Archive for October, 2008

My bandmates and I just got back from a two-week tour of the Midwest and East Coast, and because we’re still doing most everything DIY (except for some help from our booking agent, who is fantastic), it required months of saving up, planning and making Excel spreadsheets. We went through every single detail over and over and still came out $500 over budget in the end. But even when you’re playing to 15 people on a Monday night in a city where you’ve never played before (Cincinnati, in our case), there’s nothing more fun than touring. That said, if we didn’t like our songs, hadn’t practiced a ton and weren’t totally prepared, it wouldn’t have been nearly as enjoyable; even when you’re well-rehearsed, something always goes wrong.

Here are a few things I learned on the road that may help you musicians out there who are planning on touring soon:

1. You must read Tour:Smart: And Break the Band by Martin Atkins.

2. A Rand McNally 2009 Road Atlas Large Scale map book in combination with a PDA running Google Maps is very helpful. But we still got lost…a lot. It’s best to bite the bullet and buy or rent a GPS system that can tell you which way southwest is on whichever street, rather than having to guess. Either that, or add a compass to the mix.

3. Be polite and introduce yourself to every band you meet on the road (more of this in the Editor’s Note in the Dec. 2008 issue of Remix).

4. If you are the band treasurer, lie to your bandmates about how much you have in the band bank account. If they don’t think the band fund is flush, they won’t be begging for the band to pay for Jameson shots.

5. Don’t use any band money to pay for alcohol.

6. Don’t drink any alcohol before you play a show. I know this can be hard, but we made that rule about halfway into the tour, and it made a world of difference. You already know that it’s bad idea to drink and drive because your reaction time is much slower when you drink and then get behind the wheel. The same goes for playing an instrument. Forget hitting all your cues if you’ve had ten beers before you hit the stage. If you’re a complete virtuoso who has never missed a note in your life, then you may have one beer before you play. If you’re pretty consistent as a musician, then bring your first beer of the night onstage with you. Me, I just drink water until the show is done. I drink beer and then I end up belching into the microphone, which is not pretty. Plus, I forget lyrics and biff guitar chords. No can do.

7. Remember to have fun. Things can go wrong on the road, and they will. If you stay calm and remember that you’re having fun, it’ll be easier to solve problems (like your van dying halfway between Minneapolis and Chicago).

8. Read all the parking signs, and then read them again. And if you buy a ticket to park in a lot, especially to park your RV in overnight, make sure you know when the ticket expires. In Chicago, they’ll also nail you for parking in “multiple spots” because your stupid RV sticks out, even though no one is parked around you.

9. If in an RV, stay at campsites wherever possible, and try to book in advance. Campsites are great ’cause you can hook up the RV to electrical outlets and a water line, dump waste into a special hole in the ground (gross) and take a real shower. If you’re in a van and don’t have a friend’s house to stay at, you can always find a cheap motel (or what I lovingly call The Crime Scene Inn). But someone should probably sleep in the van every night, unless you’re a girl. That’s the benefit of being the one girl in a band full of smelly dudes.

10. If you’re RVing it, you can buy pots and pans and cooking utensils at thrift stores and then give them away at the end of your route. Cooking on the road saves a lot of money.

11. If you see an animal in the middle of the road, and you’re driving in a giant RV, I’m afraid you have to hit it. It makes me sick to my stomach to say this (I refuse to kill bugs, let alone animals). But you can’t swerve in a 30-foot RV, and you probably can’t in a 12-passenger van, either.

12. Play your best show at every show, even when you’re just playing to the other bands, the bartender and the sound guy. The bar owner might buy a CD and ask you to come back on a more popular night (like a Wednesday as opposed to a Monday), and the other band you’re playing with may just break out, become superfamous and take you on tour with them.

13. Bring replacement cables and adapters, and prepare to go to a music store at least twice in a two-week trip (and not for fun).

14. If you’re in Kentucky, do try moonshine, but make sure the guy giving it to you isn’t blind because it may have been the moonshine that made him that way.

15. Do not give people an opportunity to steal your gear. Do not leave it in sight and unattended.

16. Take naps whenever you can. It’s easy to get sick on the road. You need to sleep to keep the flu/colds at bay.

Anyone else have some good touring advice you want to share? Feel free to comment….

I know we mainly cover the production angle in Remix, and that mainly pertains to all things regarding recording instruments, sampling, DAWs, software, etc. But I’m guessing a fair amount of you produce singers or do some singing yourselves. I’ve been singing since before I could put a sentence together, but it wasn’t until last year that I actually starting working with a vocal coach. I guess you could say I just had “raw talent.” I’ve been recording, playing live and touring for a long time, but I was never trained. I felt like I had to be trained to play the saxophone (back in my middle school and high school days), and I took guitar lessons, but I never feel the need to take vocal lessons. That was until I hit a wall with a particular part I was trying to sing while in the studio. My friend Dusty DiMercurio (who works for Digidesign) turned me on to The Voice Studio (www.thevoicestudio.org) in San Francisco, and I started training with a supercool instructor, Heather Pierce, who is also the frontwoman for a awesome band called Karmacoda (www.karmacoda.com).

Suddenly, I realized I’d been singing all wrong. Okay, not all wrong, but not all right, either. I was working my voice and vocal chords too hard, and I was losing my voice more than I should. If you see pictures of me singing, I often have my mouth really wide open. It looks like I’m really going for it…because I am. I tend to write vocal parts that run the gamut of my range, and I really push myself to run all over the place on the scale. It’s not histrionic in the R&B sense (hitting 25 different notes on one word), but I don’t make my job particularly easy, either.

I started to learn about something called “Speech-Level Singing.” Basically, it’s about singing like you talk. It’s more natural sounding, and it makes it a hell of a lot easier to hit the notes.

When I sing live, I think I’m fairly solid, but I miss the mark (even if by a little) sometimes. I want to improve the odds of making the mark. Speech-Level Singing helps with that, and it also helps with endurance when you’re singing night after night and improves the consistency of tone, agility, flexibility and range.

There are three parts to your voice: chest voice, mix voice and head voice. Between each part, there is what’s called a bridge. According to the Voice Studio, that is “where the resonance shifts from one area of the body to another.” With this technique, you can learn how to make those transitions flow better by narrowing the vowels and not widening your mouth too much. You produce the sound more easily, and it sounds better, too. For example, there’s a line in one of my songs that goes up over my mix-voice bridge into the head voice and back down again. The line is, “Something pulls me back inside.” Heather has me sing it with a different accent to narrow the vowels, so I can get up over the bridge (which is the A flat above C) and back down with less trouble and effort. Now I’m less freaked out every time that part of the song comes up. When I practice the part, it now sounds a little like, “Sew-ew-um-thin pools meh beck insoid.” And when I hit “thin,” the highest note, I drop my jaw a little to accommodate the sound. Now I’m not singing with my mouth as horizontal but more vertical. I think it’s fascinating. I’m smoothing out my voice, making things easier on myself and becoming a better singer. Now, why didn’t I do that ten years ago?

You can read more about it Speech-Level Singing here: www.speechlevelsinging.com.