One of the most important pieces of marketing material you will produce for your band is your demo recording. I’ve already discussed using a live recording in your marketing kit as opposed to a studio produced recording. Today I would like to discuss your song selection that you will be including on your demo. The songs you choose for your demo can sell your band in many different ways.
I guess it’s a no-brainer that you will want to put your best songs on the demo recording. What determines your best songs? A combination of different things. Obviously you want the songs that you actually play the best. These would be the songs that the band knows like the back of their hand. Songs that you play perfectly every time you play them. It’s very important that you give a great consistent performance of your demo songs so when you play them in another club you will sound like your demo. (more…)
As a musician I’ve wondered what my legacy will be. Will anyone remember or care that I worked so hard at music for so many years after I’ve gone? I’m hoping that at least my kids will remember and care about my musical legacy after I’m gone. So what is something concrete that you can leave behind? I believe that the recordings that you should be making over the course of your career will be the biggest evidence that you really gave music your best shot. A good body of recorded work will document your life as a musician in a way that nothing else will. It will show your progression from beginner to being the best you could possibly be. A good body of recorded work will bring you a lot of enjoyment as you get older and want to take a trip down memory lane to see where you’ve come from as well. I know listening to my old recordings makes me feel really good about where I am now.
There are a lot of incredibly good audio recorders on the market right now. They are compact and handheld with built-in stereo microphones. Having one in your gear arsenal is very important for a number of reasons.
I’ve written before about how important it is to record your live performances. You can learn so much from hearing your gigs back on a recording. Having a recorder like the
Olympus LS-10 Linear PCM Recorder can make recording your live shows as easy as setting the recorder up in the back of the room and letting it record. Since it’s all digital you can edit out dead spaces later. Making a back of the room recording is a good idea because it really lets you hear what the audience is hearing. You can also capture the audience reaction to your performance. If you get good at placing the recorder where it picks up well, you could end up with an excellent live recording that you could use as a demo in your bands marketing kit. (more…)
I have people ask me all the time who my biggest influences are in music. I always just keep it simple and say “The Beatles, The Who and Pink Floyd”. While that’s true to a large degree they’re obviously not my only influence. When I first started to get really excited about music those three bands really turned me on to a lot of great things. But then naturally I wanted to hear more new and exciting music. Which brings me to my topic today. I can honestly say that I’m a huge fan of all music and that every piece of music I hear influences me in some way or another.
I’ve been playing in bands for 27 years now and have been to lots of band practices and rehearsals. Today I’m going to talk a bit about how your band sets up for practice and gigs. I want you to think about how your band sets up during a standard band practice. I’ll bet you that you stand in some kind of circle or oval facing each other with all the amplifiers and speakers pointing at you. That’s really the standard setup for a regular band practice.
Now think of your setup at your gigs and live shows. I’ll bet your backs are to the drummer and all your speakers and amplifiers are pointing forward. (more…)
I’m always checking out new and interesting products to help make my life in a band easier. I was looking at some guitar tablature books and stumbled onto the Gig Guide series published by Hal Leonard. The Gig Guide series is designed to provide musicians with a blueprint for building bands.
What Hal Leonard has done in the Gig Guide series is to pick a musical genre, say Classic Rock, and compile a 12-song setlist. It’s the same thing I’ve done for you with the Live Musician Central Set List series. You get several tools to use to learn the songs with the Hal Leonard Gig Guide series. Along with the list of songs are a Lead Sheet with the basic essential parts you’ll need to know to play the songs. This could be as simple as chords and melody. You also get a demo CD with a full band playing the song so you can hear how you should sound. (more…)
Yesterday I posted about how much learning to play the piano has helped me throughout my career as a musician. My post is titled “The Most Important Instrument To Learn – The Piano“. Dr. Christopher Foley who teaches at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Canada and is also the author of The Collaborative Piano Blog has written a fine article referencing my post. His article is titled “Piano as a Second Language” and you can read it by clicking on the title.
Chris makes some excellent points in his article that I’m sure you will want to check out.
My first step into my music career was learning to play the trumpet when I was 10 years old. It came naturally for me and I enjoyed the instrument. When I turned 11 years old my sister began taking piano lessons. One day I sat down at the piano and my sisters beginning piano book was on the piano. I opened it up and proceeded to play the entire book in one afternoon. That book was John Thompson’s – Teaching Little Fingers To Play. It was easy to read and learn from and my soul as a musician drank it all in. Naturally my parents had been listening to me working on that book and suggested that I may want to take piano lessons along with my sister. I did and from that point on the piano became the musical root of everything I have done musically since.
If you want to get stronger, faster and more accurate on your instrument then there’s no substitute for practicing with a metronome. Metronome’s are perfect for building up the muscles in your hands. Today I want to turn you on to the free online metronome at www.metronomeonline.com.
One of the most important parts of your bands marketing strategy is your Demo CD. The Demo CD is going to be one of your biggest selling points in getting new gigs for your band. I’m going to give you a few tips for putting together a Demo CD that will help sell your band to club owners.
I was listening to Demo CD’s one night with a club owner who was trying to sift through prospective band for his club. I remember he kept saying things like “Studio recording”, “Studio Effects”, and “Too Produced”. And he would toss those Demo CD’s in the trash. What the guy was looking for was a live representation of how the band would sound when they played in his club.
So the most important aspect of putting together a successful Demo CD is to make a good live recording of your band. Preferably with a lot of crowd cheering mixed in. Club owners want an accurate snapshot of how you’ll sound playing in their club. They want to hear how you talk to the crowd and how the crowd is reacting to you. So a live CD is the must for getting into clubs.
If you do want to mix a few studio tracks on your Demo CD that’s okay, but put them at the end. Club owners really don’t care what you sound like in the studio. The best thing to do is have the live demo for the club owners and a studio demo to give to fans at your shows. The studio demos should also have some live tracks at the end because you never know when one of your fans is going to put a Demo CD in the hands of someone who can line gigs up for you.
There are a couple ways to capture a good live CD. One is to record your show at a club that you regularly play at and hopefully you’ll catch a good night. Another way is to control things a bit more and invite a rowdy crowd of friends to a more controlled environment for recording. I’ve done both and the demo’s we’ve recorded with a crowd of friends has usually turned out better just because the band was more relaxed and interacting easier with the crowd. Remember, the club owners want to hear some stage banter.
Finally, put your best songs on the Demo CD. Make sure they’re the songs that everybody will know and recognize. If you want to really show off your skills with a highly technical song, only put one on. Also, unless you want to play weddings, only put one slow song on the Disc.
It’s really excellent practice to record all your live shows because you never know when you’re going to have that perfect gig. You just may get the live recording of a lifetime. So be prepared by having a recorder at the gig recording your show.
It was easy to read and learn from and my soul as a musician drank it all in. Naturally my parents had been listening to me working on that book and suggested that I may want to take piano lessons along with my sister. I did and from that point on the piano became the musical root of everything I have done musically since.
