Rock The Bike: BLOG
Bike Blenders, Pedal Powered Activities for Events and Education
Bringing Pedal Power to your event increases the fun and participation while decreasing the use of diesel generators, extension cords, and batteries. This instantly gets your group moving, breathing, and active. People are more likely to loosen up, enjoy themselves, and learn something new when their body is engaged. Our most popular activity — and the most accessible starting point for anyone interested in Pedal Power — is Bike Blending. Please read on to see the different Bike Blenders and our full array of Pedal Powered activities!
read 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.
read more
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. |
El Arbol: The Bike Tree
This custom art bike, made and based in San Francisco, rides through the city at 12 feet tall, then sprouts roots, branches, and leaves at events, where it becomes a 2500-Watt double-stack main speaker at our Pedal Powered Stage. Integrated LEDs look stunning at night. The Tree has two seats and creates all of its own power using an integrated One Bike / One Speaker circuit.
Above, El Arbol in action as a Aerial Dance rig at Gaia Fest in 2012.
Aerialist Shredder performs on hoop from El Arbol’s trusty rear branch.
- Tara performs on El Arbol at the start of the SF Marathon
- El Arbol without its Canopy of Leaves.
The sound quality is incredible. By using the audio elements from 2 Modified JBL PRX loudspeakers, it has the ability to get music out at festival levels with very low distortion. We use El Arbol as half of our Pedal Powered Stage at the San Francisco Bicycle Music Festival. The height of the upper loudspeaker (9′ up!) helps the sound spread out easily out above a crowd, without requiring deafening volume levels for those in the front.
It’s fun and expands the notion of ‘Stage’ to include the pedalers.
read moreWe’re Pedal Power people.
A mom and her son Pedal Powering a music performance on a Mundo 500 generator at the Oregon Country Fair. Rock The Bike built the Pedal Powered Stage used at the Fair.
We help our event partners engage their communities to provide the greenest source of power possible. Read on to see how we do it!
read more
Ride to Maker Faire with Rock the Bike
Ride 21 miles from Dolores Park to Maker Faire with the Rock The Bike crew!
Please RSVP on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=163941343661961
read more
Thanks Sunday Streets! Highlights from the Pedal Powered Stage.
Many thanks to Rupa & The April Fishes, Cradle Duende, Izzy Wise, and Cello Joe for their performances. Also thanks to Tara Quinn who did an impromptu ground contortion routine shown above.
The crowd peaked at about 200-250. Rupa raved about the sound from our Pedal Powered Stage, saying “Our set at Sunday Streets sounded amazing, surprising power on his pedaled system.” Justin Ancheta, bandleader of Cradle Duende also thought we’d reached a new level of sound quality: “I think last year [after Sunday Streets in the Mission] I said it was the best I’ve heard, and this year topped it. The sound was great in front due to having Maya manage the board, monitors were working great.”
Above: Rupa Performs as two pedalers keep El Arbol powered up, along with 3 pedalers on stage right using Mundo 500s.
Crew Photo!
After Sunday Streets we hung out with a few new friends and did some social bike repair.
read more
Rupa to headline as we Pedal power awesome local music acts at Sunday Streets in the Mission this Sunday!
This Sunday we’ll be Pedal Powering hours of live local music at San Francisco’s groundbreaking cyclovia program, Sunday Streets. Headliners Rupa and the April Fishes are an internationally touring band that calls San Francisco home. Be there as we Pedal Power this amazing quintet, as well as up and coming local ‘Klezmenco’ hoppers “Cradle Duende” (listen at http://www.reverbnation.com/cradledduende ) , the digitally enhanced Cumbia sounds of Bernal Heights’ Izzy Wise, and the hilarious singalongs of the world’s only beatboxing cellist, Cello Joe. After we’ve done all that, we’ll reconfigure our gear for a LiveOnBike performance by Fossil Fool, the Bike Rapper!
Our latest Pedal Powered Stage uses artful ‘Soul Cycle’ music bikes including the imaginative El Arbol and the stout Blue Whale. These custom fiberglass rigs are built on our exclusive Modified JBL PRX loudspeakers, so they sound great and make the most of every watt of available Pedal Power. You can see them in action in the video from Earth Day at USF below.
Location: 24th and Florida St. Many thanks to the Sunday Streets crew for this awesome spot in the heart of the Mission District.
Lineup:
12PM — Izzy Wise
1PM — Rupa
2PM — Cradle Duende
2:45PM — Cello Joe
3:30PM — Fossil Fool, LiveOnBike!
Sunday Streets is a revolutionary way to experience San Francisco car free. It’s one of the first american ‘Cyclovia’ events, in which large swaths of a city are closed off to cars and people can experience a human scale community, if only for a day. Rock The Bike has been participating in Sunday Streets since 2009.
read more
