When you get together with the group to rehearse, decide whether this is the vocal rehearsals or the instrumental rehearsals.   And by the way, during instrumental rehearsals, someone still has to sing the lead, just to keep it all together, but the main focus is getting the instruments right.

And there’s only one way to get it right.  EVERYONE has to be able to hear everyone else.    If you are not in a rehearsal hall with sound equipment and a sound man, it is up to everyone to monitor their levels and to ascertain that one of them is not overly loud.   

Being overly loud, leads to everyone else turning up to hear themselves and the drummer killing himself to be heard over all that.

It is best to rehearse at the lowest level possible.  

This keeps you from getting too tired too fast and also might save your hearing down the road.   Just ask Pete Townsend, though you’ll probably have to shout.

The culprit in most of these scenarios is the electric guitar player.    I have been in rooms where I could not hear the keyboard or the lead vocal, or the bass because the rhythm guitar player was so loud.

Maybe the best thing is to have someone who walks around turning down the guitar player’s amp every few minutes.?   A guitar amp monitor guy, with a white strap affair that goes across his chest and around his waist and over his shoulder, like the old  safety patrol at grammar school.

Do not take offense if someone asks you to lower your volume.   A balanced blend of all the instruments is the only way that you can truly rehearse, learn the changes, learn the dynamics, learn the arrangement and make it better.

Taken one at a time, the changes or chord progression is the tonal map for the song.   Usually there is a chart that has all these changes written out above the bar lines on music staff paper.    That way everyone knows exactly when to change.

I was in a rehearsal a while back where the rhythm guitar player was louder than God and either couldn’t read the changes or couldn’t make them fast enough, so while most of the band was playing one chord, he was playing another.   Cacophonous.

If the levels between all the instruments are balanced then you can begin to introduce dynamics.  You can get really soft, build to a crescendo, set a groove level, and simply make the song really work.   Employing dynamics gives the song  an emotional impact that would otherwise be absent.

Decide whether there will be a solo, who will play it and when the soloist is playing, you dumb down your part to support groove.   Let the soloist fly.   If he’s competing for sonic room and rhythmic room, he’s not going to do as great a solo.

Put this all together and you have the arrangement.

Now bring in all the vocalist, or all the vocal parts if the band is also singing.  

Play softly enough so that everything can be heard; the lead vocal, the background vocals and all the instruments.    When you get that perfect blend, it’s an eargasm, I’ll tell you.

Because I knew I would be flying on a small aircraft, on which I would have to gate check my precious guitar, I didn’t use my usual gear bag.    I consolidated everything into a carryon bag and, a laptop and a guitar.

Consequently, I didn’t bring all my pedals, just my RE-20 Looping Station and my L.R. Baggs Para Acousctic direct box, and four monster cables of various lengths.   And I didn’t have my usual one bag, one guitar set up as there was no room in the carry on for the bag.  Everything was loose and at the showcase I used a black plastic bag I found to keep it in.

After my showcase, I repacked all my gear in the small black plastic bag and placed it on the table in the green room and went outside to watch the other acts.

At the end of the showcase, I was loading up my guitar and performing clothes in the car when my pal, John, asked me if I had the plastic bag of gear.    I ran back  into the green room and it was gone.

I first checked with all the performers, but they all knew nothing of it, though several admitted that they saw it there at the end of the showcases.

I checked with the sound crew and with the custodian.   Nobody saw it.

I went through the trash cans in the green room; I had the sound crew check the truck; I reinterviewed several of the performers; and finally I made several announcements at the conference community dinner and meeting.

The next morning, I got up at 7 am and went to the dumpster, climbed in and went through every single trash bag in there.   Nothing.

So my warning to you all is to not leave anything anywhere it can be borrowed, thrown out, misplaced or stolen.

If I had followed the routine that I have been doing for decades, this would not have happened, but I got lazy and I felt that this community was not the kind of place where theft occurs.

Wrong!

It occurs across the board, in every community, in every setting, in every culture, in every age group, in every religion…I think you are getting my drift.  

I made a $700 mistake on a weekend where I was not earning a dime, so the conference cost me $700 more than it should have.

