The Part Timers | Acoustic Bands in Birmingham, UK

The Part Timers November Gigs

The Part Timers — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:42:50 +0000

Its been a little while since our last update but we’ve a busy time during October, gigging at several locations, The Plough as usual, The Grapevine event at The Clarendon Hotel in Wolverhampton, The Music King open day and The Junction in Harborne. Here is an update of our gigs in november which we would love you to attend!

We are back at The Plough in Harborne on Thursday 5th November starting at 8pm, a chilled out acoustic set for bonfire night with loads of new songs, both our own tracks and covers ranging from Pink Floyd to Just Jack!

On Friday 6th November we are performing at The Priory Tennis Club in Edgbaston, Birmingham for their spectacular annual Bonfire Night and fireworks display, so get your toffee apples ready and wrap up warm for some excellent music from ourselves and another local band “Shampoo.”

The following week sees us playing at Bohemia in Selly Oak, Birmingham on the 14th of November from 8pm. A fantastic little restaurant which loves its live music night. Often taking part in the Birmingham Jazz Festival. We will be playing another chilled out acoustic set to entertain diners throughout the evening.

Friday 20th November we are traveling down to Stroud in Gloustershire. Details of which will be confirmed on our Part Timers Gigs page.

Thank you to everyone who came along to our gigs in October, we really appreciate your support and hope to see you again soon!

Gary

The Part Timers at The Plough 1st Oct 2009

The Part Timers — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 14:53:27 +0000

We’re back at The Plough in Harborne next Thursday, 1st October 2009 from 8pm! Come on down and enjoy a night of musical mastery, fun, drink, food and just the best entertainment in the Midlands!! Find our event on Facebook and become a fan.

Look forward to seeing you there!

The Part Timers

The Part Timers at The Junction in Harborne

The Part Timers — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 12:22:40 +0000

Well what a bank holiday, firstly we had a great time at The Music King in Halesowen, but even more so at our gig at The Junction in Harborne. I think we definitely demonstrated why we could possibly be one of the best acoustic bands in the West Midlands, nay, the world! ha ha! The Junction was packed everybody was having a good and after a chilled out first half with songs like She Is Love, Better Together and other mushy acoustic tracks we went big in the second half!

After the break we returned to our set and opened with Under the Bridge by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, of course we threw our own tracks, Fly Away and Part Timer, which its great to see loads of people singing along too. All this gigging must be paying off! Adding on to this my new Dovetail Strings sounded awesome, they hold up really well when I am boshing along to things like Sweet Home Alabama and Satisfaction! I highly recommend you try them out!

Anyway, check out our gig list to see when we are next on and come on down to see us, why not bring your friends along too!

Our acoustic gig at The Music King

The Part Timers — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 20:07:02 +0000

Today we played a half hour acoustic set at The Music King in Halesowen. The set was part of The Music King‘s Music Feast; an open day with free food and drinks and 10% discount across the store. The event was well received with loads of people turning up. We played some fun covers and just had a bit a laugh really. We didn’t want to take it too seriously, so classics like Rocky Raccoon came out the bag we got the crowd smiling. We were playing outside in a cool make shift stage, inside the doorway of The Music King warehouse. The weather was on and off but people managed to stay outside during our set even with the wind and cloud cover! My new Dovetail acoustic strings held up great, they are really nice to play with and sound awesome on songs like Wind Cries Mary and All Along the Watchtower.

Tomorrow we play our first gig at The Junction in Harborne, which I am really looking forward too and on Tuesday we will be finding out if we will be getting a weekly gig at Henry Wong’s, yes the infamous Cantonese restaurant also in Harborne. Really looking forward to it, we have some great ideas to make our regular set a truly great event to come along too.

Following that we have plans to finally get some of our videos and tracks onto the website and also get our YouTube channel up and running. So keep watching this space and if you have been to see us recently we would love you to write some comments on the website!

