How To Book a Tour: Tips for the Independent Musician
The Littlest Birds perform at the Trillium Cafe in Hood River, Oregon
Last year my girlfriend – singer/songwriter/banjo player Sharon Martinson and I (singer/songwriter/cellist) formed a duo called The Littlest Birds and hit the road for two months. Performing some 35 shows across 10 states around the West. It was no small step, but more of a big leap into the world of the touring musician. Endless hours on the computer and the telephone booking gigs, even as the tour started, filling gaps in our schedule, planning who to stay with, and hoping for a lot of generosity along the way in the numerous towns where we knew no one.
People most often asked us how exactly we managed to pull it off. To start with you must have a good quality album. Your music is what you’re selling to venues and the public and if you don’t have a good representation of your sound you will struggle to book gigs. We holed up in my parents cabin in the mountains with great acoustics and no distractions for a week and recorded the best album we could. It was recorded in a “live” style, with no overdubs (except for one harmony vocal track), as that was the simplest way we could assemble an album’s worth of material while also capturing a certain “feel” that you get with that sort of recording. Next we designed a clean, simple website with every last bit of information a venue could want all located on the very front page. No need for anything fancy here, you do not want lots of menus or pages. No one knows you, no one cares. They just want to arrive, click on your music, glance at a photo, a bio, have images they can grab easily for their venue website, and be done with it. Think efficiency when designing a site. Think straight forward and professional.
One service that does provide clean integration, and simplifies the process of designing a good website is ReverbNation. Once you sign up for a page with them you can embed your music player and show schedule in a variety of ways that are certain to match whatever design you come up with for your site. This allows you to change schedule stuff in one place rather than having to update a bunch of different pages individually. ReverbNation also integrates flawlessly with Facebook, allowing a sort of all-in-one approach to social networking.
We chose to have our album professionally replicated through an online company (Oasis) that also offers promotional tools including a free membership to CD Baby so that once completed, our album would be available for both download and hard copy sale throughout the web and iTunes. Also, order enough copies to be able to provide hard copies to CD Baby for this service, as it’s important – we consistently sell hard copies online and gain more money from those sales, and a service like Pandora requires that your album be available for hard copy sale through Amazon in order to be considered for submission to their service. Not to mention, you’ll want extras to hand out to venues and friends along the way on your tour. You’ll want to be able to send them out to magazines and radio stations for further promotion of your tour. We started with 300 copies of our CD, and in less than a year close to half are already sold or given away.
Additionally, the promotional tools offered by Oasis allow you the opportunity to release a single on a compilation disc that gets sent out to radio stations and industry insiders around the country. We’ve already received two requests for our album from radio stations, one of which we’ll likely be able to visit and perform a live interview/in studio performance during our upcoming tour.
Once you’ve got decent recordings, a CD in progress, and a website up and running, then begins the task of finding and contacting venues. One easy trick to finding compatible venues is to look up similar artists and find where they’re performing. There are also a variety of directory style pages profiling good venues for particular styles of music. These are hit and miss though, as the info is often outdated. Beyond that you’re left with the power of search engine keywords. Craft different combos, look up Pubs, Bars, Breweries, and contact as many friends as you have in those areas for suggestions.
In terms of working with venues, what we learned from our first tour was to be polite but persistent. Give them time to respond but not too much. If you’re already committed to the tour, then be prepared to take gigs that do not pay any guarantee and count on some CD sales and tips to get you to the next paying gig. Venues generally have no problem feeding you and giving up a couple of beers a piece for the night, but guarantees can be hard to come by without a solid, predictable draw.
If you want to adequately promote your tour you must do it all yourself. Expect nothing from the venue. Design a blank flyer with space for any date, time, location to be added. Print them (there are a variety of online services that’ll do this professionally, best of course to find a local printer), and mail them to any friends you have in the towns you’ll be playing. Get them to put them up around town before the show. Send them to the venues too of course, and hope for the best. We’ve walked in to a venue to find a stack of our flyers sitting on the counter, with only one up where you could see it.
