The touring circuit can be a hard one to crack and it’s surprising how many artists and bands seem to think that they can just walk straight onto it. It’s also surprising how many bands (thanks to the help of digital editing) record great albums but really REALLY suck live! Our advice is always to start recording your rehearsals and gigs on to CD or mini-disc and have a critical listening session afterwards, if it doesn’t sound as tight, punchy and ‘vibey’ as the album then go back and rehearse harder until it does. Legend has it that James Brown used to religiously listen back to all his concerts and then fine each musician for each mistake he heard, if he heard 3 mistakes in the same gig then the musician was out and replaced within 24hours! A little bit harsh maybe but you can’t argue with the fact that he always had a super tight band on the top of their game for every gig he played.

When your on a bill with 3 or 4 other bands the aim is always to be the stand out act of the night. If your out shone then it’s back to the drawing board, tweak the songs and improve the playing until you genuinely are the act that everyone leaves the gig talking about. A lot of artists and bands, maybe fuelled by the overnight success stories of shows like Pop Idol, don’t seem to realise that nearly every successful music career has been built on the foundation of tireless touring. When Pulp headlined Glastonbury in 1995 the media wrote huge stories about this overnight sensation, Jarvis Cocker ruefully retorted by describing himself as a 12 year long overnight success story. There are nearly always years worth of hard slog playing up and down the country and around Europe before a big enough fan base has been built up to push an artist into the mainstream.

There are several things to consider when booking up shows to promote your music, firstly – as always – you’ve got to target your efforts so you end up playing to people who will be into your music. Choose the venues and promoters you approach carefully to make sure that you’ll fit in with the vibe of the nights they put on. If you don’t know the local scene that well just go through the local gig listings, and check out the websites of some of the bands listed to get an idea of what venues book which genres. Then it’s a matter of making phone calls and visiting places to get the names and contact details of the promoters who book the bands and passing them your demo and biography with a pitch for a slot on the bill.

On a local level, the main concern that nearly all venues have is that you bring in the punters so they spend money on the door and at the bar. You can be the worst musician in the world but if you bring in 100 of your friends each time you can almost be guaranteed another booking. As a business savvy artist you need to really take a hold of this fact and use it to your advantage. When making your pitch make sure that you emphasize things like the size of your mailing list and how many fans usually turn up to your shows. When you get the booking, make sure you deliver by promoting it to your fans via email, your myspace page or by handing out the venue’s flyers.

Most venues usually have 3 or 4 bands on during a night and it’s this cross-pollination of fans that’s essential to building up your own fan base. Trying to get onto the bill of other bands and artists with a similar sound or vibe is essential because it gives you a chance to play to people who you know are into your musical sound. Playing such a gig is a great opportunity to expand your mailing list so make sure to announce from the stage where people can sign up and have friends or yourself work the room afterwards with clipboards and sign up sheets.

On a larger scale, the big touring bands often look for a local support act in each city that they visit to bring in the local crowds. Keeping an eye on the local gig listings and then contacting the relevant record labels can land you a killer opportunity.

When it comes to start doing your own tours you’ll need some support behind you. You’ll be counting on either the venues or a promoter to do all your local promotion for you and if you haven’t got a booking agent then you’ll be approaching and booking all the venues yourself which can be time consuming and frustrating. This is where the support, experience and contacts of a good manager can pay dividends. A good manager should be able to open doors to you that would otherwise have remained closed and help you find the breaks you need to progress up the live music circuit food chain into the decent larger venues. Finding a good manager can be difficult but they can be a huge asset and well worth their percentage cut. 

One last thing to mention is to always remember to push your merchandising when your onstage. As we said at the start, you’ll have no better opportunity to sell a record than after you’ve just wowed someone with an awesome live set. Make sure that your merch is prominently displayed – preferably near the exit so that everyone has to walk past it – and that it is sensibly priced. After the gig try and make sure you are around to meet fans, talk to them about the music and even sign stuff if they want you to. Anything you can do to build a relationship with fans will reap benefits. Someone is much more likely to go home and tell all their mates about this incredible band they heard play last night if they also have a story about how they met the lead guitarist afterwards, chatted away and ended getting their arm signed by him or something. 

Promoting in the mainstream–>

Indie Lab Contacts

We have a load of contacts in the professional recording world. If you’d like us to recommend or put you in contact with a producer, engineer or studio then just contact us..