Love to you all

The Part Timers | Possiblyone of Birmingham’s best acoustic bands

The Part Timers and Dovetail Strings

The Part Timers — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 13:53:34 +0000

The Part Timers & Dovetail Strings

Great news, we were approached by a company who make guitar strings called Dovetail Strings asking if we would be interested in endorsing their strings. Interested, I sent them an email asking to know a bit more and before I know it I have got my hands on 5 sets of strings, 2 x electric and 3 x acoustic for me to try out. I’m actually pretty excited as I’ve always used Ernie Ball Slinkys, and now I have the excuse to try something new and I have to say I am impressed. Going to test them out this weekend when we play at The Music King in Halesowen and The Junction in Harborne.

I have put the Dovetail Regular Light Bronze ( .012, 0.16, 0.24W, 0.32W, 0.044W and .054W) on my Yamaha APX 500 and they have a great tone and sustain. Very nice indeed for the type of music we play and sounded aweseom when I played a funky version of Wind Cries Mary by Jimi Hendrix. I am yet to try the electric strings yet but again have gone for the regular light set aswell.

I will be trying them out properly this weekend when we play our gigs at The Music King in Halesowen and The Junction in Harborne. So I will be able to give some proper reviews and get some good pics/vids on here…still somethin we have yet to do properly!

If you are interested in trying some new strings with a cool sound I recommend you get in touch with Craig at Dovetail Strings and tell him that Gary from The Part Timers told you to get in touch.

New Gigs: The Junction in Harborne and The Music King

The Part Timers — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 18:50:44 +0000

NEW GIGS: The Music King & The Junction

Well its been a busy few weeks for The Part Timers with rehearsals, being in the studio and a couple of private gigs. Now for the last weekend of the month another two gigs! That’s right we’re pushing the boat out and doing Saturday and Sunday at The Music King in Halesowen and The Junction in Harborne.

Why not come on down if you are free, The Music King is an awesome music store, always having great deals on top music equipment. We get all of our gear from there and they always look after us, we highly recommend them! We will be on about 3:30pm but their will be lots going on all day so come on down and get involved!

The Junction is a brilliant pub in Harborne, Birmingham. Really chilled out with great food and drinks. The beer garden is spacious yet cosy and the whole place is generally fab! Why not spend your Bank Holiday Sunday chilling out and listening to us. We are on at 7pm and will be playing a smooth set of legendary covers and some of our own home grown songs.

Look forward to seeing you there!

The Part Timers

Rocking at The Plough

The Part Timers — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 09:54:50 +0000

Last night was our third gig at The Plough in Harborne and what a night again. We had such a good time, its was amazing. Everyone was joining into our covers and we had loads of really good comments about our own songs too, especially “Fly Away.” But waking up this morning was not something I had anticipated being so hard when I eventually fell asleep at 2am. I really didn’t want to get out of bed, you forget sometimes how tiring at 3 hour gig can be! But anyway it went really well and I can’t wait for The Part Timers to get their next set of dates in at The Plough, we will keep you posted… On another point about our gigs, you will notice on the home page our next gig is this Saturday 8th August, want to know more?

The gig on Saturday is at the Clarendon Hotel in Wolverhampton we will be performing at 8pm until 9pm, however the whole event, labelled “The Grapevine” will be an evening of 12 bands and 6 djs from around the region. I am hoping it will be an entertaining night. We will be doing some upbeat track for people to get their groove onto like they did last night! Hopefully the drinks will be flowing too!!

If you fancy coming along for a night of great live music, then please come on down, it would be really nice to have some supporters with us!

On a final note we now have a demo CD and some video footage of last night, hopefully a load of photos too! As soon as we have made them fit for the internet I will get them posted on here and finally create a you tube channel for us too!

Anyway speak to you all soon, for those of you who came along last night, we really hope you had a good night and thanks again for your support!

Gary

The Part Timers Next Gig

The Part Timers — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 14:02:47 +0000

Well its that time of the week again to do a post about what we’ve been upto and what’s going on for The Part Timers band in and around Birmingham and the West Midlands. A couple of things really, we have been in the studio and have a gig tomorrow and Saturday. We now have a plan of action in place to get some more gigs booked in, and it has been worth the wait for our Demo CD.

