Rock The Bike: BLOG
The sLEDgehammer has escaped the tube.
Our Pedal Powered lighting challenge, the sLEDgehammer, has escaped the tube. We’ve both advanced the circuitry and the creativity of this piece of gear, making it even more of a crowd pleaser.
The sLEDgehammer is a Pedal Power game where you have to pedal really hard (but not for very long) to win. When you win, the power you’ve built up by pedaling gets unleashed in a dazzling light sequence. In the example above, a river appears to flow down the courtyard away from the pedaler, then the Peace & Love sign lights up. The 9-segment ‘reward’ sequence lasts only a couple seconds. When someone wins the game and sees the sequence, there’s a palpable release of energy. The celebrations are awesome to see. At the holiday party where we set this up, people were shouting “Peace & Love!”
Basic questions to consider when crafting your Pedal Powered Stage
The technical needs of a Pedal Powered event vary greatly depending on audience size, venue, and power needs of musician’s devices. The questions in this post will help you to know what features are most important for you, and how much power you’ll really need. Please answer these questions and email us using the contact form. Also, please check out some of our recommended packages to see systems intended for different crowd sizes: https://oldsite.rockthebike.com/pedal-powered-stage-packages
Above: Shake Your Peace! performs during the Bay Rising Tour on their Pedal Powered Stage crafted by Rock the Bike.
- In your mind’s eye, how many people are taking in the music at your ideal event? Audience size is the most important factor in knowing how many loudspeakers, generators, and circuitry to get. Are you aiming for school assemblies? Street performing? A festival stage?
- Who is pedaling to generate power at your events? Is it competitive cyclists? fit adults? the general public? teenagers? kids? How family friendly are your events? Doing events with kids means you’ll need more bikes! The reason: Kids love to pedal but can’t generate much power. Also, they need to use bikes that are sized accordingly. If you want to do these events, you need to plan ahead so kids can participate.
- What style of music do you want to amplify? Or do you have a specific band your are planning to work with? Are you a bandleader? If so, what is the instrumentation in your band?
- Indoor vs. Outdoor? In your mind’s eye, where are your Pedal Powered events taking place?
- Do you want or need to be completely off the grid? Off The Grid means that you are completely independent and not relying on power from any other source. Some people just want to demonstrate Pedal Power, but are doing so in places where there ready access to wall power. Perhaps they don’t mind using some wall power and some bike power. This can be a way to decrease the number of bikes in your system, but still offer people the chance to create power with their bodies. For example, if you want a Bike Powered Cinema, you could power the loudspeakers with bikes and the projector with wall power. Other people want to make a statement by using NO power from the grid, or they are trying to bring a concert to a natural setting or park where there is no built-in power at all. They’ll need to be completely off the grid. What is right for you?
- Related. What is your main motivation for doing Pedal Powered events in your community? Examples: Have fun, get involved in music events, raise environmental consciousness/bike excitement, encourage healthy lifestyles, publicize a commercial offering. It helps us to know why our customers are interested in Pedal Power, and it may affect our gear recommendations.
- Are you planning to bike it there? Biking it there requires more crew, gear, and experience than loading a truck, but can be enormously gratifying. Check out these photos to see if this inspires you: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rockthebike/sets/72157622547485971/
- Will you be doing nighttime events?
- Do you already have a crew? Are you interested in leading a crew? Doing larger events with the general public requires a crew, including specific roles like Sound Guy, Roadie, Coach, Tech, MC and more.
Watch Fossil Fool’s TED Audition.
VOTING IS CLOSED! Thanks for reading and watching the video!
Friends, customers, and fans: Please support my campaign to speak at the global TED 2013 conference. There is an open voting and comment period happening NOW until the end of August, in which you can watch and review all the amazing auditions that took place in the past 6 months. I auditioned in Vancouver in May. While the TED team make the final decisions, your feedback and ratings are going to help this talk get noticed. Please see bold instructions below for info about how to take action!
Ride to Gaia Fest with Rock the Bike
Beginning July 30 from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, we will pedal northward, covering 180-miles in 4-days, arriving in style at Gaia Fest, an awesome music and camping festival at the Black Oak Ranch in Laytonville.
For the past 4 years, we have mobilized hundreds to ride 20 miles south from San Francisco to Maker Faire.
At the Bicycle Music Festival, we move our entire festival, including our 10000-watt Pedal Powered Stage and hundreds of fans, from our day venue to our night venue 5 miles away.