If I had followed my routine, I would have gathered all my gear, taken it back to the hotel room and then returned to the conference rooms.   I got lazy and I was stupid.

Don’t let it happen to you.

We are assuming that it is a compatible billing.  So ask yourself why you are in that slot?

To lengthen the show?   To fill the time until everyone has found their seats?   To change the crowd into a galvanized responding unit, to wit:  to make them a receptive audience for the main act?

Yes.

All theses things are true and there is also the consideration that most, if not all of the audience came to see the other act, so your position with them is weak to start with.

You had best be brief and you had best be the best you’ve ever been.   Go over your material, pick the very best stuff; the material that consistently works with an audience.   And this is a very productive exercise, because it forces you to edit, excise and then go with your very best, because the promoter is going to tell you how long he wants you to play. 

If they say they don’t care, go to the main act or the road manager of the main act and ask how long they would like you to be on.    And respect what they say.   If it’s twenty minutes, the make certain that that’s what you do.   

Many times it is a union house and there are only so many hours the crew will work before they go into golden overtime.  The promoter doesn’t want that to happen because it costs him personally, right out of his profits.

I actually turn my watch around so that the whole time I’m playing, once glance at my guitar neck also gives me the face of the watch.    That way I’m always exactly on time.

Here’s what you don’t do:

Complain that you weren’t given enough time.

Knock the other act.

Pretend your show doesn’t start until you start singing.   When they announce you, your twenty minutes has begun.   If you break a string, that’s part of your twenty minutes—and too bad for you.

Go longer than your allotted slot.

Take an encore.  (What I do is check with the headliner, if they don’t take encores, as was the case with Steven Wright when I was his opening act for three years, then you don’t take encores.   If they do take encores and they’d prefer you didn’t, do that.   You can come back out, say thanks, take a bow and then leave.  

Keep selling your CD’s in the lobby after the main act has taken the stage.

Remember the show isn’t about you, it’s about the other act and you have been fortunate enough to play for their audience.   You want to make the most of that opportunity, by choosing your best material and leaving the audience wanting more from you.

It’s what I do when I’m the opening act and it’s what I expect when someone opens for me.

When you go over long, overstay your welcome, flog the audience to death, you don’t serve anyone or anything.  

The main act is never going to want you to open for them again; the promoter is not going to use you again because you weren’t professional and you cost them money; and lastly the audience that came to see the other guy is going to hate you for keeping them waiting so long to see the act that they actually paid to see.

But be that as it may, while I was filling out the various boxes, one asked me for my i-tunes store ID.   It took me ten minutes to find myself on their maze.   I had to wonder how long a prospective fan would endure their  “refine your search” prompt.

I looked under Singer-Songwriter, Contemporary Singer-Songwriter, Folk, Rock, Pop, and finally found it by doing the same thing I did at the beginning.   Type in my name.     It seems that your name only shows up once you are in the proper category.

I know that the whole idea of categorizing your art is repugnant, but if you want to survive economically you have to acknowledge it and work it to your advantage.

This got me to thinking about how I categorize myself; which has been for decades,  as faux jazz.    This is a little bon mot I created from the idea of starting in folk music and falling in love with jazz and that my music  is where the two meet.   Folk /Jazz  or Fo’jazz  finally becoming  faux (or false) jazz.

As cute as that wordplay is, there is no category for that, so I’m always choosing the closest thing I can find from the choices that they offer.

Today I want to suggest that you look very carefully at what you do.   How do you categorize yourself?   But more importantly, how do others categorize your music?    Because they are the ones that are going to search the net for you and if you are not in the category that they believe you to be, you might be missed in their search on the may services that actually do list you.

For a while I thought that I should put myself in a category that didn’t have very many people in it, so that I would be noticed, but that’s a one way street in the wrong direction.  

Do you actually notice the names of the people you aren’t looking for while you search for the name you are trying to find?

Secondly, how many people go to that category?

Take an honest look at yourself.   Who are you competing with musically?   Whose music influences you the most?  What category are they in?   Is your music like theirs?   If it is, then that’s your category.

If not, then who do you go and listen to?   Who do you perform with?  Where do you perform?   These things all help you to define who you are musically.    And while your musical identity will evolve, grow and change, you can always re-categorize yourself to reflect that transmogrification.

