I don't know how many times I get Phone Calls During a Performance on stage,.....I always lower my ringer volume before I start playing so the audience doesn't hear it I have "The GODFATHER Theme" on mine. But sometimes that very Important Business Call, New Gig Booking client, or an emergency, etc, will come in that you have been waiting for although the phone isn't ringing aloud you can see the screen light up with the name of the caller. I do however have a call message that says "Hello I am on stage performing please leave your message and I will return your call asap"....that's fine I can check my phone after the show or on a break, but the damage is done and many times that important call is hard to return and phone tag begins for days on end in some cases... Also for the rest of your set your mentally annoyed that you Missed that important call!!

Well you could just add another dumb thing and answer it during your performance because if you look out at the audience, probable 80 out of 100 folks are already talking on their phone or texting. quangdizj@gmail.com

Stick the thing in your keyboard box and forget it until a break - who needs that distraction during a performance? quangdizj@gmail.com

Stop everything, answer the phone (over the mic) and tell the audience it's from the President, then hang up on him.

You might have a special needs child, or take care of an elderly parent at home who might be calling you for some reason also in an emergency too...

I have the phone where I can see it. If caller id shows someone I know and I think it might be important, sometimes I'll just hit answer and they can hear what I'm doing. Then after the song, I might take the call, or tell them I'll call right back.

There is an offswitch on your phone... I use that whenever doing important things, like buiseness meetings, or even having fammily time with my wife and kids


Ten years ago we didnt have mobile phones, how did you handle things back then..


Switching the phone off means privacy, and everyone is entitled to privacy.... Just nake sure you have a good message on your answering machine..

Sometimes if call is Important enough I will text with one hand and play and sing with the other.....it's called Multitasking LOLOLOLOL

The only time I turn my phone on is when I want to use it. No call is important enough to me that I need to interrupt a performance - no call. If that woman has another heart attack while I'm gone, she knows exactly how dial 911, and so do the adult kids. Now, I do keep the phone turned on while on the boat, just for general communications, though. It sits in a pouch next to the helm seat and it's no different than having the home phone next to me in the office. However, if it's a client, I just tell them that I'll call when I get back from sailing. Gotta have your priorities straight.

Good luck on that multi-tasking stuff,

Gary 8)

Do you have a Flip phone or Smart Phone Gary..

I have a $32 Wallmart flip phone, which has served me very well for the past three years. My more expensive phone took the dirt nap on the way to Florida on the boat - It didn't like the marine environment. I can text with the new phone, but as a rule, I never text when I can just talk - much more effective means of communications, IMO.

Gary

I don't have a cellphone and I don't want one. I get along fine without being tethered to one of those things.

It's amazing in this day and high tech age to read how others use or don't use devices in their daily lives, I can also do my whole show just from my phone as all my backing tracks, lyrics, and Mp3 songs are on board just in case ....another thing I often do is when I get a weird request not in my collection I can look it up on youtube insteantly on my phone at the gig and play it right off the phone thru my PA system AWESOME!! and my client or guest is happy that I did their off the wall request ......great thread.

sorry gotta run my phone is ringing again!!.......

Me neither...never needed one that badly.

Since retirement, all I have on my regular portable home phone is call display...no answering machine.

If I had call answer and someone leaves a message, I'm sort of obligated to call back.

This way, unless the name displayed is someone I know, I never return the calls...one of the other joys of retirement is having, and giving myself, much more control over how I spend my time.

Ian

Some of you guys are just too bus....... crap. Hold on.

LOL! Nailed it, Ian. Must be the peaceful, unhurried pace of life in our northern paradise.

I would love the President to call me , when I am on stage...I would explain it's not really gigging...it's more like entertaining.....and we look at it as just a small audience , like a JV group........than I would hang up on him

I have one, but like Gary, I turn it on when I want to use it and I never give that number out to anyone except immediate family.

I bought it for in the car traveling only.

I place it in my equipment bag the whole performance.

It is a very disruptive device, that prevents me from performing with 100% efficiency for my audience, and the people that are paying me.


