Have you ever felt frantic about getting more gigs on your schedule? Depending on your goals and where you are in your music career, that may be exactly the thing to do. If you are in this to create a lasting career in music, one that builds momentum and progresses from one level to the next, you need a plan when booking music gigs. Read more.
One way to expand your audience is to serve as an opening act for a better-known artist on multiple tour dates or one local show. Sometimes you can get lucky and be in the right place at the right time, but if you’re more interested in strategy than chance, here are three suggestions to help you land some of these choice performance slots. Read more.
If you want to perform live more than just once a month, there are plenty of ways to fill up your performance schedule without saturating a particular market. Four basic strategies you should consider include: 1) A club residency, 2) Alternate format performances, 3) Dual territory performances, 4) A tour. Read more.
In “Tales of the worst music gigs ever,” we shared a handful of on-the-gig horror stories and lessons learned from them. While those stories were all wrenching in their own rights, here is one from New York bassist Dmitry Ishenko that stands in a category of its own. Read more.
Every musician has stories of the best gig ever, that performances where the music, the crowd, and the stars aligned. Then there’s those other times when nothing goes right. Gear explodes, drunks attack, people vanish… But even the worst gigs can be valuable learning experiences. Read more.
Bassist Malcolm Gold’s story about the benefits of MusicPro instrument insurance doesn’t involve theft or damage. It was just a momentary lapse of focus on a long commute. “It was a very stressful time in my life. I was traveling on a train with a beautiful 1966 ice-blue metallic Fender Jazz bass. It’s a custom color, and worth a considerable amount of money, to say the least.” Read more.
Playing music gigs in Canada just got easier thanks to a new law, but crossing the border with your instrument still requires preparation and organization. If you’re planning a trip to play music gigs in Canada, here’s some advice and a few online resources to help make your border crossing smooth and easy. Read more.
An organized soundcheck can give band members and sound engineers the tools they need to craft an excellent live music mix, while a chaotic one can suck up valuable minutes – and good will. Some bands do sound checks like complete pros, others are just a mess with everybody onstage playing at the same time, nobody listening, and lots of noise and yelling. Read more.
When playing international music gigs, singers and flutists have it easy. Drummers, guitarists, bassists, and keyboard players, on the other hand, have to figure out more creative solutions to manage their gear. If your music-making equipment is larger and more cumbersome than a standard airplane carry-on, how do you ensure that, when you take the stage miles away from home, you have the gear you need to a give a performance that you can be proud of? Read more.
While technologies like Square are becoming more and more popular, there’s still a coolness factor – they’re new enough to elicit wide-eyed looks of wonder from grown adults (jaded New Yorkers included). For now, at least, paying for an independent album via credit card on someone’s smart phone, and signing with a swipe of your finger, is fun. Read more.
Whether you’re driving north from the east coast to play a coffee shop in Montreal, bringing your electro-pop act to a string of clubs in Tokyo and Thailand, or presenting a midnight set at a jazz festival in Germany, performing music gigs abroad can be an incredibly rewarding and cool experience — but one that brings its own set of challenges. Here are tips from seasoned musical world travelers to help you make your international music gigs run as smooth as possible. Read more.
The most important thing to do when dealing with money is to make sure to write EVERYTHING down. A good way to keep tabs is to put all the info in Excel. We divide it into date, gas, food, lodging, salary (how much we pay our musicians), pay (from the venue), CD sales, t-shirts, tips, extra. At the end of each day we total it up. There are two main ways to make money as a band: 1) Guarantees/door/bar percentage, and 2) Selling merchandise. Read more.
Many people have asked us how we transformed our band into a sustainable business, touring 250 days a year. We’ve created a series of videos to help explain what we’ve learned over the past few years in the hopes that it will help you learn how to get gigs and get more good bands out on the road. We’ll explain how to book music gigs that are well attended and pay guarantees, promote your shows, make extra money, build a following, and describe who wants to take your money (and why you shouldn’t let them). Read more.
Traveling to play music gigs is expensive. Being on the road also takes a lot of planning, time, energy, and day-of alertness for travel plans to be flawlessly executed. Whether touring around your favorite regions of the globe or traveling to a far off city for a music conference, there are a few tricks and tips that can help make your travels go smoothly, and keep your bank account afloat at the same time. Read more.
Dealing with live sound at a music gig can often range anywhere from a minor annoyance to a major catastrophe. Broken PA components, weird-sounding rooms, difficult on-site staff, or the lack of someone present who can actually mix live music can be just the tip of the iceberg. On the bright side, there are any number of tried and true ways to minimize your on-the-gig headaches when it comes to dialing in your live band sound. Here are just a few live sound tips to keep you sane — and sounding great. Read more.