LezBnRocker Chicks just finished their second album, "The Lesbian National Anthem" (available on CDBaby, iTunes, Amazon, and EMUSIC). The vocals and lyrics are so fun and match up nicely with the simple, clever guitar riffs. Today they share a tale from the road - find out why when it comes to guitar amps, size does matter!

The girls and I were going to play for the first time at this new club. We had asked the owner if we could come in early to set up our sound reinforcement. The owner said that wasn't necessary because he had some really good sound gear and the world's best sound guy, his nephew. He said all we had to do was plug in and the sound guy would balance us in headphones before we went live. No one had ever tried to mix us live using only headphones before so I was a bit nervous, but he said we didn't have anything to worry about.

So we show up and plug our guitars, sound pedals and keyboards into the sound reinforcement. The monitors are facing the audience so we were worried whether or not the sound guy would actually get the mix right. The sound guy listened to us through his headphones and directed us to play and sing into the microphones while he adjusted his mixer. He gave us a thumb's up and flipped a switch to turn the monitors on. This loud howl barreled out of the monitors and nearly scared every one half to death! The sound guy scrambled to stop it but couldn't figure out what input caused the squeal so he shut everything off.

The audience paid good money to hear us play and was getting restless while boy genius frantically tried to sort things out. Meanwhile, the owner came to me and begged me to do something to appease the fans.

"What am I supposed to do, tell jokes?" I asked. "You told me I didn't need to bring any of my sound stuff. Maybe if you had an acoustic guitar or a guitar amp I could keep them busy for a little while."

So he screams at his 10 year old niece to go get her guitar amp. I began to think that the night might not be a total waste until I see what she returns with. Kim, our drummer, busted out laughing.

"I didn't know Fisher Price made guitar amps!" Kim said laughing herself silly.

The tiny amp was a Danelectro Honeytone bright neon-green plastic 1 watt amp with a belt clip boasting a 2" speaker and was powered by a single 9 volt battery. The little angel hands me the amp and says, "Here Leslie you can play with this!" Sara, our bassist/keyboardist, started laughing so hard I thought she was going to pass out. Nonetheless, the club owner was as serious as a heart attack when he asked me to go out on stage with that tiny amp.

So I told the girls that I had an idea. I fastened the amp to my guitar strap and turned it up as loud as it would go without distorting. We climbed down off the stage and started walking around the audience playing some of the acoustic stuff with vocal harmonies that we'd been working on. I was scared at first because my effect pedals and distortion can easily hide a miss - fingered chord or a single bad note amongst the drums and base, but this tiny amp was catching every fret wiggle. As it turned out, 1 watt is a lot louder than you might think!

Much to my surprise the audience loved it! I don't think any audience has ever been so tuned in or focused on what we were playing and singing. We had never been so up front and personal with an audience before and it was an amazing experience: both frightening and exhilarating at the same time! Now every gig we do in a small club we always end it with one song on our neon-green, clip on, 1 watt amp.