If you have never been to the downtown Lake Wales open mic, the most useful single sentence anyone can give you is this: it is a walk-up sign-in night, the list is on paper, and the order of the list is the order in which you play. Everything else — what to bring, what to expect from the PA, how long your slot will run, how the room behaves — derives from that one fact. The night happens at Market Plaza, the outdoor brick plaza on Park Avenue between First Street and Scenic Highway in downtown Lake Wales, on the first Wednesday of every month, from six in the evening until eight, with hard load-in for performers starting at about five-thirty. There is no online form. There is no advance lineup. There is no door fee. The plaza fills, the sign-up sheet appears on the front of the sound booth, and the order locks at the moment the first slot starts at six.
What to bring is short. Bring your instrument, bring your own quarter-inch cable if you have a strong opinion about cables, and bring whatever you need to play three songs cleanly in twelve minutes. The house provides a complete PA system, two vocal microphones, one direct input suitable for acoustic guitar or keyboard, and one general instrument microphone, and the volunteer sound engineer behind the board has been doing this long enough that you can trust him to set your levels in the thirty seconds he has before your first downbeat. Three songs or twelve minutes, whichever ends first, is the format and it is enforced gently but consistently, because the night runs on a tight clock and because every slot taken at length is a slot lost to someone else who showed up to play.
What the room actually wants is more cultural than technical. Originals are received warmly; covers are perfectly acceptable, but the regulars notice and appreciate the originals first. Quieter performances do better on the outdoor PA than loud ones, because the brick walls of the plaza are very forgiving of vocal warmth and unforgiving of clipped DI signal. Short spoken introductions between songs are welcome — especially if they tell the room where the song came from — and long stage banter is gently received but not the reason anyone is there. The single most respected behavior of the entire monthly arrangement is that you stay seated, listening, through the players who come on after you have finished your own slot, and that you applaud them as warmly as you wanted to be applauded. That is the whole etiquette. If you are looking to join or form a band, the corkboard next to the sound booth is the place where the 'drummer wanted' and 'looking for a bass player' notes actually get read, and the full performer contact list on the Open Mic page of this site is the long-form reference for anyone who wants to make introductions in advance.