Bands prep for battle

Local musicians filed into the Residential Student Association office Feb. 26 and Feb. 27 in hopes of getting to perform at the 2010 Battle of the Bands.

Jamie Knox, Student Government Association press secretary and a junior sociology major, is directing the event and will be hosting alongside David McLaughlin, secretary for SGA and a senior management major.

“We’ll pick five bands and we’ll also pick talent acts,” Knox said. “The only difference between those is the time they get to perform.”

The talent acts are a new addition to the Battle of the Bands tradition that is set this year for April 8 at 8 p.m. in the Magnolia Ballroom.

“Between bands there is a break time,” Knox said. “We give us a five-minute window where the bands are changing sets. We figure there’s a lot of down time then. There’s a lot of time for the emcees to make something up and try to say something. We’re going to use that time to have people perform and to show more talent at GCSU. I think that’s a really important thing to show people that have a lot of talent that are not necessarily in bands.”

One of the students taking advantage of the new talent acts placement is freshman rhetoric major Harrison Thacker, under the stage name of NGP.

“I’m an up-and-coming hip-hop artist,” Thacker said. “I’d really like to get my name out, so I figured one of the best ways is to get it around campus. When I heard the campus is doing a battle of the bands, I figured what better way to get some promotion.”

Competing against NGP will be Young Krew and Daniel Goldberg.

The winning talent act and band will both receive a cash prize.

“Last year it was $250 for the judge prize and $100 for the audience prize,” Knox said. “Since we’re adding talent acts, we’re in the discussion stages of increasing the prize amounts. That’s going to come down to our budget and that kind of thing, but there will be an increase of the prize money from last year.”

This is the third year the Residence Student Association and Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, GCSU’s male music fraternity, have partnered up for the event.

“Battle of the Bands won program of the year for Georgia Residence Hall Organization,” Knox said. “(GRHO) is for RSAs all across the state and we won program of the year. It won last year and I think that was a really big thing for a lot of people that were a part of this. It got a little bit of merit behind it, I think, and a lot of people started taking it seriously.”

Last year’s judge winner, The Stumblin’ Toads, will be performing as an exposition band.

Seconds from Falling won the audience vote last year, but will compete once again with another returning band, Titan.

“Last year we really wanted to get our name out there,” said Titan member Steven Jackson, a senior history major. “We did the radio station battle of the bands and had fun with it. We had fun with this last year. We thought we came pretty close to winning it, so we thought we’d try again this year.”

Also competing will be Blind Child, Merfin’ Me? and Sun Set East.

Paul Rossetti, a member of Sun Set East and a junior marketing major, has been a part of Battle of the Bands before as a volunteer and wanted to see what it was like on the other side.

“I’m in Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia,” Rossetti said. “These past two years I’ve been helping. I wanted to do it myself.”

To perform in the event, a member of the band had to contact Knox to set up an audition time that fit everybody’s schedule.

“The only thing that we ask is at least one person is in school,” Knox said. “They don’t even have to be at GCSU. They just have to be in college in Georgia. We’ve had bands where everybody is from GCSU and we’ve had bands where only one person is from GCSU. The range is very wide.”

Posted by Courtney Murrah on Mar 5 2010. Filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry