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Touring - Get out of town!
By Kit Benge
April 30, 1999
Playing live is what a lot of musicians live for. Nothing tests your chops and patience quite like it. Playing out of your local area or going on a tour can be a huge tool for your band. It can help you receive exposure, radio play, and press. But if you're not prepared, it can be your worst nightmare. If you want to play San Francisco just to say you've done it, save your time and money. This is not an endeavor to be taken lightly. Very few acts can break even financially on tours without a good plan. The number one reason to hit the road is to support a CD or tape receiving airplay in a certain area. The bottom line is, it's very hard to get any sort of good booking in a market where you aren't receiving airplay, let alone enough money to put gas in the van. This column is the start of a series which will help the pro and new band alike with booking, budgeting, sound and lighting, transportation, promotion, and other aspects of getting gigs both in and out of your area. With that in mind ... let's go!
Let's approach this from the standpoint that you don't have the services of an agent or manager. The first thing you need to consider is the plan for booking shows out of town. One of the best tools you can have to book shows is an effective promo kit. It should include a , bio, and a CD or tape of your material, in an attractively designed folder.
Lets say you are starting your tour in Seattle and going down the West Coast to San Francisco. The first consideration is the tour routing. There are many resources that can provide you with information about venues around the US for you to play. One of my favorites for club booking is the Musician Guide to Touring & Promotion. This guide published each year, features clubs, who to contact for booking, sound and lighting systems provided, and capacity of the venue. Another choice would be the Musician's Atlas which recently went into publication as well. It is loaded with booking/press contacts, studios, agents, and lots more.
Another great resource is to establish a relationship with a band in your area that has toured in the same area that you want to. This is the best resource, as a band that has played the area before will have a much more detailed idea of what the venues are like in a certain area. When figuring your itinerary out, consider any area between the two cities that is a college town, or community of more than 100,000 as a ential place to play. The fist thing you need to do is figure out how many places you can play between the two points that you are touring from and to. The chart below is an example tour itinerary starting in Seattle, Washington, towards San Francisco, California, and back to Seattle.
[email protected]Preparation
Leaving Seattle Towards San Francisco From San Francisco Back to Seattle May 1st - Olympia, Washington May 9th - Oakland/East Bay, California May 2nd - Portland, Oregon May 10th - San Jose, California May 3rd-4th - Corvallis, Oregon May 11th - Sacramento, California May 5th - Ashland, Oregon May 12th - Eureka, California May 6th - Redding, California May 13th - Eugene, Oregon May 7th - Santa Rosa, California May 15th - Bend, Oregon May 8th - San Francisco, California May 16th - Tacoma, Washington
As you can see, there are 14 different markets identified for the tour. You can count on the fact that even if you do a great job of booking, you will not get gigs in four of the markets, and will have to take at least that many number of days off because you won't be able to get a gig on a certain date or don't want to play a club on a Monday. This will provide you with days off and flexibility in booking. The days before and after the dates listed can also be considered possible dates for that market. As you can see, all of the dates are within an 8 hour drive, and most much less. You should also notice that I took the two closest communities and put one on the way down and one on the way back (What goes down ... must come up). This makes for a two-week tour if all goes well, and will prevent long distances between dates on your tour.
In choosing the clubs that you want to play in the market, choose venues that fit the format of your music. Don't even bother hitting up a rock club for a gig, no matter how cool you have been told it is, if you are a jazz or country band. Do your homework about venues, and pick three possibilities for gigs in each market if you can. Talk with fellow musicians and others who might know about a great venue for you to play. One great trick that I have used many times is to call the local music in the area you want to play and politely ask them about the venues in the area. Also call the radio stations in the market you plan on playing and ask if there are any clubs you might go over well at. If it's a college radio station, by all means ask them who books shows at their school. You will gain knowledge, and make contact with an organization that will be of great help in promoting the show, once you get one booked.
After you identified the venues, you are one step closer to sending out promo kits to the venues, and if you have some extra money in the budget, radio stations in the area. Plan on sending promo kits to the clubs you have identified that fit the format of your music, and have a realistic capacity (under 500), if this is your first time playing in the market. Send out packs to radio at the same time to see if you can get some airplay on college or commercial radio before you get the date booked, and through your own efforts, or the efforts of a small distributor, have some CDs in stores in those markets.