Next you’ll want to research local media outlets – newspapers, blogs, community websites with entertainment listings, and it’s easiest to prepare a form type paragraph, where you only have to change a certain date, time, or location element to facilitate submitting your gig info to as many different outlets as possible. It sucks, but you have to promote yourself. The world is so clogged with good music and independent musicians trying to do the same thing that you have to raise your voice a bit, and not be afraid to market your music.
And as far as marketing goes the social networks are a great place to start. Consider a Facebook Ad for your band, or your tour. Signup for Twitter too. I’m not a big fan of myspace as the interface is clunky and difficult to use, so I’m no longer on it, but many artists still are.
Be prepared to start working on setting up your tour six months in advance. This will be a bit far out for many venues, but not far enough out for others, and allows for a couple months of booking work to establish the majority of your shows, and then another couple months to do additional promotional work and listing with newspapers, radio stations, and websites; to design a flyer and get it printed and mailed off to every place you’re headed. Giving yourself lots of time keeps things more relaxed. Our first tour was very last minute and it took tons of time and effort to make it happen, and didn’t give us enough lead time to do much promotion or radio spots or flyers. This year we already have most of our tour lined up with fives months to go.
Once on the road we kept a tight ship. Try to control your drinking to not much past what is given to you for free from the venues. Bring a camp stove and cook meals yourself on the road. The grocery store is cheaper than the restaurant or coffee shop any day. Remember it’s not just about having fun, it’s also a business and you want to turn at least a marginal profit.
Touring is fun when the gigs are good, and not so fun when they aren’t. Rest days are great so that you actually get a chance to see the countryside that you’re driving through and shake off whatever exhaustion has accumulated from the previous days gigging. Consider the emotional strengths and weaknesses of everyone involved in the tour, know that there will be some ups and downs along the way. You won’t make it big with your first shows outside of your home town. Chances are people still won’t know who you are on your second, third, and fourth big trip out of town. Minimize expectations. Just try to break even financially and emotionally. Focus on the music. Do some busking, find time to practice and learn new tunes as you’ll quickly tire of the same old set list. Know that you’ll need up to a 4 hour catalog of music at your fingertips to satisfy many places.
And that’s about it for now. I’ll let you know how this next tour goes, and what additional lessons are learned.
You can follow our music on Twitter (@cellobanjobirds), Facebook, or on our website http://www.littlestbirds.net
Along the Pacific…
For the next little while I’ll be kickin’ it along the pacific coast of California…drivin’ around for surf, music, and to meet up with old friends. The David Rawlings Machine (which involves Gillian Welch and members of Old Crow Medicine Show) is playing at The Fillmore in San Francisco on Tuesday (2/9) and I just grabbed a ticket for that to gain some inspiration and simply groove and listen to the sounds of my favorite acoustic guitar player…
Meanwhile I hope to gather inspiration from the moist climate, green trees and hills, roaring pacific, and clean waves and carry that on into my own shows….
(Friday-2/12 in Oakland at the Nomad Cafe (6500 Shattuck Avenue, CA 94609) from 7:30-8:30pm, and Saturday-2/13 at Asana Teas and Cafe in Santa Cruz (103 Lincoln St., CA) starting at 8pm and going till 10:30 or so…with perhaps a few friends joining in at the santa cruz show…
I’m polishing a host of new songs, including a few new cello songs and am excited to debut the new material.
Meanwhile, right now, the wind sings in the trees, and a light rain patters out of the dark night, good swells roll in off the ocean, wrapping even into the insides of deep bays to peel along sand bars, and the walls of a friend’s old cottage seem to resonate with a warmth and humanity that I really only feel along the coast. It is a fine place, this California Pacific….and I think I’ll lay my head down and rest upon it awhile…
The Trespassers @ The Divided Sky, South Lake Tahoe
Good friends of mine, The Trespassers are a bluegrass/oldtime/gypsy jazz/western outfit from the westside of the Sierra Nevada. I’ve pretty much known them since their first gigs, playing late night around a fire at Tuff Rock Festival in Bishop, and the July4th Hog Roast at Rock Creek Lodge several years ago. They recently finished their second album of original music titled Western Front which is available for sale online at their website. They just rocked one of their favorite venues, The Divided Sky in South Lake Tahoe, the last couple nights, and these images are from Friday night.
another house jam…at 90 Shadow…Old Mammoth…
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since one night’s never enough, we booked two nights at the bar…
but two nights wasn’t enough either…
so here we are on the third night…
Celebrating a friends birthday with a gathering of some fine musicians.
