New Issue! :eek:

More Gigs

You're on the stage, the sound engineer just gave you the thumbs up, the crowd is gazing up expectantly at the band, waiting for the opening chord of your hit.
Unfortunately, no-one is perfect, mistakes happen, strings break, vocals get forgotten, people trip, things explode, it's all in a days work.
So how do you deal with mistakes?
Well it depends, you should have spares for most items at hand anyhow.
Guitar strings are one of the most common mistakes, the string breaks, and all too often, the guitarist just stops, the rest of the band turn around and watch, wondering why he stopped, the song falls apart.
This is bad.

What should happen?
Well the guitarist should carry on playing, it is likely he can work around the broken string, it may not sound perfect, but to be honest, unless your playing MTV unplugged, no-ones going to know.

Just battle on till the end of the song, either quickly putting on a new string (you did remember to bring the spare strings right?), or you can switch guitars (you did remember to bring two right?)

All in all though, the key is to do it fast, once you have the crowd in your grasp, you don't want to let them go, making them wait around along time will make them antsy.
What can you do to fill the breaks in between "breakage"?
Telling jokes is a classic, unfortunately, many people do it wrong, the joke needs to be funny to start with, you also need to be calm enough to tell it slowly and clearly, otherwise no-one will ever hear.
Or you could take the time to talk about an upcoming video or album, or the merch stand, or even thank the other bands and the crowd for coming.

Do anything you can to maintain the crowds attention, although be wary of getting the bassist and drummer to jam, as the guitarist is trying to tune up.

If an amp breaks, or a mic breaks e.t.c., carry on, the person with the broken equipment can stop whilst they get it sorted (preferably within 20 seconds), the rest of the band has to continue however.
Talk to the other bands before going on, try and have some contingency plans sorted out and prehaps have a few small amps lying around the stage ready for such an event, 2 mic's up per vocalist e.t.c.


Forgetting Lyrics?
Well the show must go on, you have a few choices depending on the music you play and the acoustic enviroment.

1) If the musical situation is appropriate, scream anything.
2) Just sing, Not any words, just things such 'aah', once again this is an musical situation that may not apply to all, a grindcore band probably can't get away with this mid verse
3) Stop and go from the lines you do know, this is probably the worst as everytime you stop it's apparant you forgot something, but if you keep calm, smile and then take the next line, you'll get away with it.

See the recurring trend here?
Carry on, you'll look more professional, and the crowd won't get agitated.
Keep a cool head, plan ahead for these events, and keep smiling no matter what.

If the crowd isn't into you, there isn't too much you can do but smile and bear it, most likely you've done something musically that they don't approve of, or they've checked you out before and didn't like you.
Be as nice about it as possible, if someone hurls abuse at you, take it well, if you start screaming then the crowd have another reason to get aggressive.

An example,
I was at a gig, it was an independant record label all dayer, (In at the deep end if anyone must know).
One band came on, "Bas[B]t[/B]ards Trained by Bas[B]t[/B]ards", I made the comment to my friend that the drummer looked like a womble, which was fairly true, but in that funny sort of way.

Now, the guitarist had a redshirt, red hair, and a red guitar, however he had demin trousers.
Halfway through the set, a drunken idiot shouted "You like the colour red don't you, pity you missed out on the trousers mate"

The guitarist looked up, he was obviously ready to kick the guys ***, but instead he smiled and said "You're colour blind, my jeans are red, the guitar is blue and so is my shirt"

The vocalist then piped in straight after, with the punchline "and his hair isn't even their"

This amused the crowd, and whilst it was not the most witty intelligent counter argument, it was fast paced, shut the shouter up, and kept the crowd happy, the situation had been difused, whilst the band were not fantastic (I preferred the political message they inferred rather than the music), the crowd respected them for keeping their cool.