Even if you're devoid of an agent's services, try to get someone to help with booking (a former tour manager, or a member of a band that has toured before). Someone good who knows the ropes cost big bucks. Even if you have to pay them well, it's worth it. The whole booking process will take you about eight weeks, possibly longer, from the time you want to play the market to actually getting shows. Don't take for granted that the club will contact you, because they almost never do, but do realize that most clubs get upwards of 100 promo packs a week and their booking agents are very busy humans. When you call, be friendly, persistent, but not over bearing or pesky when it comes time to contact these people. You want to establish a relationship with the person you're talking to; once you decide to book your band, the club can be a great help in promotions and possibly get you to the right person at a local radio station to set up an acoustic on-air performance or interviews. Club agents, for the most part, have one thing on their minds when they hear from an out of town band: "HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE YOU GOING TO DRAW?" This is where the radio, record store, and information from each market comes in.
To get the ball rolling, obtain as many local music s as you can from each market. You can get most radio stations or record stores in the area to send you copies. Find out by looking at the ads for the local clubs who the better bands in the area are that you plan on playing. If you see a certain band playing all Friday and Saturday nights at a venue then those are the bands you want to make a note of. Look at the club ads for venues you've sent promo packs to (and any bands that radio and record store contacts said are cool), making a list of bands that play a lot on weekends. This tells you who the better bands in the market are. Call your radio, retail, or contacts back and ask if they have a phone number for these bands. If they do, call up the bands and tell them you've heard they were a cool band to play with and ask them if they have an upcoming show they could put you on (Don't forget to tion that you'll be glad to return the favor if they ever come to your area.), and that you have already sent packs to the clubs for review.
By Brett Ratner
April 26, 1999
A fair number of the responses to the Purchasing and Acoustic Guitar column asked for
more details pertaining to various types of wood and how they affect
tone.
Off the top of my head, I can tell you why certain types of wood work
well in stringed instruments. Aside from possessing the strength
necessary to support the tension of four to 12 strings, "tonewoods" have
a tendency to resonate at frequencies sympathetic to the pitch of the
note or chords played. Oak, for example, is very strong, but does not
have this resonant quality. Therefore, you wouldn't want to make a
guitar out of oak... you'd save it for your dresser.
To shed some serious light on the subject, however, I contacted Roger
Fritz, my former co-worker at Gibson. Aside from being a really cool
guy, Roger set up and headed up Gibson's repair department. Prior to
that, he owned and operated Fritz Bros. Guitars, hand-making high-end
custom instruments. Among others, Roy Buchanan was a client of Roger's.
These days, Roger is very busy writing music for and playing guitar on
Shelby Lynne's upcoming record on Mercury/Capitol. He's also building
custom guitars again, but took a few minutes to discuss wood.
"I don't want to play favorites, but there is a reason why certain
combinations of wood have become legendary over the years," Roger said.
In keeping with Roger's philosophy, this article will go step by step
through the classics and then discuss some... as Roger calls them,
"alternative woods."
Spruce - Spruce, though not as pretty as maple, is the all-time winner
for the "top" of flat top acoustic guitars. According to Fritz, spruce
is light and has a grain. This enables the wood, when properly
cut, to vibrate much like a speaker cone. Better yet, as the guitar
ages, the sap hidden in the grain of spruce gradually dries and
crystallizes, further accentuating the bright, resonant quality of the
wood. "Engleman Spruce," according to Fritz, is the best for making
guitar tops.
Rosewood - Rosewood, Brazilian Rosewood in particular, has become the
gold standard for the backs and sides of acoustic guitars. Dense and
beautiful, rosewood lends a full bass, good high-end bite, and a
distinctive "piano-ey" midrange to the tone, according to Fritz. While
rosewood is obviously great for fretboards, guitar makers have had
limited luck using rosewood elsewhere in solid-body electrics. The
guitars are too heavy, too bright, and/or cost prohibitive. This is
because the wood is rare and expensive. Plus its porous nature requires
a good deal of "pore fill" (and subsequent labor) before lacquer can be
applied.
Mahogany - Mahogany became popular in guitars because it is beautiful
and cheaper to get than rosewood. Whereas the high-end Martin D-28 would
have rosewood back and sides, the lower-end D-18 used mahogany.