Jerryghr

Look out there once in a while you'll see that same audience on their cell phones also..

I can honestly say I've rarely seen anyone on a cell phone while performing. The are really discreet or they take it out of the room where they can talk in private, besides they are not getting paid to entertain... We are. I would consider it very rude to the audience for me to be on a cell phone while performing.

just as rude as many players with a alcoholic drink or beer on stage while performing or even smoking on stage,....
I see it all the time.
No one cares..

The only thing smokin' on my stage is me and my Tyros4!...YEEE HAAAAW!

Talk about faking out the audience, he's using a
Faux Piano Shell trying to fool the audience too Smoke and Mirrors?....Why?

At least he's not on a cell phone!!!

Cell phones are only in their infancy.....just watch what happened in years to come..

There's an old saying, "A lot of people hear with their eyes."

When I see someone on their cell/I-phone in the audience, the first thought that comes to mind is "There's someone that needs to get a life." Mostly it's young people, but there are times when I'll see someone in the late 50s glued to that stupid phone as if it was their lifeline and without it, they would quickly die. C'mon - get a life. Why in the Hell did they come here if they wanted to be glued to that stupid phone, texting, etc...?

Cheers,

Gary

Ummm, sounds a lot like 'Synthzone addiction' to me. How many times a day do you check the forum? How many posts do you feel compelled to respond to? How many days a week do you post (and how many times a day)? For a few, between posting and researching URL's to post, they can't possibly have time for anything else. But what the heck, family life is probably overated anyway. 'nuff said.



chas

The zone has always been somewhat of an addiction to me, Chas, as much as I hate to admit it. However, when I get out on the boat tomorrow, there is no internet connection in the middle of Chesapeake Bay, no cellular connection in much of the bay, and for the next five days, it's just me, the wind and the waves. Now, there's a bad addiction. But, I surely have a lot of fun with this one, too. The worse part is coming in the next month, when the weather gets too cold to sail and I have to store the boat on dry ground for the next six months. Next winter, though, I hope to solve that problem by heading south again before old man winter rears it's ugly head.

Cheers,

Gary

Love my phone! I also have a horseless carriage, indoor plumbing, and electric lights. None of them are necessary of course.

WOW ... that's COLD !!! ...

During a gig, my phone is placed someplace out of sight except to me, sound off, vibrate on ... If a call comes in I can see who it is and decide if I NEED to call back immediately - some sort of EMERGENCY - or if I can call back later ...
Before passing judgement - which I shouldn't do anyway - on someone using their phone during my performance, I try to determine if that person is on an IMPORTANT call or just chit-chatting ... I also dislike people getting or making a phone call while on the golf course ... If your work needs to call you while you are on the golf course, perhaps you shouldn't be there ...

No phones on stage. Period. Shut it off. My God ... we've taken a turn for the worst when we act like the teens that have it permanently attached to their body. I've been a leader on a few nice dates and the band members attempted to have their phones on ... "attempted" (key word here). I told them - "no phones on stage" - no phone - or no job.
It's really a question of work ethics - none of us needs to be accountable 100% of the time.

New technology using Phones & Tablets, laptops, is coming out every day,......why not embrace it?....it ain't going away.

My phone is packed away in a gig bag when I'm at a gig; I don't even think about phones once I'm playing ...

No, Donny, it's not going away, but the thing that seems to be vanishing is young people's ability to communicate directly with other human beings without the crutch of a smartphone, Ipad, etc... They tend to hide behind those inanimate objects, say things texting that they would never say to a person's face, and lose their sense of identity. Then, of course, the criminal element steps in, and the list of internet and cell phone crimes that currently take place is growing exponentially. IMO, we've gone so far backward in this nation that it will really be difficult to turn things around, and often in the name of technology.

I saw where our school systems have now taken cursive writing in schools, which I think is all part of dumbing down our youngsters. When I was a kid, you could not bring a slide rule to school, because it was considered cheating when doing math. Slide rules were not permitted back then till you got into college and engineering school. Now, every kid is school would feel like he or she was mentally handcuffed if they didn't have an I-pad so they could Google every topic. Unfortunately, there are loads of kids now that cannot read enough to comprehend anything other than abbreviated text jargon. That's pretty damned sad.