The last thing I want to say on this topic is to ascertain that you are consistent.   List yourself in the same category on every site.   What? you say.   I can reach more people with the shotgun approach.  Yes but they will not coalesce.    If all your fans/supporters/patrons are in the same genre, then you have a name.    If your fans are spread across the gamut, then you have no real impact in any of the genre’s.    Trust me, I know this to be true from personal experience.

Think about this.   You sell five thousand CD’s worldwide.   Six billion people on the earth.  You do the math.   Not one person in a million knows who you are.

You sell five thousand CD’s in your hometown, you are on the front page of the paper.   And you draw big crowds when you play because you are an event there. 

Choose your arena and then go for it, dammit.

I know that scheduling a time each day to write is a wonderful way to do it.   The same time and the same place and you sit there; you play things; you read things; you write things down and that way you are right there where the muse can find you.

But what happens if you wake up out of a sleep, or are getting dressed to go to a dinner, or committed to someplace else shortly?

You must follow the muse when she shows up.  

Now I realize that you only have to stand your friends up a few times for you to find yourself without friends, so you need to figure out a way to keep connected to the muse and to keep your commitments.

For melodies, I find that writing down the musical notes is the easiest way to save an idea.   If you don’t write music or don’t have any sheet music, you can use the solfage system (do, re, mi, etc) and give your syllables values if you can (quarter note, half note, etc).   If you can’t do that then use long lines drawn over the syllables to annotate long notes and short lines over the syllables to denote short notes.

Paul McCartney remembered the melody to yesterday by putting it to the lyrics “scrambled eggs, o my god I’m eating scrambled eggs”,   so that is another technique that is obviously successful.   Putting words to a melody, helps to keep the melody fixed in your head.

But you can also still lose the melody if you don’t do something about it soon.     I also keep a cassette recorder (yes, I still have one) with fresh batteries in it so that I can record something at a moments notice.   That way you are sure not to forget it.

A story idea, a song title, a lyric, whatever.    You can just record it into the machine and forget about it.

The bad part is that you actually CAN forget about it, thinking that you’ve gotten it down safely and you can get back to it later.  But later you may not be able to plug into the inspiration that created the idea to begin with, so for me, the best time to work on an idea is as soon as it shows up.

I know that I have scads of tapes with ideas on them that were not followed to their conclusion and some of them are really wonderful.   

My Audi is old enough to have a cassette player in it that works and when I have a long drive I sometimes pile up a bunch of cassettes and take the portable cassette player as well and then listen and either complete the idea or consolidate all the good ideas on to one cassette which becomes the real work cassette.

These techniques work but I think you owe it to yourself and your muse to honor the connection when it shows up.   It doesn’t matter what you are supposed to do (though catching a plane is probably going to trump this idea), put it on hold and follow your muse.

Be late, be remiss, be gone, but be there for the creative spark

It then occurred to me that I was remiss in my listening.   You learn and you grow by exposing yourself to as much music as you can.   And I was listening to nothing new.

This is an easy place in which to fall and difficult place to escape, as the music is comforting, soothing, no surprises and reminds us all of some wonderful moment in our lives.

There is another hurdle for the seasoned musician and that is one of the knowledge of the mastery of the instrument and the craft.   

If you’ve never heard really great playing or writing, then it is easier to become excited about some new band, but once you have listened to the greats and tried to emulate them and to grow, hearing a new band that’s been writing and playing for a year or three is not so exciting for that person.

As the producer of hundreds, if not thousands of sessions, I cannot help but begin to think about what is wrong with what I’m hearing and what should be done to make something better (by my lights, that is).

I am truly amazed at the lack of mastery of the guitar, as I hear over and over again, basic guitar playing from “artists”.   Singing that demonstrates no work on the part of the singer to learn their instrument and make the most of their gifts.

Make no mistake, an artist’s work is never done.   An artist is never as accomplished as they want to be; never at the place where they can rest.  

It is our duty and responsibility to continue to learn, practice and grow in every direction of our artistry; performance, composition, and mastery of these crafts.

We live in an age of disposable everythings and that includes music.    Not much from ten years ago is being played right now (though you can still hear the Beatles recordings and compositions on a daily basis no matter where you are).

