A popular guitar forum that I frequent gets a lot of these types of questions:
1. How do I learn how to shred?
2. What scale is this (random notes that have nothing diatonically to do with one another)?
3. How can I make my sweep picking faster/better/whatever?
4. What chords are these (random, again meaningless triads)?
I have advice for those guys – quit it. Your perspective above is wrong. While technique and theory are really important, they aren’t the most critical part of music. The most critical aspect of music is, of course, being musical. It takes time, practice and self-critique to develop musicality. If you aren’t doing that you are missing the MOST IMPORTANT part of development as a guitarist.
If you want 4% of the male population to geek out while you play 64th note sextuplets at 240 BPM, sweet – keep the practice up. On the other hand if you want to have a chance of taking your career anywhere you need make good music, not technical music, so stop being a guitar player and start being a musician. Stop f***ing shredding!
Two quick questions:
1. How many great shredders are there who have made it big? Like “do it for a living” big?
2. How many mediocre guitar players have made it big because they are incredible musicians/songwriters/performers?
If your answer to #1 is less than your answer to #2, you need to adjust your practice schedule so that it is more in line with a long term goal that looks like #2.
One great way to do this is take lessons on another instrument or from a good instructor who teaches on another instrument. Find a great piano player, tell him what you’re trying to do and get him to work with you on musicality. He can’t give you tips on technique because he doesn’t know any. 
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Made this instructional video on how to structure your practices for ultimate productivity. NSFW. Oh, and the neck beard is optional…Enjoy.
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(This is a follow up to my post “How to Supercharge Your Band’s Bookings.” You can read it on Steve Nixon’s blog.)
So you got the gig. Awesome! Now you need to make a good impression and get booked there again. If you draw well, this shouldn’t be a problem. But what if your attendance has been spotty? Here are a few of my favorite techniques as well as a word of caution.
WORD OF CAUTION: You can’t expect to spend $0 on marketing and promotion and have a successful show. The venue needs to see that you are spending your own time and money to promote a show – you’ll earn a great deal of respect from them. My fan recruitment techniques necessitate spending at least your first night of earnings IN ADVANCE to get butts in seats. You will make $0, maybe less on your first couple of shows. However you’ll gain professional respect from the venue and your next gigs will pay out in spades.
These techniques fall in to two categories: “More Fans” and “Less Cost to Venue.”
Less Cost – “Insure” Your Gig
If you have a performance contract, request from the venue that you get paid $0 unless you bring X number of covers. If you don’t have a contract, refuse to accept money from the venue owner if your draw is less than stellar. I have turned down money and it resulted in a second chance every single time.
Less Cost- Drink On Your Dime
Many venues comp food and drink to band members. Lots of guys abuse this, particularly at smaller venues (bars, irish pubs, blues clubs, etc). When your waitress arrives, turn down the comp and tell her that you want to carry your own weight. Which brings us to…..
More Fans – Tip, Tip, Tip
The best way to promote your band is to get the venue’s staff working for you. Most musicians are cheap. Waitresses are used to this. They are also frequently the gateway to another gig. So tip the crap out of them. At our first show at a bar outside of Chicago, our draw was ok but not stellar. We took entire $550 check and make sure the wait staff and bartenders were each tipped out. This worked out to $50-$75 per person. It was really really expensive but paid off. We got our “second chance” one month later. The staff promoted our band to every single person they saw for an entire month. When we showed up to load in the bar was already turning people away at the door and their patio was jammed. It was one of the best Fridays in the bar’s history. The booking agent called me that Monday and faxed in a performance agreement for 1 Friday per month for the next 12 months at $650 per show. Not a bad night, and our $550 investment yielded a return of $8,350 plus merch sales. Ten months later we booked an additional year at $750 per show.
More Fans – Party Bus
Although we had a decent fan base in the city of Chicago, tons of our fans were suburbanites. We had a big show at Hard Rock and needed to bring our ‘A’ game. We rented two charter busses, one from the north side and one from the south side. Pickup points were suburban bars that booked us regularly. (Of course they appreciated that since it increased their bar receipts for that night.) Everyone met, bussed in to the city, watched our show, partied, and went home. That night we made 3 venues happy – Hard Rock and the two pickup/drop off locations. We spend $1,000 but it was offset by “passing the hat” for the bus drivers’ tips, on-bus merch sales, and future bookings at the suburban bars.
More Fans – Use Craig’s List
Craig’s List is a great place to get fans, but don’t use the musician forum. Don’t use the activities forum. Use the jobs board. Post an ad that you’re looking for girls to come out to your show and that they’ll get free drinks and/or a few bucks for 1-2 hours’ work. Make sure you let the venue owner know that you would like to run a tab for some VIPs to ensure that it’s ok with them. Ask the girls to bring friends. Then have a friend with a camera take pics, post ‘em on your band’s web site and watch the single guys flock to your shows!
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I hope you’re having a great start to your Memorial Day weekend! I’m currently flying home from Dallas, reading a bunch of post from posers as they attempt to flame me for my guest post on Steve Nixon’s Blog earlier this week. I had no idea that it would cause such a stir, nor did I know that one of the largest music forums on the web had so many contributors with limited reading comprehension skills. Although I’m not remotely interested in starting a bunch of point-by-point rebuttals, there are a few clarifications that I would like to make.