We have studied from the masters of self-supported music and bike touring, the Pleasant Revolution. Cello Joe, in foreground, will be biking with us. Kipchoge, in background will also be biking to Gaia, but from the North.
And now, we are ready to bring YOU safely by bicycle to Gaia Fest!
We will be carrying all the supplies we need for our tour, then setting up a Pedal Powered Stage featuring some of the best bands at the Gaia Festival, right across from the Main Stage!
Many thanks San Francisco Bicycle Music Festival: World’s largest Human Powered Music Fest.
The 6th Annual San Francisco Bicycle Music Festival was our biggest ever and a milestone for our grassroots Human Powered Music Fest. Many thanks to the bands, fans, and our huge volunteer crew. Any one of the 3 phases of the day would have been epic enough. But we had a beautiful, idyllic daytime music festival in the park, an outrageous mobile party, and a post-modern urban block party all in one day. Daytime: 500+ people in a meadow, enjoying live music in the beautiful sunshine… Followed by a fire-truck dodging, freeway underpass screaming, Fossil Fooling LiveOnBike session, with captain Ariel using no electric assist to pull 3 performers and audio gear weighing 250 pounds on our Mobile Stage… Followed by a street party with an elevated stage, a glowing Bike Tree, and a 3-person pedal powered stage lighting system.
Rupa & The April Fishes perform at Golden Gate Park’s Log Cabin Meadow. Photo: Volker Neumann.
We had 19 pedalers at the peak in Golden Gate Park! Plenty of power for our 10000-Watt sound system to run. In the distance you can see our Pedal Powered Line Array hanging from its bamboo tripod.
The suite next to the metalshop in our Berkeley workshop community is available!
There’s a suite available next door to our metalshop in our Berkeley workshop community, which also includes the East Bay Bike Coalition. “Unit A” has good light from its large glass doors and skylights, concrete floor, high ceilings in most of the space, lots of built in storage, a sink, gas heater for the winter, and access to a shared bathroom, kitchen, and outdoor shower. Our landlord has expressed a high priority on finding a new tenant within the bicycle field, so that we can continue to develop a thriving business community at Channing Way. There is ample bike parking in the large courtyard space and we are on a well-trafficked bicycle boulevard.
The workshop community has the honor of being the only structure zoned for ‘Light Industrial’ in this otherwise residential neighborhood. This makes it ideal for inventors, frame builders, seamsters and seamstresses, or fabricators. We are close to good food and 3 BART stations.
Unit A also has access to our metal shop seen below. Depending on the nature of your skills, needs, and experience, you can make an arrangement with us and the landlord to use the tools in the metal shop. Perhaps you can share your skills!
The highlights are:
Asking price is $1200/month for Unit A. Please contact landlord Nick Bertoni, 510-517-9991 or Rock The Bike, 510-548-2453, for a tour.
Bike Blenders, Pedal Powered Concerts and Activities for Events and Education
Bringing Pedal Powered activities to your event increases the fun and participation and puts people in an open, joyous, and receptive state, where they’re ready to interact and learn. It’s green energy in action! Our activities provide a way for people to use their own muscle power and instantly achieve a delightful and memorable result.
Our most popular activity — and the most accessible starting point for anyone interested in Pedal Power — is Bike Blending.
We’ve spent the last 13 years developing Pedal Powered activities that help everyday people experience their power to make change. From 1-bike stations like Bike Blenders and Recharge Stations to 20-bike concert systems , Pedal Power rocks! We do the hard work of engineering the bikes and systems to be safe, dependable, educational, and fun. You bring in your group and share the gift of human power with people for the first time.
Please click More to read on about all our Pedal Powered activities, or, for info about the ones we rent and our rental program, check out our handy table of rentable Pedal Powered Activities!
(more…)
Vow for 2012: No More Foofy gigs!
We want to feel the love at all of our events in 2012 and are willing to let some event opportunities go if they are shaping up to be foofy.
Foofy: Excessively frilly or frou-frou, typically in a manner calculated to attract attention to an otherwise unremarkable person or event. Source: Wiktionary
In the context of Pedal Powered events, foofy is synonymous with greenwashing, needless burning of Fossil Fuels to get there, or huge expense of resources to amplify a vague message.
For 2012, we vow: No More Foofy or Unattended Gigs!