Which is more than could be said for the shouters band, it was apparant he had other things in mind, the band he had verbally attacked had put a banner up behind them and forgotten to take it down.
The shouter stood on a drum stool (yes, he was that short) and tore it down, damaging the banner, he then just left it, not bothering to hand it over to the other band.
As a result of his attitude, he didn't get on well with the crowd, he repeatedly threatened members, and when a 5ft5 drunkard threatens 18 year olds, it is laughable.

I'm glad to report that his band is not signed to In At The Deep End Records.
But this is just an example, of crowd management.

Not only are these key factors in pleasing the crowd, but your set list is, they need to be designed to give your new fans a break, don't put your 3 210bpm songs after each other, put slower songs inbetween every couple of fast songs, the crowd can't headbang continually, also structure songs based on the musicians.

If song 1 has a ripping guitar solo, make the next song fairly easy going on the guitarist.
Don't just throw down your songs, think about them before hand, punctuate the set list with your more catchy songs instead of putting 4 normal songs, and the 5 masterpeices together, it will create the illusion to the crowd that all your songs are catchy.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying "You only have 4 good songs", it's just some songs are more catchy than others the first time round.
It's useually the melodicly catchy ones rather than the lyricly catchy ones at live gigs.
Accomodate for this too.


Getting the crowd excited is a matter of luck, chances are, most of them are tapping their feet and digging you, thinking "if only a few people would start a pit"
I've gone into methods of getting them excited, but often it requires incentives, like "If you dance your asses off you get a free cd"
You need to try and luck out by getting 5 people to walk forwards, which will trigger another few who will trigger more, the crowd mentallity.
It's hit or miss, if the crowd aren't coming forwards at all, then you must play as cleany as you can, if they won't dance, your going to make them listen, give them the best you've got.

MP3's?

Well, it's a fact, MP3 sales hit over 1 million last year, thats alot of people considering fellows like me who slander it so often.
I read an article in music tech magazine about the subject, one user of an mp3 buying system expressed his glee at just buying anything that looked nice, and paying next to nothing for it.

And considering it's sales, it's looking rather popular.

Is it for unsigned bands though?

Unfortunately, I'd have to liken it to trying to restring your guitar by setting the fretboard on fire.

1) Most distributers want you to pay money for it.
2) Have we all seen the MP3 selling prices? From American sites you can get them for about the equivilent of 50p, thats a 12 track album for £6.
3) You need to be known of for it to work.

Now we shall go into more detail.

1- This makes it risky, your paying money for a venture that may not work out.
Something you cannot afford to do as a band.
The £40 or so set up fee could go towards something more likely to work.

2- You will end up undercutting yourself, in some cases you may be offering an album for £12 and the album worth of mp3s for £6
Cd's are an unsigned bands best friend, theres still a fair bit of distrust against mp3 services held by people like me.
(Things like, its not the same as a real cd, computer errors e.t.c.)
You do need the extra money from real CD's, its no good having 200 fans in a distant town but no means to get to them.

3- You can't just stick MP3's up there and hope people will buy, you need people to come on the site and search for your band randomly, they need to know about your band, you need to promote your *** off, and most services include the what seems mandator "Give me £50 and you can be on the front page for a day!"


In short, MP3 services are best left to the bigger bands.
On the subject of MP3's, if you have an e.p. or album coming out, put a few tracks up.

For an e.p., prehaps one full track (make it catchy) and two 30 second samples from other tracks.
(if you give them 3 free tracks, where is the incentive to buy just for track 4?)

An album, put 3 full tracks up, and maybe 4 30 second samples.

Make it easy to buy though, put "email me to buy cd", isn't a good option, many people are still skeptical about buying on the net and few will transfer money over it in that fashion.
There are a few other methods though.

1) Get a professional to design you a webcart (expensive)
2) Paypal (I can't account for this myself, but I've heard bad things about it)
3) A free cart service, there are a few good ones out there.
4) For people in the UK, I think it is Natwest, they are creating something to rival paypal.

Don't forget to price sensibly as well, e.p.'s for new bands should be around £2-£3, just enough to cover recording costs in most cases.

Albums, around £7-£9

Next Issue; Me dunnoes, Suggestions?