Right now, as I type this diatribe, I'm sitting on my sailboat, stuck in the mud waiting for high tide so I can get back into my slip and moor the boat. I spent most of the day with my wife sailing in 20-knot winds on Chesapeake Bay, enjoying the beautiful fall weather, clear blue skies and watching American eagles soar overhead in search of a fish that happened to get too close to the water's surface. Most of today's youngsters will never enjoy, or embrace this kind of magic. Instead, they'll have their eyes glued to their Smartphones, while wolfing down high carb junk food from a fast food restaurant. They're eating there because their parent don't know how to cook, and more often than not the parent - not parents, have embraced that same technology that is now dumbing down their children. They were raised by a TV set, never heard of Home Economics in school, it has been gone for years, and the instructions for cooking are now on the back of the box. 3-minutes on high, stir, 2 minutes on high, let sit for 2 minutes before eating.

When I was in the grocery store last night, I noticed that in Giant, there were three full rows of frozen food freezers, all of which were meals in a box. The good stuff, the fresh meats and veggies, were all the way at the other end of the store. You had to pass through 20 isles of prepackaged foods to get to stuff that you actually had to cook. No wonder McDonalds, Burger King, Hardies, Red Lobster, Black Angus, etc... are packed to capacity with families every night of the week. No ONE CAN COOK! THEY DON'T KNOW HOW! But you can bet your ass they know every application that's available for their cell phones. However, while they're slowly consuming that huge volume of carbohydrates, salt, fat and calories they never seem to know there is someone sitting directly across the table from them - They have their damned eyes glued on that tiny screen, texting with one hand while trying to eat a Bloomin' Onion with the other.

So, Donny, you can have my portion of all that new technology. I might even turn on my cell phone today, but probably not. I would rather just sit here and wait for the incoming tide, sip a cold Coors Light, and talk with Carol about our upcoming trip to the sunny south this winter. Next week, I'll have my daughter and grandson out here with me, we'll get some nice photos of the wildlife, sail down the bay, and I'll grill some burgers on the boat's gas grill. But if I didn't have gas, I would switch to charcoal, or maybe make a nice wood fire in the grill with some hickory sticks and grill them the old fashioned way - damned the old fashioned way sure tastes pretty good.

Enjoy that technology,

Gary

Gary.I won't argue but I will say everyone has a life to enjoy, ....
how you do that is much different then the next person,...no one is right or wrong,...life is too short...do what you like and do it often because before you know it in a snap it's all over. One mans garbage is another mans treasure if you get my drift!

C'mon, Gar, ... with today's technology there is no reason to be stuck in mud waiting for high tide ...



Gary ... there are a lot of folks our age and younger who never get to embrace that kind of magic, and it's not because of 'modern technology' ...
You've done well, my friend ...

Seems like at the time, Gary wasn't getting ANY drift ...

This says it all......NUFF SAID !!

Tony, just got home, the tide finally came in and I was able to get to the dock, get Carol off the boat, button things up and drove home. At the top of the ridge above the Susquehanna River, just a few miles from the boat, is a beautiful farm called Mount Ararat Farm. It was just after sundown when we got there and the entire soybean field was covered with hundreds of whitetail deer. I stopped the car on the side of the road, and we just sat there and watched them for about 10 minutes, then continued the drive home.

Unfortunately, the light level was too low for me to get any kind of photo of this, but I can assure you I've never seen this concentration of deer since I left Spokane, Washington many years ago when a blizzard drove the mule deer out of the high country and down to Cusic Flatts, where there was still some food available for them to prevent starvation. It was an incredible sight.

And, when technology figures out a way to raise the tides, then I'll embrace that technology. I hope I'm around to see that happen. Until then, I guess I'll continue to relax, sit on the boat, sip a Margaretta and wait for the moon to do it's job and raise the tide the way it has since time began.