In attendance were Andy Roberts, Meghan Herring, and Ella Naiman of the String Slingers, as well as Yoseff Tucker of the Dalton Mountain Gang, Nina Weisman of Independence CA, Scott Roberts, myself and Jeff Meadway of the Sweetwater String Band, a classically trained fiddler named Amy, and another old time fiddler named Kathy Hillimire of Fretless in Santa Cruz…also Eiger Mike Williams of a variety of nameless or name-changing local bands made cameo appearences on the bucket bass and banjo…
lots of strings, lots of songs, too much in Bb – goddamn Capos! – and lots of beer and good times…drove back up the street to my house at 4:20 in the morning…
(it’s still snowing in the mountains of california, this week promises to be another good one for skiing…)
Music Makin’ in the Mountains of California…
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Since the days are so short in the winter time, it’s the perfect season for playin’ music…long nights allow ample time for inspiration, dancing and drinking…the past couple of nights some friends The String Slingers have been in Mammoth splitting shows with us, Old Coyote Moon, at the Auld Dubliner, where our friend Chris is the manager…two nights in public havin’ a blast is leading us toward tonight, in private, at home with everyone, playing real backporch acoustic music…
Bruce Medhurst, who has been playing didgeridoo with us for awhile, brought out the guitar this night, playing a Beck song Golden Age, and two original songs of mine, opening up more sweet sounds of the cello.
If you look into the backroom on this one, you see Scott jammin’ with Yoseff Tucker, classic bluegrass, can’t get enough – you’ve got to jam in the back while your friends are playin’…
The Fretless Path
I was introduced to making music at an early age. I couldn’t have been older than five when my dad started me on the piano, and somehow I managed an award two years later in an entry level category at the SMYF competition in Southern California near my home right before I gave up the piano at seven years old “because I don’t like it” and my dad offered me a cello. Initially I remember being more happy with the cello than I had been with the piano, perhaps because both my brother and father played the piano (my father being a piano teacher actually). But not long into it I began disliking and protesting the amount of practicing I was supposed to do. I just wanted to be a normal kid and go collect baseball cards and stuff like that.
But once I could “perform”, I always enjoyed it immensely. I hated the practicing it took to get to that performance, but I loved the singular, brief moment of sitting down and becoming emotionally involved in a piece of music from start to finish. Often this was how I “practiced”. I would just pretend to be performing the piece and play it as well as I could, doing it again and again. I would imagine an audience but really I just disappeared into the moment. This worked relatively well and natural talent took care of the rest considering I got away without practicing all that much. I read books, drew pictures and day dreamed instead, and once I was in high school and attending Crossroads, a private school in Santa Monica away from home, I practiced even less. Throughout my struggles with the motivation to practice and learn difficult classical music, my love of the moment of performance carried me through.
I believe the underlying root of my struggle to practice was that I’d never personally decided that I wanted to be a cellist. I had been told I was good, a “child prodigy” and very talented. I had been pushed into it and just sort of followed along because it was what my brother was doing too. The difference came when my brother decided on his own that he wanted to be a pianist and that changed the nature of his passion. Now he was practicing for himself, while I continued to play only because I was supposed to.
By my 11th grade year I’d pretty much decided that I should be able to make my own decisions regarding the direction of my life. I’d do my pretend-a-performance practicing routine but the magic had aged and was fading. I thought more and more about being a writer, moving to the mountains and being a ski bum. I guess they never should’ve let me read Thoreau or Kerouac, or Muir, that was their first mistake. Or really, their first mistake was teaching me to ski when I was three. And for that my dad has no one to blame but himself. Thanks Dad.