CDBaby.com seems like a good fix for the issue of people in another location wanting to buy a CD but not knowing how. It's something like $40 or so to sign up, you send them five cds, they review them, make samples, (you specifiy how long the samples are,) and set up a page for you on their website. They keep about $3 of each CD. So, you could probably put a demo CD on there for $4...not much for profit, but it'll help spread the word. It seems the average price of a cd on CDBaby is around $10-$12.

Fantastic!

Paypal charges quite a lot for sellers, but is free for buyers, and very safe and reliable.

i saw a black metal band called blackiris at 'the shed' in leister last saturday, they rules, best band there by far, but because it was a small venue almost no one was dancing/moshing ect. the singer and guitarist shouted abuse 2 the crowd. not a good vibe at all... ruined the whole set for me

One of the best issues yet! How bout doing something on ways to collect money, or how to persuade people to donate? PA systems aren't cheap nowadays.

I was looking around on the net and found this interesting gem.
[url]http://www.music-utopia.com/faq.html#1[/url]
It appears to be CD distrobution service.

However, they have no set up fee, and take £3/$3 from each CD, they host a small site for you with 2, 2 minute clips.
They screen music to make sure it is to their tastes, but it might be worth a little checking out, if your right for them, you probably don't have too much to lose.
They also ship to Canada, US, the UK and Europe.

They still appear to be a small site, with only a few bands using it, but it could be a very effective method of circumnavigating nasty HTML code, look at it this way, you put a link to your cd in their store on your site, and you don't have to pay for setting up shopping trolleys e.t.c.

presenting, kocaine and gretel of mixmaster! *claps*

Maybe you should just add a CD buying section to your website. If someone is into you, that's generally the first place they go. It might not look as professional, but it will sell you CDs.

not neccessarily, unfortunately.

Stagediving !
 

I think someone here asked about live shows. I'll try to write some stuff if you don't mind KKKKKocaine :thumb:

[B]Lesson 1[/B] will be about [B]stagediving[/B].

I'm sure none of you can imagine a good concert without mad stagedivings both by musicians and by audience. But you have to know some things before you risk to do it. I mean, some people say: "While you perform live, you can't expect when to stagedive........you see the crowd going mad and here you go.........jump right there, they give you to eachother and after 10 seconds you're back on stage rocking even harder"

A very big no ! These things are just magic tales. Let me write a bit about it.

1. Imagine you're the lead guitarist, you've just played some kickas$ solo, you have 10 seconds to start your second solo and you jump into the crowd and return on stage and go on playing. No ! it won't happen !
Did you know that in a good stagediving angle, your Wooden Les Paul can kill up to 5 people? Well, now you do ! Also, if you're lucky, the only thing missing on your guitar will be your strings. If you're not, the only thing NOT missing on your guitar will be it's strap. So be careful ! :thumb:

2. The same goes for vocalist. Some vocalists get so much energy that while stage diving they forget to leave the microphone on stage. Did you know that in a good angle your mic can hit someone's eye? Yes, now you do !
So don't be surprised to meet 20 people by the door after show.
Also, audience is mad and drunk. This means you can lose even your pants or shoes. No, people don't need your shoes, they just do it because it's fun. Watch your wallet too.

3. Don't stagedive if it's your first show and people don't even give a reaction to your performance...............yes, they won't catch you.

4. Please know how to do it before you try. The best way is to jump on your back. God, I even saw a guitarist who stagedived with his feet down. Of course you don't want to have someone's boots on your face........so, no one caught him and he just kissed the floor.

5. About the audience.........If it's a little bar show it's OK. But in big open-air concerts you must be careful. Because you're not the one who sponsores the show. So DO NOT ever call people to come on stage. Those little kids will be savagely beaten up by "big peni$ security" guys. It's horrible, I hope you never see what the security did in a show I went to. I hate them. Luckily I was far away from there. Anyway, even if any of them manage to come up on stage, they'll already be agressive because of the punch they ate a second ago.....so they'll eather kick your as$ or smash your amps.
So please never call people to stagedive when there's security !