We throw someone up the pop charts and two years later no one seems to care.   Media is looking to devour, over expose and dispose of the “next big thing” on an incessant basis.   You can’t let them decide your worth or validity.

But you can’t ignore them either.   Try to see and hear as much music as you can.   And try to listen without judgement, no matter how difficult that is for us, we must do it if we are to learn and to grow.

This year saw the release of my first studio solo CD in four years, Backstage At the Resurrection.   It got a lot of airplay and spent about six months on the radio charts.   I am still doing the songs from that CD as well as songs from the other 22 CD’s in my live shows.  

It gets more and more difficult to put a set together when you have such a catalog to draw from.   And even though some of the songs are decades old, they haven’t become dated or weird (IMHO).    A few have, but most of the time I am writing with an eye on posterity and so there are not references or sounds that would make it too dated.  

Following the traditional instruments route helps maintain their immediacy, though my arrangement style is definitely rooted in the last century, which I believe will be regarded as some kind of remarkable time for popular music.

Cliff Eberhardt and I released All Wood and Doors in July and have received an incredible amount of press, all of it good.   Nothing but five star reviews across the board, with the exception of one doors fanatic who said that I was just wrong to rearrange these songs…as though they came down from the mountain on tablets or something.   I wrote him a nice letter to which he replied with his usual grace.   I leave it to you to discern the gist of his epistle.

I was just listening to Coldplay live and was truly amazed at the limited vocal gifts of the lead singer and the inane lyrics.   The camera would pan the audience and they would all be singing along.   I immediately think back to the early Beatles and the same sort of inane lyrics that made me so happy and I guess this is what the inexperienced listener expects.   Something that they can understand.

Meanwhile, I’m writing a song about losing my parents, which very few of those people will experience for decades.   You begin to wonder why you are writing such things.   Then it comes to me.   I have always written from my own experience and my own heart.   I have never written a “hit” song that I wrote from the get go as a hit song.  I have had some hit songs, but I was always trying to write a great song.   I know that that is subjective and you may find my work lacking in all respects but that is your opinion.  I have mine and it’s just as valid.

And validity comes from sincerity and intelligence, not from having convinced a million sheep that entering the slaughterhouse is good for them.   We often mistake commercial success for validity.    It’s not validity, it’s commercial success.    Nothing wrong with that, but I don’t want to confuse it with what matters to an artist, and at this stage of the game, I’m pretty sure that’s what I have become.   In a perfect world that would be enough.  In this world, it’s still pretty close to enough.

Happy New Year.

Thanks to CD Baby, my music is on all the paying download sites ( more than 80 at this point), but the sites that help you make a presence and build more of a following are different than that.   Reverbnation, Numubu, FMLast, Facebook, Myspace.     And I’m on all of them, but…

With so very many choices how do you choose what’s right for you?  Do you choose them all and spend your entire life uploading files?   Do you try to be on every single site that exists?   What do you do?

My feeling is that, to begin with, look over all the sites and find out how many people are actually on that site.   Then pick one site that works for you and has enough people on it already to benefit you,  and work that site like crazy.

Once you see results, you can refine your working process, limiting it to what works.   Then go find another site and do it all over again.    The thing you must remember, however, is that as soon as you stop working it, you lose all momentum.   It really is a sysiphus game.  

I started out by simply putting something on every site that I could find.   And to tell you the truth, I don’t take advantage of any of them because I haven’t gone to the trouble of learning how to use every option that they make available to you.

I have now had a change of opinion about what to do.  For me, I’m going to investigate all the sites and then pick the one that I think will give me the most bang for my efforts.    That is not to say that I am going to take my stuff off of the other sites, I’m just going to concentrate like crazy on one site and see if I can gain some momentum there.

The next question will be, what does having momentum on that site do for you?   I want it to turn into more CD sales, more downloads, more performance dates, and larger audiences.

Right now there are more people making their own music than has ever been in history; more people making their own CD’s; more people competing for the same gigs.   And that is a tough one.

Right now, there is someone who is willing to work for free; there is someone willing to give some skimming bastard money just to get the chance to have a venue hear them; thereis someone always trying to take your place.   What do you do?

