Start a Band
So you are a bit of a demon on the guitar, keyboards or drums, or perhaps you think you can sing? Either way, if you found this post you are probably considering starting a band, so here are a few tips in what to do and what not to do based on my own experience over the years.
In my opinion there are three key ingredients to making a successful band, fistly and most obviously the music itself, then there are the musicians and finally and rather surprisingly, is the bands name. So lets have a look at each of these elements one by one:
1. THE MUSIC
You need to decide on your style, and when I say that you don’t need to say we are rock or pop but unless you find other band members with vaguely similar tastes you may struggle with cohesion with the members, but I’ll come to that a bit later. What I mean is having a general theme, or influences. You also need to know if you will write your own songs or play covers, generally speaking the professionals who are not famous tend to play covers, these groups often play weddings, and private functions. If you are going to play pubs you need a mix of both original and covers, leaning more towards the covers side, but if you really want to make it you will probably write your own songs. This approack is incredibly hard, even if you are exceptionally good and the success rate (even to break even) is very very low, but obviously if you do make it the rewards are enormous.
2. THE BAND MEMBERS
Who you work with will make an enormous difference to the overall sound you have and will make or break the band if you all do or don’t get on well both on a professional and personal level, remember you could spoend quite a bit o time in each others company.
You need to make sure you find people with similar levels of commitment and flexibility, as the last thing you want is to work hard to get a gig only to find out that the drummer has his map reading lesson every Friday night! It’s also nice to have your regular practice night, but also for the drummer and bass player to get together for jamming sessions together sometimes, likewise if the guitarist and vocalist are the main songwriters they will need to spend time together working on riffs and vocals.
It’s important to be open minded too, especially when writing your own songs. If you play blues, there could be some interesting influences which could be gleaned from genres as diverse as drum and bass, country or classical, the only limitations are your own imagination, so it’s essential to try new things out. Most of the time you will try something and it just won’t gel, but every now and then you will hit on a great new idea that just might make you stand out from the crowd.
Band experience, whilst it’s not essential that all members are seasoned gig players, it’s nice to know that they have a few live gigs under their belts, as the last thing you want, is to turn up to play your first live concert and find the bass player has stage fright.
3. THE BANDS NAME
It’s almost impossible to tell you how to name a band, but the easy way to give it the best chance is to write down the name of all the biggest bands in your genre and the names of the upcoming ones too, see if you can find some similarities in them, then try to find a name which fits into the musical genre, so again this goes back to the decision of what type of music to play.
Find out more about party bands, or gig dates for a specific party band in a region see party band Oxfordshire, party band Berkshire, party band Cornwall, party band Hertfordshire or try to find party bands Wiltshire or other function groups and acts.
Tags: berkshire, group, oxford, professional, wiltshire
Posted in party band