Collage

What’s the deal with shelter for musicians?

Posted on 7/3/2010 at 11:11:45 PM

Maybe you’ve seen our contract, maybe you haven’t - either way, I want to explain what our deal is with “adequate shelter” and why it’s so incredibly important to us.

First, understand that most of us (the musicians of Collage) are from Oregon!  We are happy to get wet, get dirty, muck around in the mud, get sunburned on that ONE day of the year, etc etc.

BUT, our instruments.. now that’s another story.  Because we are all professional musicians by trade, our instruments are, as you can imagine, extremely important tools that are crucial to our livelihood.  They are kinda like our children, in a sense: extremely valuable and totally critical to our very beings.

Most wooden instruments are varnished, and a great many of them are very old (yes, the older they are, the better they sound!).  Imagine an extremely expensive antique piece of furniture, made 200 years ago, that’s still functional, but pretty delicate (and worth upwards of $10K). You would never leave it out in the direct sun or rain, right?  No!  Same deal with our string instruments.

Flutes and saxophones are a bit more durable when it comes to the weather, but the issue with them is that when subjected to extremes of temperature, they become impossible to play in tune (actually string instruments do this too, but in the opposite direction!).  So, if we are in the direct sun, the flute or saxophone will get really out of tune, and so will the strings, but in the opposite direction, so we end up sounding awful.  Add to that the damage the sun can do to the varnish on our string instruments, and you end up with a recipe for disaster and possibly terrible sound.

So, that’s our deal with shelter.  All these potential problems are solved if we have a tent, canopy, or even a simple patio umbrella.  Tree shade is often perfectly fine - we are not particular ourselves - it’s just that we really want to sound good!  And of course, we want to keep sounding good for years to come, so we have to be very careful with our instruments.

Don’t stress! - your rental company and/or venue should be able to provide some sort of shelter for us.  And if not, we have a backup plan: we do have our own 7′ patio umbrella we can make available (you have to pick it up from us though; and it’s subject to availability because we only have the one).  So let’s talk about it and make sure we can find a solution - the absolute LAST thing we want to do is end up unable to play because of rain or sun problems.

Cheers!

S.