I hope I could help a bit.
Will post something else about live performances soon. :wave:

Good info, thanks. I hope it made people realise how stupid it can be.

I have a solution though, how about just don't stagedive! :p Ok maybe when the crowd is into you or if your band is really popular... most bands are too scared to anyway

[QUOTE=KKKKKocaine]Next Issue; Me dunnoes, Suggestions?[/QUOTE]


How about organising your own gigs: how to find bands to play, all the problems you could face, equipment and so forth..

I disagree with the statement of no good show doesn't have stage diving. If stagediving must occur, let the crowd do it instead of the band.

My tips/rules for gigs would be:

[b]1. Move around a bit up there.[/b] You don't have to go mental and have a spasm, just make use of the space you've got. Of course, the level of activity you have to do varies with the energy of your set. Try and compliment the music. I just did my first gig with a new band, and we all forgot this rule due to first-gig nerves. We all just stood there like shop window dummies on Mogadon. Our music is quite high-energy, so it must have looked a bit incongruous, like we weren't trying. The audience reaction was okay, but it probably would have been a lot better if we'd matched the energy of the music with our actions.

[b]2. Get an adequate soundcheck.[/b] If you're still looking for elementary tips like this, you're probably going to be an opening act on a bill, not a headliner. With this in mind, persuade the other bands/venue to give you a decent soundcheck. It's not nice to watch the other acts larking about on stage for ages, only to find you get ten minutes (or less) to set everything up for yourself. You're the ones who have to warm up the audience, so you should fight for a decent amount of time so you can sound good.

[b]3. Don't get seduced by monitors.[/b] When we did the gig, we spent the majority of our ten minutes (see tip #2) telling the sound guy to turn this up and that down so we each had a decent monitor mix, and pretty much forgot that the audience won't be hearing the monitors. Get someone to stand where the audience will be and give you feedback.

[b]4. Make sure your soundcheck song is the most representative of your sound.[/b] If you have quiet bits and loud bits, slow and fast bits, make sure the soundcheck song has all those bits so that you can test out all the instrument patches you are going to use, and so that you can get the mix sounding good for all aspects of your sound. We devised a song specifically for soundchecks, to combat this problem of choosing a suitable song.

[b]5. Wear earplugs.[/b] They will save wear and tear on your hearing, and good ones can still alow you to hear what's being played/sung. Also, they allow a singer to concentrate on their performance without getting shell-shocked into tone-deafness by huge speakers. I forgot mine, and it worked out okay, but I was still flat/sharp on bits that I do better every time with earplugs in. Also, our bass player is deaf as a post from not wearing them. It doesn't help a band to communicate if they are constantly shouting at each other, even when the music isn't playing.

[b]6. Have something to say in the breaks.[/b] It's a good idea to think about what you're going to say beforehand - you don't have to memorise a script or anything, but standing around going "um...er...." doesn't look good. Plug a CD, or introduce the members or something.

[b]7. Give support to the other bands on the bill.[/b] If you're on first, don't just go off and booze it up whilst the other bands are on. Make them feel wanted (unless they are so awful that you can't stand them). If you are nice to them, they are more likely to be nice to you, which all helps with the perception of those members of the audience who aren't with any of the bands on the bill and are just there to listen to music and enjoy themselves.

[b]8. Check your equipment afterwards.[/b] I'm not talking about making sure your family jewels are intact, but checking that any equipment you borrowed is given back to the band it belongs to, and vice-versa. Especially leads. You don't want a reputation for nicking stuff, you'll find it hard to get a gig soon enough.

[b]9. Enjoy it.[/b] It's fun, so enjoy it! Don't look nervous or like it's causing you pain (unless the pained look is part of the image). The audience can smell fear, and lack of enjoyment is contagious.

[b]10. Don't pull a face if you get a bit wrong.[/b] They won't notice if you just carry on regardless. If you're playing covers and they are all big fans of the song you're covering, they might notice. But if it's your own stuff, and the audience isn't that familiar with it, they probably won't notice anything was wrong.

