Starting a Band - Stop "Jamming" and Start Being a Band

Starting a Band

Songs Songs Songs
Obviously you gotta have songs. And lots of 'em. The first 20 songs you write, no matter how great they seem to you, are probably going to be terrible. It's like the first time you played that riff from Iron Man on your guitar. You were more thrilled than a pedophile at a daycare, but to anyone else's ears, it was a musical abortion. Most songs, especially anywhere around the punk genre, follow a basic formula. I'm not going to spend much time talking about how to actually write a good song. That's up to you. It's one thing to promote your band to death, and get people to initially listen to you, but if your songs are boring, or out of tune, out of time, or otherwise awful, then people will never listen to you more than one time. Anyhow, before you really start digging into anything else, get between 10 and 20 songs totally down. Practice as often as you can. When Roaming Bovine started, we only met up about once every two weeks, and it took FOREVER to be able to play them tightly. So you got it? 10 or 20 songs. And make sure at least 5 or 10 of them are really catchy. I'm not saying to throw 10 shitty songs in there for filler, but if you have a handful of really quality tunes, then there's nothing wrong with having a couple slow ones in there.

Name Your Band
Oh yea, and I suppose sometime between writing and practicing songs, you should come up with a band name. It's up to you to figure out the name. But my advice is, once you come up with something and start telling people what you're called, DON'T keep changing the name to something else. It's like you've started all over as a band if you change names. Imagine if Cameron Diaz changed her name overnight to like umm.....Cathy Diego. People would hear and read her name and say, "Who the fuck is this loser? I've never heard of her!"

Make a Demo
Remember those 5 or 10 great songs you wrote and practiced and practiced and practiced and can play with your eyes and ears plugged shut with cotton balls? Well now you need to take a few of them, probably 3 or 5, unless you've got lots of time and money to expend at this point, and make a demo. Lots of kids these days have home recording equipment. I'll tell you this now though, unless you have a room with great acoustics (which pretty much means you've glued soundproofing foam to the walls), and have decent recording gear, and are an absolute expert on operating your recording gear, you're probably not going to end up with a recording worth a damn. If you've got a 4 track cassette recorder you found in the attic in one of your dad's old boxes, forget it. We got our hands on a thousand-dollar digital 8 track, and I'm pretty sure that under the right circumstances, some great recordings can be made with it. But we were using it in a tiny, un-insulated, echoing room in my old trailer I was living in. And they all sounded like crap. Some better than others, but none of them were anything I'd want to send to a record company or venue manager. A plain, unfinished, concrete-walled basement is the WORST place you can try recording in. Also, if you're like we were, you don't have a 1500 dollar condenser mic, or a half dozen drum-mics, or fancy headphones. Any respectable musician would shit themselves if they saw us trying to record our songs back at that old trailer. But I won't get into that.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that unless you have some damn nice equipment, and you or someone you know can seriously handle that equipment, your best bet is to find a cheap, independent recording studio. Don't get me wrong, recording is expensive. But remember, you're only recording a few songs. You can even just record one, but I recommend a few. Normally you pay by the hour at a studio. But this is why you practice the hell out of your songs while your at your own damn house. It's free. You may not record your song in one take, perfectly, every time, but the more you've practiced your song, the less takes you probably will have to do, and the less money you'll spend. Most recording studios have equipment that they will rent to you if you don't have it or if yours is a piece of shit (guitar amps, drum kit, etc etc).

I suggest for demo purposes, ONLY ask for the master copy. Then you go home and make a couple dozen copies of it on your computer. Make up a label for it, throw together a design on a paper sleeve, or a paper insert in a regular CD case. That all depends on your creative skills and your computer abilities. If you buy several copies of your recording from the studio, they'll usually gouge you.......if you really want them "professionally" done, take them to a place that only does that. You should worry about that later, when you're actually ready to make an album.

There's a couple ways to go about recording. Big famous artists, even the bigger punk bands, as DIY as they want you to think they are, still spend a long time in the studio, recording each track. Which means, let's say first they lay down a guitar track. It starts with simple rhythm. Next, a drummer listening to the rhythm track on headphones will play the drums, and then the beat track is recorded. Next is the bass player, or lead guitar, or whatever. And finally the vocals are recorded. I'm not saying that a bigger punk band is making a fuckin Brittney Spears recording..........in an average shitty pop song, there's between 100 and 300 tracks. Every little note, sound effect, noise, etc etc in a famous pop song is set on a different track, and then all put together later by sound engineers. Brittney is probably in the studio for 4 days, she sings her songs that someone else wrote, and then she goes home. Sound engineers are the ones doing all the work. ANYHOW, what I'm trying to get at is that for your demo, you should probably take a different route than all this multi-track recording business..............make a live recording. This means that you are in a recording studio, with everyone in your band, with all your instruments, and all the expensive studio recording equipment and sound tech behind the glass running all the gear, but you play your songs together as a group, just as if you were playing a show in front of a crowd. But you won't have audience noises, or ambient sounds like your mom upstairs vacuuming. It's not nearly as involved as recording each track, although the downside is that if your bass player fucks up, you gotta play the whole song over from the start. If he was laying down a bass track and fucked up, he would just have to play his part over again while the rest of you sit off to the side and smoke cigarettes. But since you all know your songs inside and out, you won't fuck up!!!! Right??? Good. So for a demo, my advice is to do your best to do a simple, "live" recording, play each song as few times as possible. And trust me, you won't even notice that your recording doesn't have as good sound quality as, let's say, NOFX's latest CD......or somethin, because you'll be fucking excited about hearing your songs on a CD professionally recorded.