According to Fritz, Mahogany lends more of a "parlor" kind of tone to
the guitar. In other words, it's twangier but not as brilliant. It's not
as "big" sounding either, but possesses a distinct character. This
character graced most of the acoustic guitar sounds on early Beatles
recordings since they used Gibsons of mahogany construction. As far as
electrics are concerned, you can construct an entire guitar (except the
fretboard) out of mahogany. The electric tone is marked by a warm sound
with lots of low to mid-range frequencies.
Alder - Alder is the classic Stratocaster body material, though the
original were made of ash. Alder is easy to work with because it doesn't require a lot of pore fill. Alder has a full-bodied
sound, but doesn't have quite the "bite" of ash.
"It's like the Chevrolet of hardwood," joked Fritz, adding that he
sometimes uses alder in semi-hollows too.
Ash - Twangy, porous, and heavy are words that describe ash, the classic
ingredient of the Telecaster sound. It also has good bottom end.
"It's an ash kicker," Fritz said.
Maple - Maple's two main uses are in necks and as a "cap" on an electric
guitar. Maple is extremely hard and dense. While this makes them ideal
to support the stress of string tension as a neck, they are too heavy
and too bright-sounding for use as a solid guitar body. The Les Paul
Standard utilized the maple cap to add brilliance to the body while
retaining the warmth of the mahogany. "Figured" maple also adds
beauty to the guitar since patterns in the grain can be enhanced in the
finishing process. Maple is sometimes used for the sides and back of
acoustic guitars, but not nearly as often as rosewood or mahogany.
Ebony - Ebony, when not used in pianos, is a great material to use in
fretboards. The wood is extremely strong, bright, and durable. Gaboon
Ebony comes only from the Gaboon Province in Africa. It is marked by
deep black color. Macassar Ebony is a tad less expensive, and features
brown stripes in the black, though it is often dyed to be all black.
Walnut - Walnut is a good alternative to mahogany. It is strong,
warm-sounding and naturally beautiful. It works well for solid guitar
bodies, and acoustic back and sides. If properly "quarter-sawn"
(perpendicular to the wood's annual rings, or a slice down the center of the log), Walnut is stable enough to use in guitar necks as well.
Cedar - Cedar is one of few alternatives to spruce for acoustic guitar
tops. Cedar is bright, light, and the deep red color adds a distinctive
look to a guitar... plus you won't get any moths in your guitar case!
Though Fritz says you could "go on for days" talking about other
"alternative woods," he thought he'd tion the more common ones.
A Tobias Classic 4-string bass made with walnut, wenge, and alder.
Woods such as purple heart, pau ferro, wenge, and bubinga are finding their way into solid body instruments. Particularly, these are being used in basses, since bass manufacturers tend to be more adventurous than their guitar counterparts. Typically, these woods are marked by extreme strength and density, and are especially useful when multiple laminates (combinations) of the woods are used in neck-through-body construction. The result is guitars with incredible stability and sustain. Also of note, global consciousness is causing these woods to find their way into guitars with more conventional construction.
"Many companies and builders are experimenting to see what different woods will work for them since the woods typically used are now in limited supply," Fritz said.
Brett Ratner is a contributor to Guitar Player, Musician, Electronic Musician and Music & Computers. He also spent two years as the Creative Writer for www.gibson.com. Currently, Brett plays sessions and performs regularly around Nashville with the band Katoorah Jayne. Please email Brett at [email protected] with any questions, comments or ideas.
Have you ever noticed that almost every trained piano player can leaf through books of sheet music, and not only sight-read songs they have never heard before, but do it the first time through, without mistakes, capturing the rhythm and feel of the songs amazingly well? My aunt can do this. I have seen dozens of examples of a piano player competently leading a sing-along of a song they have never heard. Yet I have never seen a guitarist do this perfectly who was reading notes. (Guitarists can generally read chord charts and improvise accompaniments to songs quite well.) Concert guitarists memorize their pieces, and unless they have had some time to look over the piece, they will almost certainly stumble somewhat when trying to sight-read something completely new. This underscores a rather important issue in guitar education that I have never seen or heard discussed. Are guitarists just worse at sight-reading? Are they lazy? Why can horn players and flute players and all the other instruments in the orchestra do just fine with the notation, while the guitarists lag behind?