Gary

Gary, not to worry. Any time now, global warming will melt the polar ice caps thereby raising the ocean levels and you'll be unstuck in no time. However, most of coastal Maryland will also be under water so the dock you were going to moor the boat to will probably also be under water. Then you'll be sitting there thinking, "wow, maybe Al Gore was right".



chas

I totally agree Dave. There is never a good reason to be taking a phone call during a job on stage. I sure don't even have a phone on me while I am playing.

This works great to hold the cell phone device on a mic stand pole .....you can easily record your performances audio or angle up to record video also, or use it as your Mp3 player connected to your Aux input on your KB, or lyric read too,...so many used with a cell phone on stage.....if it rings just don't answer use the vibrate mode.

Chas, Al Gore is a politician, and we all know politicians don't lie. HOAX

This has likely been the coolest summer and fall I've experienced in my lifetime. Right now, I'm sitting in the office with a sweater on, space heater running, and it's just 52 degrees on the deck outside. As far as I'm concerned, any temperature lower than my age is winter. Ironically, we had some unusually high tides this past week, a combination of moon phases and southerly winds, something that frequently happens in this part of the world. It has been taking place since time began, but wouldn't you know it, the global warming zealots jumped on this like a tick on a dog, crying wolf as loud to the liberal news media.

During all this so called Global Warming the antarctic ice pack has been slowing increasing in size to the largest in recorded history. Ice Pack Does this mean I have to move to the Florida Keys in order to prevent my boat from being iced in during July and August in Maryland?

Cheers,

Gary

Better yet - use the DO NOT DISTURB or turn off the cellular connection entirely. It improves battery life, avoids interruption of playback and let's you focus on your PAYING job. An employer has the right to expect 100% of your resources while on the job. Same goes for clients and entrepreneurs. I LOVE my phone - I really do ... I use it a hundred ways, but I don't text in the car and I don't have it on while performing. Audience étiquette, and mixed company behavior, in general, is very sad. People answering phones in checkout lines, at dinner tables ... without SILENCE - music is just noise. Embrace the silence and focus on the job ... not the tool.

Here ya go donny - you smartphone users will love this - https://www.youtube.com/embed/Q8xz8xKEFvU

Gary

I don't have a flashlite app I actually use a real MINI Maglight keep it in my gig bag,.....just sayin,....

I do and it has been helpful on many occasions.e

Me Too!!!!

It is very handy, way better than looking for a flashlight...it's right in your pocket, or in Donny's case...his ear...

Fran, did you watch the video?

Gary

Not yet

people love smart phones nobody cares

I'd bet those folks that had their bank accounts cleaned out from a flashlight AP care.

Gary

simple solution does use download the apps..
but Smart phones will forever flourish BIG TIME!!

My flashlight app is really small, not big enough to do all that snooping.

http://www.snoopwall.com/threat-reports-10-01-2014/


Here is my 72 k app..Read article and you can download their app free..

My flashlight is really small - it's on my keychain.

Gary

I just ordered another Maglite Mini...

Let me get this right...you ordered a back up flashlight ($10-$15)...that you can see that you plugged the cord in the wrong place..

Why carry another tool, and a backup to boot...just use the cell phone ..you always have it with you anyway...

BTW: on stage when you are using it for musical reasons...just switch to "airplane" mode

All good points Fran......My first flash lite mini I got at a yard sale and the bulbs now died....so instead I ordered a Maglite Mini to replace it got a deal for $7.99.. The FL app on my smart phone is ok but eats alot of battery life,...it's no prob to carry the Mini-mag in my gig bag just in case when I'm in a dark situation gig.
Like Gary always says.."Gotta Have Backup"
btw, get that BK9 backup soon I wanna try it...just sayin'

I have one of these on stage at all times. Never need to worry about batteries, just give it a crank.

I use these...the one on the left can be on belt loop. Very nice, lightweight and good bright light.



Ian

Jeez, Ian, and there was I thinking you might have had a spare Men of the Deeps pit helmet to wear on stage.