Once you've recorded your demo and made some nice duplicates of it, you gotta send 'em out. Send them to any venue that you want to play at (that you think you actually have a chance to play at). Most places will want a demo, but some don't require it. Also, you'll want to send a demo to any small record labels you might eventually hope to get onto. Any bigger label at all will not accept unsolicited material, so don't bother. You already have to have a following before any medium-to-large sized label will even give you the time of day. Besides, you want to be on an indie label anyhow, right?

Play Shows
Ok, so you've got songs, and you've got a demo. (And I'll assume you've still been practicing your bitch asses off whenever you can). Hopefully you've already played a show or two by now. If you have, then this section might not be anything new to you, but on the other hand, you may read something that you don't know or haven't thought of yet.

Keep playing shows. Play as many as you can, and play them with as many other bands as you can. Get your name out to the other bands, and they might start asking to play with you. When you play with lots of other bands, the likelihood of gaining new fans goes up exponentially, because the people who come to see a band you are playing with will probably see you play too. If they like you, you got new fans that you wouldn't have had otherwise.

Promote Your Band
There are dozens of ways to promote your band. The best way, hands down, is to have a website. From a website, every other method of promotion is accessible. From one website, people can read all about you, listen to some songs, see your swanky logo that your artist friend came up with and will hopefully recognize later when seeing it, join your street team, pass out flyers for you, etc etc. This is all, of course, if you sound good. I've known salesmen who can sell refrigerators to Eskimos, but they are assholes, and you don't want to be an asshole. So for god's sake, don't waste your time and everyone else's time promoting the shit out of your band if you really, really suck.

Pass out flyers for upcoming shows. Do this at shows you've just finished playing, at other bands' shows, and anywhere else you can. Independent record stores usually have stacks of bands' flyers on a counter somewhere, or on a big bulletin board.

Get fans to sign up for your email or snail mail newsletter. Have a sign-up sheet at all of your shows. Give a free sticker away when someone signs up. Your newsletter should look good, but be to the point. Don't waste people's time. Put info about new albums or upcoming shows, or other pertinent information to your band.

I just mentioned stickers, and I will mention them again. In my experience, stickers are just about the best way to spread the word about your band. People love stickers, especially punks. We love to besmirch everything we can with stickers....our cars, our guitars, our computer cases...whatever. I used to slap my band's sticker on the front edge of the drive-through window's counter every single time I went to a fast food restaurant. The employees hardly ever look at the outside edge of their counter, but thousands of people in cars will see the sticker each week. I had one sticker on a Burger King drive-through counter in Mt. Clemens for almost 2 years before they scraped it off. So I slapped a new one on there and as far as I know it's still there now.

Give stickers out to everyone you know. If they're friends of yours, they'll want to help you out. They'll hand stickers out to anyone they can if they're cool, or they'll sticker up their damn 1986 Ford Escort like no tomorrow if they're greedy bitches. Either way, people will see your stickers.

Put your website address on the sticker, if possible. Otherwise print it on the sticker's backing. I used little mailing labels with my URL printed on them, and stuck them one-by-one on the back of each one of my stickers that I had just ordered.....all 1000 of them.

Where to get stickers? There are printing shops all over the place that will make stickers, and most of them are sort of pricey. The best deal I have found so far is at www.stickerguy.com . Their prices are pretty cheap if you use one of their pre-set sizes, which there are quite a few of. Custom shapes and sizes will still end up costing you a bit, so I say start off simple. There's nothing wrong with a nice rectangular or square sticker.

Conclusion
Well, I could probably go on and on for about another 30 paragraphs or so to tell you everything that I can think of that is pertinent to starting and growing a punk band. But I think I will end it here. Once you start the band, write songs, make a CD, play shows, and promote the hell out of yourselves, things are bound to take their natural course. If you work hard, play good songs, and do everything you can to make yourselves known throughout the land, you might just make it in this crazy business. Chances are, as with probably 90% of bands, you will play some shows, have a bunch of fun, and end up dissolving due to lack of interest, lack of fans, or some silly dispute between your band's members. Either way, you gotta start somewhere.