I can’t put into words what an amazing experience AgapeFest 2011 was. All in all, it was one of the most enjoyable experiences of my life. I met so many cool people, and we were able to play for a ton of people at a huge festival.
Some backstory: my band Avapor entered a Battle of the Bands for a spot on the main stage at the AgapeFest music festival. We placed in the top five and moved onto the second round which was held on the first day of the festival (April 29th).
Things went fairly smoothly for the second round. There was a rookie sound guy mixing our monitors via an iPad. He didn’t really seem to have a grasp on what he was doing or where channels were, so that made getting a usable mix for our in-ear monitors difficult. However, we made it through soundcheck okay, and thought we were good.
It came time to perform, and everything went really well. The energy was amazing and we were hitting the cues at the right time. The only issue was the sound engineer didn’t turn on our backing tracks in the house system, so there were some awkward pauses where music should have been. Thankfully, the judges were gracious with us being the first band and it didn’t seem to affect their scores too much.
After all of the bands were finished playing, the judges deliberated to find the winnders. This is when it was absolutely gut-wrenching. We were pretty tight with most of the bands there and as bad as everyone wanted to win, we each wanted each other to move on as well. But, there could only be one second-stage winner, and two main stage winners. It came time to announce the second round winners. They announced the cool guys in Boiling Point for third place, our band for second place, and Owen Pye for the first place winner. We were going to play the main stage! We were super excited. I was super-hoarse. So bad, in fact, my voice was gone. Uh oh.
We made a game plan for the next morning, which included me resting my voice as much as possible and we ironed out the setlist for the morning. From there we enjoyed the night by walking around, seeing Needtobreathe (they were amazing) and Hawk Nelson, getting some food, checking out some merch tables.