So yesterday we spent five hours at Rich Bitch Studios in Selly Oak, Birmingham. A fantastic recording and rehearsal venue just by Birmingham University in the middle of students-ville! Rich Bitch is a cool place to play and many of the great bands in Birmingham have practised, performed and recorded there in the past. We started at midday and after a quick sound check, went straight into a cover of Half the World Away by Oasis, followed by All Along the Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix, we did a great version of “Part Timer” our own song which we wrote the other week and performed at The Plough for the first time two weeks ago. We did eight tracks in total and will be making copies ready to hand to local bars and other music venue in and around Birmingham and the West Midlands. We have even asked the sound engineer who was with us in the studio to come along to our gig tomorrow and record us live. On top of this we have a guy coming down with a video camera so that we can get some footage to post around, and so we can finally start up our You Tube channel.

Tomorrow is our third gig at The Plough in Harborne, we have been doing really well there and the owner even said to us he had been getting great feedback from when we have performed. They must have been impressed because they paid us more last week! Lets hope this continues. We have added another few tracks into the mix just to keep the variety going and rather than doing a mammoth 3 hr set like two weeks ago (yes, people really do get there money’s worth with us!) we are going to try and stick to 45 minutes each side of a 30 min break. No doubt though after people have downed many a pint, they will be yelling for us to do some more. We often get people wanting classics to sing a long too. One that goes down particularly well is Wonderwall by Oasis.

This Saturday we also have a gig, it is a freebie that we are doing for the Grapevine in Wolverhampton. A nice get together of 12 bands ands 6 djs, promising to be a uplifting event for the region! Check out more details here.

The Part Timers at Grapevine and studio

The Part Timers — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 07:31:02 +0000

The Part Timers at The Grapevine

We’ve just had the confirmation, that The Part Timers Acoustic Band, will be playing at 8pm on Saturday the 8th of August at the event we have been invited to play in Wolverhampton. “The Grapevine” is a get-together of local bands in Birmingham, Wolverhampton and the West Midlands, comprising of 12 live acts; rock, folk and acoustic, 6 DJs an art exhibition and more, it promises to be quite a good afternoon and night! And finally we have booked some studio time too!

Yes finally we have got around to booking in some time at Rich Bitch Studios in Selly Oak, Birmingham. The owners of Rich Bitch have been providing their excellent services to Bands in Birmingham for the last 28 years. I called them up yesterday and spoke to Rob who has kindly arrange 5 hrs of studio time for us with an engineer on Tuesday next week. We want to record 6 songs whilst we are there, but depending on how we get on we may do some more. The whole point of us getting songs onto CD is to get them out to other venues across Birmingham and the West Midlands and start booking some more gigs. It would also be nice to be able to lay down a few of our own tracks and then sell them at our gigs too. All for the greater good!

Our next rehearsal is on Saturday, where we will be running over another few covers songs and writing our new song which we started on Tuesday. It sounds pretty good so far, we have sorted the intro, verses and bridge, but need to sort a chorus of some description. Phil is busy writing the rest of the lyrics so hopefully it should come together nicely over the weekend.

Remember we are back on at The Plough on the 6th of August too. We will be on at 8pm, but more will follow on that!

Speak soon

Gary

Bands in Birmingham

The Part Timers — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 15:49:42 +0000

The Part Timers are on a mission to become one of the top bands in Birmingham. Having secured a regular gig at The Plough in Harborne, with our next gig there on the 6th of August, we are now looking around for new venues and getting ourselves around to book up new gigs and events.I have been busy submitting our blog to new directories and forums and working on our Facebook and Twitter accounts to build up The Part Timers following in Birmingham.

If you hadn’t already seen them, we have added some photos on our new photos page. Hopefully this should start filling up pretty quickly as we start getting around more, we also want to get some videos on their too, which we will then create a YouTube channel for, so you can always check out our gigs even if you missed them!

Tomorrow we are practicing in Birmingham, we have some new songs to add to set and we will be writing some new songs ready for our next gig at The Plough in Harborne. We must also get down the recording studios too, how can we ever get singned with no music on our site?! As soon as we can we will be posting up a selection of our own home grown songs on our blog for your musical delight! We reckon we will be going to record at Rich Bitch studios in Selly Oak which other bands in bimingham have recommended to us.

Catch up with you soon!

Gary