So I quit cello that year. Much to everyone’s dismay, angering my parents tremendously, alienating me from my musician friends in the school orchestra, but allowing me the freedom to take my first job outside of music, high in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Eastern California. Working at a backcountry lodge that summer would be the beginning of nearly eight years of wild living where I hardly touched my cello, only sort of ceremoniously bringing it out of the closet to dust off the fingerboard with my stiff and sloppy performances once or twice a year. One thing I slowly began to notice as time went on was that when I did bring it out, I felt a personal urge to practice and get the old pieces back up to par again before putting it away. Sometimes I would and sometimes I wouldn’t but often I caught myself sitting down to my cello for the first time in any given year and playing for hours without even noticing the time passing.
After years of pursuing nothing more than skiing, climbing, and backpacking, I got involved in a relationship with a girl who played guitar. She was also a snowboarder and surfer and we lived together in a cabin on the backside of Mammoth Mountain for a couple of winters. So not only did I learn to surf, but my fingers began gracing a fretboard for the first time. Initially I just sort of banged away at it with no real desire to undertake the learning process. I knew that it would be easier for me than for most because of my cello training but I was hesitant. I’d rejected music so powerfully for a life in the mountains that I think I was scared to open myself up to the effort of it again. It wasn’t until our first (of three) break-ups that I went at the guitar with any sort of passion. I’d learned a few chords, and now all of a sudden I wanted to learn all the chords and start writing songs. With a sort of manic energy it immediately took over my life.
My first guitar was a “backpacker guitar” because I wanted a guitar that I could take with me anywhere and everywhere, and I began writing my own songs since I wasn’t capable enough to learn anyone else’s. Some of the earliest songs have been happily forgotten, but some I still play with as much passion today as the day I first wrote them. They capture a feeling or an image or a time that I’ll never need to capture again because I got it right the first time.
As I played the guitar more and more, I wondered about the cello. I had never been able to “jam” despite my high level of playing ability, and now I could “jam” on the guitar and sing songs which was all I wanted to do. I’d found that my personal love of performance, my interest in writing, a desire to entertain friends around a campfire and a desire to speak out on social and political issues made the guitar my ideal instrument. I seriously wanted to sell my cello so that I could invest in better guitar equipment.
This feeling persisted until about two years ago when I first sat down and attempted to jam with some bluegrass musicians that are friends of mine. What happened with the bluegrass startled me. The guitar had opened me up to a different way of approaching music—to just playing by ear, not worrying about the sharps or flats, and not caring so much about mistakes. And now I was suddenly set free of the fretboard and relishing the freedom of a fretless fingerboard. Not only that but I loved how well I knew my cello compared to my guitar. It was like picking it up for the very first time and yet already knowing how to play it completely. Sure my intonation was a little off and my technique was slow, but I was hooked again. And this time it was for me. I felt the desire to become a serious musician, I’d already been feeling it with my guitar playing and songwriting, and now I had this whole other instrument that could allow me to do even more.
These days I can’t even call it “practicing” because I play either my guitar or cello or banjo so much, either with friends or by myself that it’s just a part of life, it’s not practicing. I take breaks only when my fingers literally hurt too much to play anymore. If I added up the hours some weeks it would come close to a full time job. But I don’t even notice the time passing, and I guess that’s been the most powerful lesson of it all. You have to do it for yourself. No one else can ever make you a good musician, you have to want it, and love it, and feel it deep in your heart—it has to be as much a part of your life as eating and breathing.
So I continue to be a dirtbag ski bum, backpacker, desert rat, surfer and occasional climber, but now you’ll also catch me performing in a couple of different bands at the local bars—taking trips up and down the fretboard of my guitar, or long glides up and down the fingerboard of my cello for free pitchers of beer and your generous gratuities. It feels sort of like a circular path coming to a close, but really it continues straight ahead—only now I make my own soundtrack.