I. Some knob with the handle “TrickyBoy” wrote the following:
“Not to be a dick, but as a professional sales manager, I wouldn’t hire anyone who took this type of approach. Fuck, I wouldn’t trust you to cut my grass. A recap of this article is one sentence: ‘When trying to book your band, lie your ass off.’ This used car salesman sleazy approach drives me crazy in the professional world and I certainly would never apply it to booking our band.
In a nutshell, I would tell anyone to disregard anything in this article.”
I did a bit of research and found out that our buddy TrickyBoy is a guy named Jason. He lives in the southern portion of the US and, as of last update, is an Account Manager for a small technology outsourcing firm. But hey – let’s take the “professional sales manager” thing at face value and disregard the fact that he could very well just be doing inside sales or telemarketing to pay the bills until his band really takes off. Four things to note here:
1. I learned an important lesson about hiring over these last few years. I put down gigging to run sales and business development for a multi million dollar internet marketing company. It went so well that I became president of that same internet marketing company, increased their revenue up by $60 million or so in 36 months and grew the employee base from 8 to 50ish. All before I was 31? That can’t be – according to TrickyBoy I’d never get hired or called back by a single client! I digress – the lesson is this: You can’t teach, train, compensate, or motivate aggression and tenacity. It’s better to start with a salesperson who is too tenacious and mellow them out rather than have an employee who is too tentative. You’ll never turn the latter into a top performer.
2. I never said lie. (This is where I first began to question my detractors’ reading comprehension skills.) I said act as if you are booking a great band and that you are the agent for that band, and don’t disclose that you are in the band. None of that is lying unless you think your band is incredibly shitty and are asked directly “hey by chance are you also a band member,” which BTW has never happened to me. Create a sole proprietorship or LLC (as I did) and act as your own agent. No “lies” or “sleazy” there. I also said “act as your own receptionist.” Is there anything dishonest about answering your phone “Joe Lilly’s office?” No. Not if you are answering while you’re at work, aka IN YOUR F’ING OFFICE.
3. A “used car salesman sleazy approach” is typically a high-pressure, 1-call type close. Used car salesmen are very short term thinkers. Someone comes on the lot, they close a sale, done. None of my techniques can be applied to that environment. So Jason has either never taken a sales training course or he’s never purchased a car. I’m not sure which.
4. Applied correctly, none of your prospects will realize that you are using these techniques. Once they do you’ll have made them so much money that they will think it is funny. More on that below, as we meet another “muso” that we can call NashvilleDoucher.
II. .Some other wank whose user name I can’t recall, aka NashvilleDoucher, wrote:
“…This is a forum for musicians to HANG. I don’t come here and PROMOTE my band(s), I come here to hang and talk with other musos who are digging in the trenches. This dude is your typical biz asshat. Saw TONS of ‘em in my years in Nashville. And some got work, but once word got around, it was funny how their work dried up. I was a sideman for signed artist for years, and I would NEVER recommend someone for a gig who acted like this. So what happens when the owner finds out your are willing to lie your ass off? He’ll look for a reason to NOT trust you. This is the kind of bullshit that gives musicians a bad name…..”
1. What does musicians hanging and you not understanding fundamentals of self-promotion have to do with my blog post? Here’s a free tip for you – if you are allowed to promote your band on that forum (if it’s not against TOS), you would be a fool not to. Google LOOOOOVES links from forums to your site. It will help your search rankings and more people will find you and want to know what band they can come see you in this week.
2. I thought being late, flakey, not drawing, drinking too much, doing drugs and being an unambitious loser is what gives musicians a bad name…but that’s just me. I’m proposing pretty much the opposite of all that – that you act professional, are punctual, and do you what you need to do to get through the gatekeeper/get the decision maker’s attention – and get booked. Simple as that. That said, I’m sure this guy knows what professionalism is all about with his dozens of bands and side work that he’s doing.
3. If you over-book yourself to the point where you can’t draw an audience, shame on you for being a moron. I never suggested you should play rooms that you can’t fill. We didn’t get to my post on “how to get more people to show up to see you be a sideman years ago in Nashville with biz asshats” post. That one is coming soon.
4. I would never ever ever ever screw a venue owner out of money. If I booked a gig I expected to be a profit center. We jammed lots of the places we played, and if I overbooked us (which happened a few times while I was learning about audience management), we took our earnings and used them to tip the staff or we didn’t take any money. That’s right. We played for free.That made it REALLY easy for these guys to book us even when we drew just a handful – in fact, we got quite a few opening slots exactly that way. We met a lot of other bands, networked a ton and pulled a bunch of fans over to our group.
In short, I guess with all their years of experience in sales and music and business and being flamer dicks on forums, these guys MUST know better how to get bands booked. So you should indeed disregard everything in my guest post, unless, of course, you’d like to play great venues (Taste of Chicago, Buddy Guy’s Legends, Great American Music Hall, Hard Rock Casino), get repeat gigs, fill up your calendar, and start making fans and money. We were able to finance all of our band-related activities including equipment, several CD’s, some small regional weekend-warrior tours, and even put some money in our pockets at the end of the year.
But why would you want to do any of that?
P.S. The best part – I’m not an exceptional singer or guitar player and I STILL got the gigs and the people to show up! I’m sure NashvilleDoucher can play circles around me!
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