXgI&feature=player_embedded

Thank you readers, thank you June (month of the supermoon!), and thank you Sunday Vipers for an awesome night!

Music

For the love of music!

Yay for music blogging! I love the coming together of musicians from all around the world and the exchanges of creative and diverse music achieved through blogging.

Annnnd…

I am super excited to share that the UK based-music blog ‘The Sound of Confusion’ has included The Rungs on their ‘Daughters of Ether – The Heroines of Modern Dream-pop’ playlist! There are lots of great female musicians on here and I’m so happy to be included.

http://thesoundofconfusionblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/daughters-of-ether-heroines-of-modern.html

Enjoy that playlist and all of the great music out there!

Live

Wild Weekends

I must provide a recap on our recent weekend adventure.

It started over a month ago, when a good friend asked Diwas to host one of the weekly open mic nights she organizes in a newly established Brooklyn music venue called Shindig. We love getting out of town and visiting our friends, so of course he agreed, and we put it on our calendar,   ‘a weekend in Brooklyn in June’.  It was May at the time, so adding something to the next month’s agenda felt like such a ways off. But boy does time fly! The weekend was here before we knew it and ended it up being the perfect time to get out of town.

We hit the road early Saturday morning only to get an unexpected surprise on the way….

IMG_2821

Our first band flat! I had never gotten a flat before, so I kind of thought it was exciting. The next surprise was that Diwas, a guy who I’ve never seen do much car work, got in there and successfully put on the spare like a pro. Definite road trip buddy! We were back on the road in no time 🙂

IMG_2824

We drove for about two hours with the little donut spare, and despite feeling extra nervous in the nyc tunnels, the ride was pretty smooth all the way to Shindig! Our luck returned when we got to the venue in time, found a parking spot right outside, and enjoyed a night of entertaining and diverse open mic performances. Here is some of the crew:

IMG_2862

Live

close but no cigar

‘Front Desk Runaway’ is one of those songs that Diwas and I have been omitting from our set list. For some reason, something about it just didn’t sit well but we couldn’t pin point exactly what was wrong. So, we decided to avoid this song at our live shows, at least until we would have time to plop ourselves down and give it a good working out. As many of you songwriters know, some songs just don’t quite make the cut. We thought Front Desk Runaway would be one of our ‘close but no cigar’ songs.

Anyway, I’m not sure why we added it to our set last month at the Elephants for Autism Festival. We hadn’t changed anything since I first wrote it back in February, but I guess we both just missed it!

Turns out, we had a lot of fun playing it! So much fun that the song even creeped onto another set list, last Sunday’s show. Not to duplicate content, (I already posted the Front Desk Runaway from Elephants for Autism Festival), but here is a live video of the same song from our Chapter House show last Sunday. This neglected song just needs a little TLC!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dznKb82GTRE

Any other musicians out there with their own ‘close but no cigar’ songs??? Lets work on these babies!