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Before Booking An Out-of-town Show, Ask Yourself These 5 Questions

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When evaluating each out-of-town gig opportunity, go through these five questions. If you answer yes more than no, it might be a trip worth pursuing.

Will I be returning in 3-6 months?

There’s not much point in taking the gig if you don’t have plans to build upon whatever buzz you create the first time around.  Even if there’s only 10 people in attendance, the object is to get that to 11 or 50 or 100 on your next visit. But that won’t happen if it takes you a year or more (or never) to roll through town again. So, if it’s a “market” you plan on hitting with frequency, take the gig.

Is there a local artist who can open or headline?

If you don’t have a (big) draw, local bands can save the day when it comes to filling the room. And if it’s a good musical pairing, their fans might become your fans too. Things can be tough when you’re the only act on the bill or if you’re touring with another out-of-towner. Which leads us to…

Do I have fans there?

Have you played there before and drawn a crowd? Do you have subscribers on your mailing list that live there? Do you have social followers who live there? Have you checked your Spotify and Apple Music trending reports (when touring internationally), Google Analytics, or CD Baby accounting and sales data to see how your music is performing in that geographical region? If the answer is no, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t tour through that town (you gotta start somewhere), but it’ll make answering yes to some of these other questions all the more important.

Is there a PR opportunity?

I once drove all the way from Portland, Oregon to Los Angeles in a straight shot with a 6-piece band to play at a crap dive bar just because my publicist had arranged for an LA Times critic to be there. Yes, we played more shows on our way back up north, but still, that’s TERRIBLE tour routing. I ended up feeling like it was worth it though, since it yielded two separate stories in the paper: one about the show and a separate album review. Maybe you won’t have a big turnout at the gig, but if there’s an angle to get attention from local radio, press, or blogs, it might be a relationship worth nurturing.

Can I afford it?

Is there a better way to spend your time or money? Will you have to take a day or two off work to make this show happen? Do you have the vacation time? It’s tough to say what’s “worth it” when it comes to music-making, especially gigging; a show with only five people in the audience sometimes DOES lead to more opportunities if you impress the right folks. BUT… that doesn’t mean every gig is worth taking. Money and time are, of course, limited resources — so be careful how you spend them.

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We Three Risk-Takers Changed The Sound Of Music

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Jordi Savall: I was part of a group of artists who decided to take risks. And thanks to that, today, a variety of music has been recognized and has become part of the classical repertoire. This may have been possible because, at one point, someone like Leohardt decided he had to play with a harpsichord and not a piano; or someone like Harnoncourt who decided he would direct certain repertoire in a particular way.  And I decided I would play the viola da gamba as I thought it should be played. I think I’ve been very consistent in my life and my way of making music. I started making music with Gustav Leonhardt when he created La Petite Bande, playing baroque repertoire with Anner Bylsma and Sigiswald Kuijken. I was in the creation of The English Concert, with Trevor Pinnock and Stephen Preston and I travelled every week from Basel to London to play with them. It was Nikolaus Harnoncourt who recommended me to substitute my teacher at the School Cantorum in Basel, in the subjects of chamber music and viola da gamba. It was a period in which each  of us, in our own way, contributed to learn that music is not only important for what it means within the story but also has a value for what it can provide today.

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Why I Should Have Paid More Attention in Music Theory Class

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music

 

Paul Hindemith is best known as a composer, but was also a violinist, violist, conductor, and teacher who wrote a series of textbooks on musicianship, harmony, and composition. Apparently, even back in the ’40’s, he felt that many musicians lacked a sufficient understanding of the underlying principles which make music work.

In his preface to Elementary Training for Musicians he writes:

“If our performers – players, singers, and conductors alike – had a better insight into the essentials of musical scores, we would not be faced with what seems to have become almost a rule in the superficially over-polished performances of today: either the rattling through of a piece without any reasonable articulation, without any deeper penetration into its character, tempo, expression, meaning, and effect – or the hyper-individualistic distortion of the ideas expressed in a composer’s score.”

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How To Make Money As A Musician

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After doing these gigs for 21 years, I’d have to say that finding a “hook” is your very best bet for getting this kind of work.

For me, that hook is history and culture. When I market my three-piece string band to these venues, I play up the fact that we do quirky, forgotten old American music – authentic stuff collected from cowboys and mountain people and canallers and lake sailors and old field recordings. There’s a storyline there much greater than us and how well we can play or sing.

(We also do original material and whatever else we want to, really, but that’s not as easy to “sell” to these venues, so we surprise them with that material once we’re there.)

Your Hook Doesn’t Need to be Complicated

Blues band? How about calling it “America’s music” and telling a few stories about how the blues came to be, and the migration of the music from country to city. Bam!

Singer songwriter? How about a song cycle about your favorite topic, or based on stories from your region, or anything else you’re passionate about.

Themed shows check all the boxes for these non-profits: they engage, they entertain, and they inform the community, and because of that, they’re valuable.

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The Surprising Truth about Learning Styles

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Thing #1: Learning preferences vs. Learning styles hypothesis

It is true that we do have study preferences. When given a choice, most of us will prefer receiving instruction in certain ways (e.g. I’ll always prefer reading something to listening to a lecture of the same material). And research does bears this out.

However, the learning styles hypothesis doesn’t just say that we have preferences for how we receive information. It goes a step further and predicts that our learning will be enhanced if instruction is tailored to our preferred style (or compromised, if we don’t receive instruction in our preferred style). Which takes us to the second thing.

Thing #2: What learning is and isn’t

It’s important to note that there is a fundamental difference between how quickly we pick up things (performance), and how much of those gains actually stick and can be retrieved a day or week later (learning). The learning-performance distinction as it is sometimes called.

What does the research actually show?

The researchers did an exhaustive search, but found surprisingly few studies which were set up this way. And the few that were…well, let’s take a look.

A 2006 study compared the performance of verbal and visual learners who were taught a lesson in either a visual-based or verbal-based style. It was a sophisticated, well-designed study, and they undertook a pretty exhaustive statistical analysis in search of some effect, but couldn’t find any difference between the performance of those whose training was matched to their preferred style, and those who were mismatched.

And then there’s a 2009 study of medical residents, where researchers thought that those with a “sensing” learning style might learn more effectively if presented with the problem to be solvedbefore receiving the information or instruction they would need to solve it. Conversely, they hypothesized that those with an “intuitive” style would do better if they received the lesson first, before being presented with the problem. But here too, there was no difference in performance.

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