Not for me anymore..... Although I'll sit in my lawn chair with a beer watching a summer concert in the park.....

I rememeber one time, outside job...

The iPad refused to start and say temperature too high

And all the sheetmusics inside !!!!

Stay Cool out there everyone this summer playing!

For 14 summers, I worked a patio. NEVER AGAIN! Bugs, rain, wind, drunks...UGH! I had a new Parker Fly kicked into a brick wall the first night I used it...a guy fell into me an crushed an expensive nylon string. I got rained on many times. One night, I looked behind me, and the cord to the power strip was 4 feet under water in the pool behind me.

The one durable thing was my old Solton MS 60. It's still in use after 20 plus years, with never a hick-up.

I won't even sit on a patio at a restaurant now, and picnics are an absolute "NO-NO".


SO THERE!


Russ"Ice man" Lay

Russ I'm glad we have choices now.

My worst outdoor job was an outdoor wedding at a country club on June 1st of that year. The ceremony took place at 1 p.m. on the lawn next to the country club, the temperature in the shade was 101 degrees, 90 percent humidity, not a breeze blowing. I was in the shade of a tree, wearing a traditional, black, winter tux, and soaked with sweat. After playing for the crowd for nearly an hour, one of the ring bearers came to me and said "Miss Cynthia says she will be another 25 minutes before she can come out and wants you to continue playing until she gets here." I told the kid to tell Miss Cynthia that if she wasn't here in 5 minutes, there would be no music at all and I would be gone." The people seated in front of the alter were mostly elderly, some actually passed out from the heat, kids from the country club were walking through the crowd handing out glasses of ice water - it was a freakin disaster. Five minutes later the bride to be finally walked out, everyone applauded, I played the wedding march, and within five minutes the ceremony was over (I believe the minister did a hurried up version so people could get out of the heat.) The bride came to me, handed me an envelope and said "You'll never hear from me again." and stomped away. I said thank you, packed up my gear, drove home and climbed in a cold shower, which really felt great.

That was the last wedding I ever did and it was back in 1985.

Gary

I've been in Florida 39 years and learned the hard way about the toll it took on the contacts on all my electronic devices from gigging outdoors.

"Pay me now or pay me later!" Many of times after doing an outdoor gig in humid climate conditions the contacts on my mixer would accumulate oxidization and I would have to apply contact cleaner to the inputs and outputs just to get through a gig.

Usually, the next gig after playing the outdoor gig, my mixer would suffer intermittent outages from the electronics connections becoming oxidized.

It is not worth whatever I was getting paid for the outdoor gig to have to endure the toll it took on all my electronic equipment.