music production & online band marketing

1. Practice At Home

The more people you are the more important this gets. If you are just two musicians hanging out and “practicing”, wasting time to remember how a song was played is a smaller problem than when there are four or more people trying to get something going on the few times all of them are available.

In general practice at home as much as you possibly can. Don’t hold up rehearsing with questions and problems you don’t need the other members to solve to, means: Know the songs and your lyrics already and try to reach those great and essential moments that only a band together can form!

2. Know When To Interrupt And When To Shut Up

The key to successfully working with others on creative tasks is to interact and communicate the right way. The flow of ideas is – once established – a tender being so while your impulse through thoughts might help, it is often necessary to take a breath and let others also make their contribution to the process.

Once you had a couple of successfull sessions with your colleagues there slowly develops a routine: a special way to find and maintain creative potential. Keep things balanced and learn also when it’s time to prevent the band from following dead-ends.

3. Have Fun And Keep Motivation High

The more motivated you and your band members are the faster you will accomplish whatever you have chosen as your objective. When you have fun practising and working on your song ideas a whole night will not be wasted but mostly result in valuable results.

So if you are one of the more ambitious members of your band project (and as you are reading this you might be) try to get the others infected. Try to make work fun to keep yourself going. How? In diversifying for example.

Diversifying means: When you sit in your home studio and have been mixing a song idea for a few hours there might come a time where you feel that your useful ideas decline and what you’re doing is just fishing in the blind. Throwing knobs around, changing sounds and parts of the arrangement without much thought. And the worst part: your ears are tired!

The important thing here is to stop mixing because your song would probably just suffer from continuing anyway and your time is spent much better otherwise. Instead grab an instrument and get your motivation back. Or if you need to recover your ears, get some marketing jobs done. Work on your Myspace or Facebook page, talk about the release of your first single or organize things around a gig.

Think about why being part of this project is great and focuss on it. It’s even allowed to dream for a few minutes as long as you get back to work afterwards. As long as you have enough possibilities to keep yourself in the game – doing something useful for you project -  you will see a positive outcome.

4. Take Notes And Record Ideas

You might think of this one as an annoying delay in your creative ways, but once you experience the loss of  great ideas because you just can’t remember, you will agree with me. Take a few short notes to easily remember all those things you might forget in the period of a few weeks. Try to find a system that works for you and write down whatever you need: chords, notes, rhythms, lyrics, arrangements, etc. (I tend to think of rhythm as the thing I mostly can’t remember correctly but you might have another focus).

Recording your idea is often a faster and easier way to make sure you remember what a song was all about the next time you practice. You don’t need a high quality audio recording, just make sure the essential parts are there and you will be able to analyze the recording. If you use special techniques or unusual elements make sure to use a combination of notes and recordings to prevent yourself from future guessing.

Another great aspect of recording your song idea is to have something “finished”. It’s the first version of your future song and don’t disrespect it for the faults it still has. Because these faults and flaws are your knowledge about what has to be different in the final version. Use it! A lot of good songs develop through eliminating all the “wrong” elements. As long as you can analyze the parts you don’t like and how you could erase or change/improve them, your song will become better and better.

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I hope to post a video about how you can analyze and improve your songs ideas through revision soon and will link it to this article. Until then, tell me how and how often you record song ideas and what other tips you have for rehearsing with a band!

Tagged as: band practice, recording, rehearsal room, song ideas, writing a song

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