If your really serious about making a great album and aren’t looking to just enjoy the process of making it yourself then it’s well worth considering working with professionals. Professional engineers, producers and musicians have so many things to offer a project it’s almost impossible to go into them all now. Using a professional engineer in a proper studio will not only mean the technical skills have been honed over years worth of recording but the equipment and the acoustics will probably be far better than what you could put together yourself.

A good producer can really inject a new burst of life and inspiration into a project and help you see faults or weaknesses in songs that you’ve been performing the same way for years. Likewise professional session musicians can offer up ideas on harmony and feel or sometimes just play sometime better and tighter which can be the difference between a track sounding amateurish or professional and slick. The downside to this approach is obviously the cost. Most professionals will work something out for your budget if they’re into the material and so it’s worth asking around and seeing what they can do for you.

The most important thing is finding the right people for the project; there are nightmare stories out there of over bearing producers or insane session players simply wrecking really quite promising projects by the sheer weight of their unfortunate personalities. Another pitfall is learning to book the right musicians for the right sessions, for example just because he’s a great jazz guitarist doesn’t mean that you can stick him through a fuzz box and he’ll sound awesome on a rock record.

Some more tips.

1. When looking for people to work with it is always best to get a personal recommendation, try and find bands or musicians you know who have recorded a project you love and find out who was involved.
2. If you don’t have a personal connection then just start going through some album covers of artists and musicians that you love and see who worked on them. Try and be realistic, because Rick Rubin worked on a record you love doesn’t mean he’ll necessarily want to work on yours (unless you’ve got a serious budget that is!) Check out other local acts and indie artists work and see if they are working with people who may be interested in working with you. Do some research, send out some emails and see what leads come up.
3. Do a Google search or use either the Musicweek Directory or the Showcase Directory to check out what recording studios are nearby and then just go and visit them. Find out who’s been recording there recently and if your into the finished result.
4. THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT! Decide beforehand on what sort of budget you want to spend and work out with the professionals your working with if that’s realistic. If working with a studio, check if the quote includes materials like CDRs and backup tapes and if VAT is included. Then get an agreement on paper that states the terms of the contract before the session starts. If your working with anyone who is putting input into the creative process then discuss if their fee will ‘buy out’ all their rights or if any royalties will be due on release, either way get it down on paper how much and how they will be paid. If working with a producer or musician discuss if they will be making any contributions to the song writing and if they will require being credited or if they will want a share of the publishing. This all isn’t necessarily because people are out to scam you, it’s just that sometimes people can have different expectations which are good to discuss before you start working.

Links

One of the best resources on the web for information on recording yourself is soundonsound.com. The web site has equipment reviews for the geeks and in-depth ‘how to’ articles on everything ranging from mic placement to building your own studio. To read the most recent articles you have to have a subscription but there is a wealth of information and tutorials available for free!

1. If you know nothing about recording then take time to learn before you start working on anything important. There is nothing that breaks the creative flow more than fighting with the computer to make it do something simple. Take an educational course or better still, sit in on some sessions with some fellow musicians or engineers and learn the ropes from them. Work on a few ‘dummy’ projects before starting the big one so that the creative process is as seamless as possible.
2. Don’t skimp on equipment, if you want your record to sound as good as your favorite album then be prepared to buy some decent gear. Don’t believe the adverts that say you can get professional grade recordings with a setup that costs just a couple of hundred quid. You want quality throughout your signal chain going into your recording device (good microphones, good pre-amps, good converters) and good software and hardware to mix with. If in doubt get some good advice from other musicians and engineer you know and trust, don’t believe the man in the shop who’s on commission from the manufacturers!
3. Spend as much time researching, setting up and treating your recording room as you do deciding on your equipment. The room is the key to a great sounding recording, even if that means just making it dead enough so that you can add on artificial room effects afterwards. 
4. Even though your ‘doing-it-yourself’ get other people involved whenever you can. This could range from just playing work in progress to a select group of honest friends with good musical taste to working with someone in a co-producer role. In the latter situation, the dynamic of throwing ideas around with the right person can take a record to a whole new level, it can push you when you get complacent and it can reassure you when you feel unsure about something that sounds awesome but you’ve heard it so many times that you’ve lost perspective. Getting too close to your project is always a danger and so having one or two people come in and give you some objective pointers and encouragement can be a lifeline.
5. Try and set a timetable and stick to it. Projects without finish dates can ramble on for years and lose all sense of creative momentum. Obviously spend as much time as you need to perfect the song writing and production but try to continually push yourself to get it done within a manageable time frame. That immediacy of a deadline can brings it’s own creativity to the process.