Practice, perform, record and keep in mind that when you make a CD, you are competing with every great CD that was ever made.  No one cares if you are better than you’ve ever been, they only care if what you are doing is, by their lights, musical, familiar, unique and cool.   This is not a game for sissies.

If you keep working at what you are doing and you keep putting it out there, there’s still a chance that nothing extraordinary will happen to your career, but you will have the satisfaction of spending your whole life doing what you love, and getting better and better at it.   That is the reward.   The money is gravy and the fame is only useful when trying to fill seats in an auditorium.  Otherwise it just gets in your way.

But I digress.

Pick one social media site and learn it.  Work it like crazy.  Then start adding more sites to your P.R arsenal.

He co hosted a tribute to the late Nick Reynolds, one of the founding members of the Kingston Trio.  The other host was Nick’s witty and talented son, Josh, who served as emcee.

There were about fifteen of us performing in various configurations and one of the most wonderful things about the entire affair was the complete lack of ego.  Everyone just pitched in, or sat it out with no weirdness, just music that played during my much younger days.

It was remarkable how many of the Trio’s songs were ingrained into our consciousness.  The entire audience sang along with almost every song and I realized that their impact from 1957 to 1964 must have been enormous.

I can’t even begin to estimate how many people they brought to acoustic music or how very many Martin guitars they sold during their run.

George Grove, who took John Stewart’s place in the group was also on hand to provide some steady direction on the tunes, which hold up remarkably well.

It made me realize that when you are writing a song, you really should decide who your audience is before you write it or record it, as the more esoteric and complicated you make a piece of music, the narrower the field of appreciative listeners.

I am not putting forth that you should only write for the masses, only that to reach the masses there are some things that must be not only acknowledged but employed.

Simplicity is a big one.  

As a solo performer, I tend to make the progessions and the guitar parts complex as that keeps me amused and challenged…and that’s great for me, but what does it do for my audience?

The trick is to put into your music the things that make you you, your style, your preferences, but also leave a wide enough opening of accessibility to allow anyone who hears it to be intrigued enough to come and be a part of your audience.

There can develop a weird kind of expertise snobbery that can only hurt you.   No matter what level of performing you are at, you want to keep growing, but you also want to keep your audience with you.   You don’t want to lose that power base just to show off how very much you know of and about your instrument.

Steely Dan always accommodated their penchant for complexity in the verses and then gave us a chorus that could not be denied.   That’s what helped get the  uninitiated into the recording, the song, and the band.

Make accommodations for your audience to go along with you and they will follow you anywhere, just don’t lose them in your own ego chops.

Though he goes into the studio and does full productions, he travels with one guitar.   What I suggested is that he go thru his three CD’s and list all the songs from each of his CD’s that he always does in his live performance.

Then go into the studio with this list and record everyone of those songs with just a vocal and a guitar.   I also suggested that he do performances of the songs as opposed to laying down a guitar and then a vocal and mixing them.   Do it live, just the way you do it on stage, I said.

Once you have that CD, you do all the songs from that CD in your first set.    Then when people come up to you and ask for a particular song, you can simply say, “every song I did in my set, is on this CD just the way you heard it, one guitar and one voice.”

I guarantee you will move a ton of CD’s this way.   And for the people that become fans, you have the studio produced versions of all the songs, plus songs that they may not have heard on your other CD’s so you have music to leave with them the next time you play for them.

And for the people that want a full production, you still have your fully produced CD’s with you.  

Moreover, there is an added benefit to recording a CD this way.   As you listen back to the take, you are going to realize that you aren’t as good as you thought and you’ll go back and record it again, and perhaps again until you get a performance that you are proud of.    And you will be a better player , singer and performer when  you finish a CD this way.

I did it with my Freelance Human Being CD.   I ended up recording the entire project three times.  Each time I came back from the road and listened to it, I decided I could do better and rerecorded it.   In the end I was recording each song sometimes for several hours until I got it just where I wanted it.

Fi magazine called it the best CD of 1999 and went on to list it as one of the Top 200 CD’s of All Time, along side Miles Davis, the Beatles, and Joni Mitchell amongs all the other luminaries.

You will grow as an artist by doing a project this way.  Try it, what have you got to lose?