Play for your life (or disintegrate in the attempt)

[Deftones-argentina]

This thread is for everyone of us who write music and has a band (or a proyect of it). The intention is to put your situation, your surrounding, the rules of the game...how much people has been coming to your shows? How long have you been doing shows? How did you promote your band? Have your earned any money from it? Could you do a recording? It helped? What about playing with more recognised artists? etc.


    Ok, so far I formed my newest band a year ago, and a lot of the songs were already written (incomplete most of them) by me, so we started in february '08 and we had our first show at september. Then, we did like four or five shows with some bands we made friends with. I think the max quantity of people that came into a show for us was 80 or so. We're trying to keep the entrances for free for as long as we can.
    On november we did our last show, and then stopped to do the preproduction of our first ep, which we recorded on december and finished mixing 2 weeks ago (it costed $5500= about U$s2000).
    I have been promoting the songs with rough mixes, and a lot of people became really interested, they really liked the songs. I used sites like youtube, Fotolog, myspace, lastfm and other shit like that to find people from our zone that might like the tunes  and so far It's been really cool. The problem is that sometimes people live to far away, or are totally uninterested even before hearing the songs. but most of them are nice and give us a chance. As an anecdote, my drummer went to a metal bar to promote the band and about 10 people already knew the band, and 2 even had a song of us as ringtone.
    In few days we'll upload the Ep on the net, and Then I'll tell you how much people have downloaded it in the first week. We'll sell it at a low price (5 bucks) at the Ep's introduction show that will be in a month or so.





Feel free to share your story with us.

[lostpilot]

We're new. We're called slowattack.

First of all - ~1,5 years ago it was just the two of us, playing two guitars and creating ideas, songs, etc. And, actually, everything we play now is written by both of us in that period of time. We have almost 20 songs and each of us have many more written personally. At the moment we're getting ready for our third show, now it's the four of us - two guitars, saxophone/cello and bass. And also some ambience samples. The guy that plays the bass will play drums in the future and we already have another person to take up the bass.

What genre do we play? I'm not sure. Some of the songs remind us of post-rock, some just of texture-rock, indie-rock. We have a wide spectrum of sounds, and we like to experiment with our instruments. oh well. If to talk about people - well, usually about 50 people come, but that's quite enough for us in Lithuania, where rock music scene is quite dead. And those people really like what we do (we do the audiovisual concerts - playing the music in the dark and projecting images and videos on the wall, with some light effects around. like a trip or something). And no, we do not make much money, just cause we haven't yet started to do that.

We're planning (now for almost over a year) to record our debut album, double album with two themes. We have all the songs written, we just need to record and mix it.. and we yet do not do it, dah. In addition to the money matters, our third concert is free:) this way people want to come to see us. Just cause we got everything we needed for the show easily and mostly free, so we do not take others peoples' money yet.

And it is absolutely odd (for me personally) when I notice more people on myspace listening to the music, or somewhere else on internet.. strange feeling to see people like what you've created by your own hands

[defTHE1s]

Well... I'm not doing nothing by now, only playing some stuff (covers) by myself, and since I got my electric guitar past december, I wanted to go with a friend who plays bass and his friend who is in the drums and some keyboard... but I'm hating school right now, because it doesn't let us much free time, so we haven't booked any "play" jut for us... I'm looking forward to make a band, but since i haven't played with those friends nothing serious, I don't know....
The only thing is that we're looking forward to get together some weekend to play some random songs... we like some common stuff (music) that is very known here... from Deftones and QOTSA ad some music in spanish...
so we'll see, when we join what happens and I'll let you know (if you like to hear it, of course!) I'm trying to learn very well Little Sister, by QOTSA, to play with them, but we'll se...
so at the moment I'm doing it by myself, covering songs and posting some stuff on youtube...

[bright lights, big city]

my first band was a terrible punk band in high school called Last Name First that used to basically do nothing but cover Less Than Jake and Goldfinger and "rebelled" against those shitty popular jam bands that were popular at the time. It was fun times, but we were so bad. Ironically, our bassist went on to be successful with a band that's a complete rip-off of Dave Matthews

then in college i drummed for a hardcore band called Power Bomb. that was just a project a few of us had when we would come home on breaks and such. we only played 2 shows before just giving up.

around this time was when a bunch of college friends wanted to start a grindcore band called FYI (Fetal Yeast Infection) basically just as a joke. It was basically the Slipknot of grindcore because we had 2 vocalists (I did screaming) a drummer, bass, keyboards, and a steady rotation of 2 guitarists. surprisingly that band played the most shows and was the most popular of anything I've done. we even opened for a local show for A Life Once Lost and Acacia Strain. But after a couple years we got bored with that.

Now today I haven't played much of anything. Some old friends have brought up doing some sort of project, but it's all preliminary. Personally I'd like a post-rock band. And I would call it Echo Park. Thing is I don't know what I'd do because you need to be a hell of a good drummer and guitarist to do post-rock, and I really don't have those skills.