Recording With Professionals —>

Fast forward to the current day – digital technology and computing power has revolutionised the way we record music and transformed the music industry. The top studios used to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds just for their mixing consoles and spend the same again on top quality microphones, audio processing and speakers. These days you can pick up software that emulates the sound of these top vintage consoles and equipment for a fraction of the price, moving recording top quality albums from the studios into the bedroom and rehearsal rooms of today’s indie musician. The move has meant that most of the major studios have now gone bust and with them the loss of some of the greatest sounding recording equipment and rooms ever built. A loss that not everyone appreciates as the cold thin digital sound of many ‘budget’ releases these days testifies. 

Whilst so many of the new recording tools are incredibly accurate and faithful to the vintage equipment they emulate, it only takes a few days working in a great professional studio with an experienced engineer or producer to see that it’s not only the tools that are important. In our opinion so many of the greatest records ever recorded sound like that not just because of the awesome sounding gear but also because they were recorded by quality engineers with years worth of professional experience. The magazines, books and audio courses that claim to be able to teach you how to record a hit record in a matter of a few lessons are misleading; the technology is good enough today to allow you to record a pretty decent sounding recording but it takes years of working at it and learning the tricks to be able to make something that genuinely stands out from the rest of the crowd. 

The plus side is that as an artist you no longer have to sign your career away to a record company or compromise your sexual morals finding a sugar daddy to fund your recording sessions. It’s possible to go and spend less than a grand and pick up enough equipment to record a pretty decent sounding demo. If you spend a bit more then with a bit of practice you can actually record something that sounds pretty special. Indulging in the luxury of owning your own equipment also means that you can spend as long as you want to complete your masterpiece without a single glance at the studio clock, gone are the days of watching another hour and £100 tick away as the bassist screws up yet again!

In the following posts we’ll give you some tips on making that all important first album.

Tips for DIY recording —>

“Marketing is not the same as advertising. Advertising is a tiny slice of what marketing is today, and in fact, it’s pretty clear that the marketing has to come before the product, not after. As Jon points out, the Prius was developed after the marketing thinking was done. Jones Soda, too. In fact, just about every successful product or service is the result of smart marketing thinking first, followed by a great product that makes the marketing story come true.”

In the music industry the labels have been using this technique for years. In the manufactured pop business everything to do with a new band or artist is market tested into submission. Most of the boy band concepts in the early nineties were produced from the same formula of characters but with a subtle twist to fill a gap in the market.

With manufactured pop bands it’s easy to shape the ‘product’ but with indie bands it’s more difficult. Unless your going to go down the ‘manufacture yourself an indie band’ route your going to have to go out and find someone with the sound your looking for. Hence when someone like Coldplay makes it big any band that sounds remotely like them also gets signed up in the hope that everyone can jump on the band wagon. In many ways trends become self fulfilling prophecies as the sniff of success by someone with a new sound sparks a raft of similar bands getting pushed by rival labels homing to cash in on the suddenly ‘hot’ sound.

The reason this is important to realize is that many of the bigger labels will be doing their market research first, identifying the gap in the market and then try to find a band to sign that either fits it or (more commonly) can be shaped into it. If your sound just happens to be the perfect complimentary alternative to the current big seller then you have achieved that rare trick of arriving on the scene with perfect timing but if a label is signing you because they think they can tweak you into something else then your running the risk of being signed into a dead end deal. We’ve met a lot of of bands who have been signed by major labels and promised the world only to be stuck in the same deal years later having never released an album because the label just didn’t know how best to market the resulting record. Trends change, record company A&R people change and you can end up just sitting on the shelf.

Being able to physically hand over MP3s opens up all sorts of possibilities ranging from selling them from your merch table the same way that you’d usually sell CDs to being able to give away promotional copies to fans at shows. The cost per card looks like it starts at about $0.50 and drops to around $0.30 if your ordering over 2500 (ex delivery from the US). While that’s not free it’s certainly a lot cheaper than printing up the equivalent number of CDs. There is certainly still a huge market for well designed, well packaged physical products but this a great way of placing an MP3 actually in someones hand.