"Happiness isn't something that you can find outside of yourself. It's something you've got to find inside of who you are and bring that to the world around you." - Fred LeBlanc of clients Cowboy Mouth
There is a lot of hatred being expressed online. Here in America it has become one of the national pastimes, right up there with baseball and Type 2 Diabetes.
Fear of this hatred seems to keep some bands and businesses from posting anything more in depth than "Sometimes I'm in the mood soup." It is the online equivalent of being simultaneously out in public and in the Witness Protection Program. Unfortunately this strategy does not do much for building an engaged, interested following. Although it might be of help to the soup industry. The more I learn about social media stats, the more I think you should not pay attention to them. Yes, I get excited when a post gets a lot of likes, comments, and shares. I'm sure there is a dopamine connection there. But when you make big numbers the primary goal (or tragically the only goal), you become a slave to that platform's algorithm and your post quality takes a nose dive.
Yes, a great post can get great stats. But a great post can also get poor stats. A great post that really resonates with someone and convinces him or her to spend money on you sometimes gets amazingly weak stats. And sometimes a post that gets great numbers does nothing for you. If you want to post something silly, that's fine. But do it because it reflects who you are or what your business is about. Don't do it to make some algorithm happy. I know bands comprised of interesting, intelligent people. But they post dumb stuff that has nothing to do with their music or who they are because the dumb stuff gets bigger numbers. However, if I told them to stop writing their own music and just cover Taylor Swift songs, they would be offended. And yet, if they just care about big numbers, they should just do Taylor Swift songs. Cris: How have you changed as a drummer over the years?
Troy Luccketta of Tesla: Well, if you want to go back to where I started, I was pretty much self-taught. So what happens is, you get better in time. You have all that young, raw energy that you just play music and you play what you hear. And there's a sense of heart and feel that goes with that, without technique. And as you mature as a player, you gain more technique. So obviously my technique has improved dramatically. And it's interesting, depending on what I am doing and who I am playing with, how much technique I'll apply versus how much I'll take out. For instance, I just try to lose the technique if I want to get something a little more raw. "Impulsive, experimental, pushing the limits. These are important qualities to know and to experience for an artist. An acceptance of error and failure should also have its place. Then you can learn as you put the pieces back together!" - Nick of clients Time for Three
"There is a real process to becoming great at something. You have to put in those 10,000 hours. It's a journey." - client Taylor Dayne
"Remember to be grateful. If you are actually playing music professionally or semi-professionally, you are in rare company." - client Rich Redmond
"Singing this style of music has made me a far better singer than I ever could have hoped to be." - Louis Prima Jr. of clients Louis Prima Jr and the Witnesses
Cris: There are a lot of electronic elements with this show that you control from your kit. What is the key to dealing with all of that electronic stuff but still giving it a good, natural feel?
Chris Kimmerer (drummer for Thomas Rhett): Before I joined this band, I did a tour with an artist who made an electronic record. It was amazing. It was a great work of art. On the tour I played some acoustic drums but almost everything else was electronic. So I learned how to replicate electronic content from the record and take that into a live setting. It never made sense to me to roll the start of the song from the computer with the tracks and then have a drum loop going on and me just sort of sitting there twiddling my thumbs. I'm a drummer. I should play that. So early on with that tour we figured out ways for me to reproduce that stuff live. I'm not sure it connects with everybody on their first glance, but it eventually registers that, "Oh. He is performing that part that I'm hearing and those are not normal sounding drums." There's a cowbell thing here or a hand clap thing there or a super 808 kind of thing going on in the kick drum world. And then the switch from that to the acoustic drums can be a thing. Part of the trick to all that stuff is it needs to feel real as far as its performance. It's been a challenge. We tried to find ways to minimize any kind of electronic crash issues and also find a way for me as a drummer to be behind the kit and perform naturally on electronic instruments, to try and recreate a true experience. "Things that have touched your life deeply can come out when you sing, when you are relating to the lyrics. Or even the melody can send you places that you've been before. I feel that when I sing from my heart. It touches people who are listening to me, people in the audience. You can see it. You can feel it. It's my truth about the music that I perform." - client Laura Tate
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April 2024
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