We’re grateful to everyone who has reached out to us about event opportunities. And we don’t want to point fingers. But those on the crew who’ve been there week after week know we’ve had some foofy gigs in the mix this past year. We took almost all the events that came our way in the past year, turning down only an employee event for a major oil company. In 2012 we want to apply a stricter standard to avoid taking gigs that waste our time or use our Pedal Power to further a lame cause. This will hopefully save our team’s energy and resources to give our all to the products and events we believe in.
If several of the questions below raise a flag , that’s a clear sign this gig is likely to be foofy. Avoid it!
- Would we be proud to announce it in our newsletter?
- Are we comfortable doing it? In order to get the gig, do we need to promise something we’ve never done at an event before?
- Does this event producer / client have a message? And is it a message we can get behind?
The message doesn’t need to be the focus of the event. For example, our music events don’t always have a strong message, and they’re still worth doing. - Do we respect the planners / organizers and their work in the community?
- Do we need to burn fossil fuels to get there? This is a big one. We did a lot of truck and airplane gigs in 2011. Using Fossil Fuels to get to a gig raises the bar on everything else. We need to reach a good number of people in a real way to make up for burning
- Do we get to work with kids? Major trump card! Working with kids makes almost everything else passable.
- Does the client care about the event enough to want to be there in person? Enough to pedal? At many of our events, we are left to hold it down and the event contact / client is busy doing something else. Not a deal braker on its own but if 2-3 other flags are up, then this might make the gig unworkable.
No more unattended gigs. We will work to get our people there!
OK, so we are only going to do events we believe in. Now we want to avoid another pitfall: unattended gigs. There were too many events in 2011 that had awesome music, a great message, and not enough people! We will use every tool in our bag to get our friends and people out. If you want to make sure you hear about these events, join our Facebook page, and our newsletter using the icons above.
Bike Fair at Sproul Plaza. Awesome event, great music and dancing, but only 5-10 people from our community showed up beyond our crew who were working the event. Let’s grow that number next year so that we can have more great dance moments like these at our Pedal Powered events.
Recent Highlights: Fall 2011
We give many thanks to all of our Fall event partners. Here are some highlights from the season:
On 11-11-11, Rock the Bike came out to help power the Occupy Music Festival. We brought speakers, bike generators, and our new LED lights for an awesome day-and-night show. We’d like to shout out our gratefulness to videographer, Arthur Woo, and all the great bands that made it what it was!
Morgan roadying to Occupy Music Festival.
We pulled out all the stops and brought along our entire pedal powered fleet: Fender Blenders, the Ice Cream Bike, Pedal Powered Stage, Pedal Powered Spin Art, and even an aerial performance by Tara Quinn.
This summer we released our new Ice Cream Bike. We think it’s our sleekest design and most innovative product yet, and it’s a great example of the progress we’ve made at Rock the Bike. We also got an amazing opportunity to pedal power our first foodie event with it at The California Academy of Science’s LocalBites.
Life is Living
This year was Rock the Bike’s first Bay Area doubleheader! While many crew members stayed at Cow Palace, a few went to Oakland to pedal power our first cooking demo.
Ramping Up Our Performances
We started off with one acrobatic artist (Tara Quinn), and now we have worked with four! We’re enjoying all the functionality of El Arbol, allowing hoops and even silks!
We’ve also added Pedal Power Stage Lighting with LED Panels (seen above & below in Red and Blue) to our Pedal Power Stage!
What are the elements of a Pedal Powered Stage?
Pedal Power Generators:
Above, two Mundo 500 generators in use at the Eugene Bicycle Music Festival. The rear wheel is elevated off the ground so that you can pedal in place and generate power.
You will need enough bicycle generators that the pedaling effort per person is approx. 50-75 Watts. Based on our experience at events, 50-75 Watts is the amount that an average audience member can continuously provide. You should also have ‘ringer pedalers’ in your crew. Ringer pedalers are strong racer or everyday commuting cyclists who can contribute up to 4 times more than an average pedaler. Whether you’re relying on ringers or the GP (General Public), you’ll need to provide enough bikes that the effort can be shared.
| Number of Pedalers | Estimated Crowd Size Possible in an Outdoor Location |
| 1 | 200-500 (with One Bike / One Speaker) |
| 4 | 500 |
| 8 | 500-1000 |
| 12 | 1000-2000 |
| 20 | 2000+ We haven’t had enough chances to test at these power levels. |
