Top Ten Do’s and Don’ts When It Comes To Gigging

Screeeaaaammm for me Long Beach!!!!

As both a purveyor and listener of music I sometimes find myself amused by the entire live gig atmosphere. Don’t get me wrong, I still love seeing and playing live music, I just wanted to put together a list for musicians in bands to read. Call it a list of do’s and don’ts when it comes to playing in a band from both the perspective of audience member and/or bandmate:

1. During soundcheck please say something into the mic besides “check one-two.”
2. When applying the master volume to your amp on stage or in rehearsal try to do it while all the other instruments are playing so you get a real level. Your amp will always sound loud when you just hear it by itself.
3. Same goes for singers. Of course you can hear yourself in the monitors during the “check one-two” phase of soundcheck. There aren’t two guitars of wailing feedback exploiting your eardrums.
4. I know most musicians have their “go to” riff/beat when it comes warming up/soundchecking, do your bandmates a favor and try and come up with something new.
5. Avoid dead air space between songs. Nothing is more awkward than the silence of a room when a band is between songs. Tell a joke. Tell a story. Promote your band name/next gig/album. Get a loop pedal so you can throw feedback on for two minutes and call it a segway into the next song. Tell the audience to fuck off. Anything. Please. The silence is killing us all!

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Dry Humping The Cash Cow

"We're one..but were..not the same..we gotta..carry each other...carry each other..ooonnnneeee."

When I was a sophomore in high school a friend of mine watched a short MTV interview clip of a new, young band from LA. He was so intrigued by them that he went out and bought one of their albums before ever hearing a note of their music. A few months later, after he had turned me on to said band and we listened to their two albums about 300 times each, they came to play at a club in Trenton, NJ that held a few hundred at most. The show was on a Sunday night and we didn’t have our driver’s license yet (17 in NJ) therefore we were unable to see them perform. About two years later, during our senior year, we did get a chance to see them play at a different, slighty larger garden: Madison Square Garden. The band was Jane’s Addiction.

Their show at MSG was incredible, of course, because they had just put out Ritual de lo Habitual and we were totally geeked up to see them play. We had waited two years and spent most of that time listening to and discussing how important a band they were for that time. In hindsight, I wish one thing was different about that MSG concert: That we could’ve seen them play at City Gardens before they blew up and we had to share them with 20,000 other fans. I don’t mean that in a selfish way, it’s just that you would be hard pressed to find anyone that would prefer watching their favorite band play in front of 20,000 people vs. 200.