New To This Band Thing

[sponge666]

Hello All,

Im new to the whole band thing. Me and my friends just made a band about 2 months ago and we practice a lot. Any tips any of you can give me to get this band thing going? any tips will be greatly apreciated.


Thanks SPonge666

[Detomah]

Welcome to Toal Format sponge666

What's your bands name? What type of music do you play?

May or may not be too relevent, depending on how far along you are already:

Tip 1: Practice until it is other people telling you, you sound good and not when you are thinking it yourself.
Tip 2: Practice some more.
Tip 3: Play to family and friends to get used to audiences and maybe set something up at your local pub.
Tip 4: Put a feeler song out onto something like YouTube to see what a mass audience thinks.
Tip 5: Set up a band MySpace page and website, so people can get a feel for the band and keep up to date with latest events.
Tip 6: Believe.

If your serious about this and not just going through a fad, assign a manager to the band, becuase a band without proper structure is never going to go very far before lack of experience starts to ruin it.

Depending on how quickly you progress, get local gigs set up, theres nothing better or more fulfilling than playing to a proper live audience and besides wanting to make lots of money from it and have groupies, the whole purpose of playing music is to have people enjoy your music after all and you can't beat seeing people enjoy the music you are playing, right there in front of you.

After that, it's time to be dealing with pro's and thinking about getting your songs out to a much wider audience, i.e. record labels, cutting disks and the likes. But if you get to the point of being good enough, the labels would hear about you and you'd likely be approached by them, otherwise it's the old sending your demo out to every record company known to man and hope one likes you.

Above all: Pprepare for lots of dissapointment along the way, because it's a long hard road to success in the music industry.

[Puratech]

Make sure you all want the same thing from it. It wont work if 2 of you want to go play small live gigs and 2 of you just like hanging out at band practice, but dont want to do much else.

Then you just have to pimp and pimp yourself, by playing live lots. Myspace is great, but dont expect it to do anything for you at all, so many bands are on it and they wont all be successful. You really just have to keep playing things like little pub nights, for minimal cash. Enter band competitions if there are any near you, as plenty of people will go to watch their friends band there and might like yours. Try not to be 100% generic, if you want to get noticed.

Above all else, have fun cos it rarely works out, but u might as well have fun doing it

[-Honchy-]

Be innovative... Don't compromise the music you want to make just to get other people to like it. Have fun. Get the most out of the tools you have, you don't have to be amazing technically to produce amazing music.

[Laz]

Try this place, as they have a lot of discussion on First Gigs, etc.

Gigs and Jams

GuitarNoise also has many UK and European members.

Disclosure: I am a contributor and moderator at GuitarNoise.com