2008 The Summer of Music
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I returned from Oz….a bit changed, and without a girlfriend. But I returned, perhaps dragging my feet, perhaps feeling completely at home in Oz and not needing to return, but truly needing to get out on my own…for both of us needed SPACE. Oz was good to us but we were not good to each other and things went astray. But it’s alright I guess, it seems that it was necessary. And I returned to the Eastern Sierra fresh with energy to play music and work towards saving for our land in Baja. It’s still “our” land and we’re still friends so the magic of Oz is still with us I guess.
What a LONG STRANGE TRIP it’s been…wow…
starting almost immediately upon my return I got a backstage pass from my friends The Trespassers to be their “crew member” at Strawberry Music Festival and got to eat, drink, and watch awesome music up close and personal for free at the end of May, in the rainy pine forests of Evergreen Road…and it did rain boy, and we sloshed in the mud and played music out in it, and stayed up late jammin’ and really ever since then things have been rather crazy. 
A solid group of us pilgrimaged to Telluride, Colorado for the bluegrass festival at the end of June and lost our minds there…left them to be picked up in little pieces and reassembled later by some sort of haz-mat team from the future…it was glorious in all shades of glory, and kept us roaring for four days…(what wonderful things come from a tiny piece of paper sitting on your tongue, anyways….)…I’m not sure the people of Telluride will ever quite recover from the acoustic, without instruments rendition of Shady Grove that occurred on Main Street in front of the Hardware Store when a whole group of us “got inspired”….
After that it was pretty much ON…performing music with two different bands up to five nights a week, and jamming on the other nights, while working 8 hours a day five days a week landscaping, which means shovelling and hauling and lifting and grunting out in the dust and heat and brush sometimes…on other days it just meant dropping in some flowers but….QUITE a summer nonetheless…QUITE a summer….
I guess the highlights would be watching the sun rise on the July 4th weekend and rolling into it with bloody marys and music at Gull Lake along the June Lake Loop…the night at LuLu’s when the Irish man and his family kept buying us rounds of beers and we played an hour later than we should’ve….the night at Side Door when the co-star to Kiefer Sutherland from the show “24″ came in and made a fool of himself and I got it all on a recording…uhh let’s see outdoors wise I did some fun climbs this summer with a friend, especially the Hair-raiser Buttress (5.9 R)….more highlights would include the old coyote moon show that we put on at the Auld Dubliner till two in the morning…the jam up at the Mono Lake Vista Point after the Blue Turtle Show on Saturday night back in September when a pile of musicians were there, basically three or four bands converging and combining to make a helluva a great jam that lasted till about four in the morning….followed the next week by our very own show at the Mobil Mart which was the best Calmer Than You Are show in history….
but this all reminds me of a few parties I’ve forgotten…namely the first BBQ at Marshall’s house back in June or July or something, when we had roughly ten musicians, all friends, together on a porch at a 1930s cabin in the woods just jammin’…we had a couple other big jams like that…some fifty strings in a room at once…
It’s been a great summer for music….we’ve all gotten better, gotten more inspired, taken it all more seriously and just plain progressed to being actual musicians.
There may not have been much backcountry time this summer, but the backcountry of my mind has certainly seen some time.
With summer gone, and fall in full swing, a large group of mammoth derelicts pilgrimaged to The City by the Bay for the annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival…a wild weekend of music and walking and heavy heavy drinking, thousands of people filling the Golden Gate Park, having a front row position for Alison Krauss and Robert Plant only to turn around a realize thousands of people had filled in behind us making it nearly impossible to escape if one needed the bathroom…but what a show that was….definitely a highlight of the summer festival scene, Plant’s still got it, and the two of them sound great together. Other great bands of the festival were Poor Man’s Whiskey, The Bad Livers, Del McCoury, The Global Drum Project, and Iris DeMent’s solo performance on piano.
Who knows folks. Who knows what will happen in this life. If you claim to know, you’re full of shit or boredom one of the two, cause this life is magic and shifty and always on the move, lookout!—-it’s comin’ after you!