Great advice thanks for that. :thumb:

can u do something like things you can do to make a show better, like kinda antic things? Like one band I saw a few days ago, the guitar jumped on the bass drum and the singer was like "anyone got any water" and someone in the audiance gave him water:eek: So risky.

priceless ****e dude! keep it up!!

Good stuff... Cheers!

thank you. i think that sums it up.

I haven't seen an issue lately. Has he been busy?

[QUOTE=XemoXmoshXpitX]I haven't seen an issue lately. Has he been busy?[/QUOTE]

We've been redecorating the kitchen, So I probably won't be able to get an Issue done till after the 19th.

Okay, that sounds good.

this thread is pretty sweet...alot of good tips

Hey. Me and my friends have recently started a band. We're an orginial, young anarcho/comedic punk/grunge/ska w/e we do our own unique style.

We are a three peice Drums/guitar/bass + we have vocals. We're in grade 10 at school and we've enterd a BOTB compitition. Witch is in febuary but our music teachers band are gigging at are school in december to help raise monry for our school mini busses and any band thats ready can gig with them.

We already have three orginial songs and one cover.

The teacher said about 6 songs will do for a set and i'm confident we will have more than six by december. After playing one song after school in the music block we gained a few fans who would ussualy be like "FûCKING GOTHICS" but our light emo grunge song won them over. Now at the BOTB in december we wanna really win the whole crowd over. I was thinking being a bit comedic and maybe a stage dive at the end? well I'd be grateful for any tips thanks

I would only stage dive if the crowd really liked you guys, otherwise... let's just say that the ground hurts. A lot.

[QUOTE=PsychoticSouls]Hey. Me and my friends have recently started a band. We're an orginial, young anarcho/comedic punk/grunge/ska w/e we do our own unique style.

We are a three peice Drums/guitar/bass + we have vocals. We're in grade 10 at school and we've enterd a BOTB compitition. Witch is in febuary but our music teachers band are gigging at are school in december to help raise monry for our school mini busses and any band thats ready can gig with them.

We already have three orginial songs and one cover.

The teacher said about 6 songs will do for a set and i'm confident we will have more than six by december. After playing one song after school in the music block we gained a few fans who would ussualy be like "FûCKING GOTHICS" but our light emo grunge song won them over. Now at the BOTB in december we wanna really win the whole crowd over. I was thinking being a bit comedic and maybe a stage dive at the end? well I'd be grateful for any tips thanks[/QUOTE]

I would disagree with the stage dive at one of your first shows. Just nail your songs and look alive and it shouldn't be that hard to win. If you want to get the crowd into it, at least pretend to know what you are doing.

[QUOTE=PsychoticSouls]Hey. Me and my friends have recently started a band. We're an orginial, young anarcho/comedic punk/grunge/ska w/e we do our own unique style.

We are a three peice Drums/guitar/bass + we have vocals. We're in grade 10 at school and we've enterd a BOTB compitition. Witch is in febuary but our music teachers band are gigging at are school in december to help raise monry for our school mini busses and any band thats ready can gig with them.

We already have three orginial songs and one cover.

The teacher said about 6 songs will do for a set and i'm confident we will have more than six by december. After playing one song after school in the music block we gained a few fans who would ussualy be like "FûCKING GOTHICS" but our light emo grunge song won them over. Now at the BOTB in december we wanna really win the whole crowd over. I was thinking being a bit comedic and maybe a stage dive at the end? well I'd be grateful for any tips thanks[/QUOTE]

dude , i'd rather not. try looking at the crowds point of view,i dont think they'll appreciate a not so popular new band diving at them :D

as the guy earlier said, rawk it out on stage!..

cheers.

exactly, the real point in stage diving is that the audience gets to touch you. Why would they want to touch you if they just heard of you, because you'd just be a normal person.

ok, it's past 19th, where is the new issue? *hits table*
he has to come up with something now... heh.