I see the cause of this problem as being strictly mathematical. It is obvious (and well-known) that the system of notes and clefs and staffs that we use (known as "standard notation") was devised specifically for the piano, and is extremely clumsy and non-intuitive for the guitar. In fact, I think that for the piano, standard notation is what an alphabet is to language, and when a guitarist tries to use this same notation it is like hieroglyphics. The notation system was set up in the first place for the keyboard, and its essence is to make a pictorial representation of the piano keyboard, to essentially "encode" the playing of the music on paper. (This relationship is underscored by the fact that it has been possible for years now for a piano player to play into an electronic keyboard and for almost perfect sheet music that generally requires only minor corrections to come out the computer's printer. Attempts to do this with guitar music have remained unsuccessful and approximate, which supports my claim that the translation of guitar music to and from standard notation is not a simple mapping, and follows no algorithm that a computer can employ. As a lifetime guitarist, I can assure you that it takes hours sometimes to find the best fingerings for groups or sequences of notes.)
Standard notation is just a graph of pitch against time, with the x or horizontal axis being time, and the y or vertical axis being pitch. Since the piano is a one-dimensional instrument, running from left to right in pitch, reading standard notation consists of simple doing a 90 degree rotation of the pitch axis. Notes that appear in higher vertical positions on the page are played further to the player's right. And the clusters of notes that form chords show the physical shape of the fingerings of the chords on the piano keyboard. The two clefs represent the left and right hands of the player. The accidentals (sharps and flats) show black keys.
Apparently this rotation is easy enough to learn to do that schoolteachers and church keyboardists everywhere can do it quite well. There is simply no intuitive relationship between the music staff and the guitar fingerboard. There are between 1 and 3 places on the guitar where any given note can be found (with some exceptions), and there are almost always several different fingerings for a sequence of notes. Guitar notation adds some extra symbols to help, putting notes played with the thumb with stems down and notes played with the fingers stems up. Small numbers net to the note indicating the string on which a note is played are usually added, as often are small letters p i m a to indicate which digit of the plucking hand is assigned to the note. But this makes the guitar notation more of an encryption to be decoded than a natural and pictorial representation of the playing of the music.
The wind instruments in the orchestra that also use the standard notation system are themselves one dimensional, and so unaffected by standard notation's limitations. The violin and viola and cello are somewhat 2-dimensional, although only 2 notes (called "double-stops") at a time can be played with the bow, as compared to the 4, 5 and 6 note chords guitarists play. I would venture a guess, not having ever learned to sight-read or having been in an orchestra, that string players have a noticeable harder time sight-reading non-linear (with double-stops) music than do the keyboard players. And the mathematical simplicity of the way violins, violas, cellos and basses are tuned make the adapting to standard notation simpler also. On those instruments, it is always the same music interval from one string to the next, making the geometry of playing the instrument more uniform. The tuning (and thus the geometry of fingerings) is irregular on the guitar.
Mathematically speaking, the guitar fingerboard is simply not one-dimensional like the piano, and attempts to render it into a one-dimensional form, such as standard musical notation, is necessarily going to cause ambiguities and distortions, and dramatically interfere with the player's ability to sight read. (Map projections that attempt to depict the earth on a piece of paper also force dimensional distortions, as we all know.) A 2-dimensional piece of paper can show a reasonably good represenation of one-dimensional keyboard graphed against time. It is clear to me that guitar players will not be able to sight-read as well as keyboard players until a 3-dimensional notation is developed. This would then show how the 2-dimensional guitar fingerboard behaves when graphed against time. Instead of a note with a stem on it showing its duration, there would need to be something like a guitar chord grid with a flag or a stem. It may be that computers will allow us to do this, and it may need to actually be a movie-like thing, and I encourage exploration of this idea. And even if it is developed, I have no illusions that it will come to be adopted any time into our present system of music education and performance, and guitarists will have to remain philosophical and put up with the way it is.
This is provided courtesy of Harvey Reid, who has been a full-time acoustic guitar player, songwriter, traditional musician, and free-lance minstrel since 1974. He was 1981 national acoustic guitar champion, and has released 13 solo recordings on Woodpecker Records. More information about him can be found Here, and he can be contacted c/o Woodpecker Records PO Box 815 York Maine 03909 207-363-1886 (phone) 207-363-7263 (fax) e-mail: [email protected]
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� 1997 by Harvey Reid
