There are common mistakes a lot of bands make that end up sapping the enthusiasm out of being in a gigging band. By making simple shifts in behavior you can make your band more successful than it currently is.

Mistake 1: Failure To Make Sales

I see this happening all the time. A band makes great music yet doesn’t release anything for sale. It’s great that you want to play shows but if you aren’t selling your music the fans have no way to take that experience home with them and you’ll soon be forgotten. Related to this are bands that do release music but feel guilty or nervous about pushing sales. You need to get your music out there and charge something for it. Do you value your music? If you want your fans to value it then sell it.

Mistake 2: Playing Terrible Shows

By playing terrible shows, I don’t mean the band had a shitty performance. I mean taking every gig offered without thinking things through. Yes, it’s important to be working hard and getting out there but it’s pointless to play shows if no one shows up. Playing a lot of shows early on is important in order to get experience but once you are past that phase you need to be more selective. Playing to empty venues where you are not making money is not only a waste of time but it kills the band’s enthusiasm for their music career. Instead of playing a crap gig where no one is going to show up, spend that evening working on booking a better show. One really great show is worth a dozen bad ones.

Mistake 3: Not Marketing Consistently

Do one thing per day to push your music. It doesn’t have to be huge but do something. It’s not fun and you’d rather be doing something else but it’s important that you are out there reminding people of your existence. You may have the greatest songs in the world but if nobody knows about them what’s the point? If you focus on making an effort daily it will pay off.

Mistake 4: Jealousy

The little green monster. It’s natural and it happens to the best of us. You’re out there playing shows, working hard and you see another band get ahead because they have a connection you don’t. It’s easy to fall into the pattern of jealousy and anger but a simple shift in perspective can turn this negativity into something that can benefit your career. The next time you see another band becoming successful, just have the mindset of “Hey, if this band can get do [X] then so can I” and then work towards that goal. Competition is good and it breeds better music. If it’s a band in the same genre as you, set up a Google Alert to help track what they are doing. You can see where and how they are connecting with their fans and then come up with your own plan of attack for getting exposure.

Mistake 5: Being Boring

Don’t play the same set at every show. Seriously. If your hardcore fans are coming to all of your shows they are going to get bored as shit hearing the same exact songs in the same exact order every week. One good set is not enough. Write more songs. Working on writing every day.

Usable as both a standalone programmable synth and as a controller, the Continuum is a synth performance dream. The Continuum is similar to a ribbon controller but it’s much greater. Instead of restricting to one axis you are able to exert continuous control over three dimensions FOR EACH FINGER.

Yes, it’s multi-touch and multi-axis. It’s available in both eight octave and four octave versions via hakenaudio.com; pricing starts at $3390.00.

Herman Gillis formerly of the Belgian New Beat group Morton / Sherman / Bellucci discusses the influences and origin of his infamous Sherman Filterbank.

My friend DJ Mad Wax over at City of Bass shared this amazing documentary on the early Jungle/Drum and Bass scene that emerged in Bristol during the 1990s. This documentary takes you through the scene as it was in 1996. Some great interviews and some classic tracks.

Untitled from Eduardo Sanchez on Vimeo.

Royal Dead have been hard at work in studio over the past year and next week you get to see some of that hard work come to fruition. Here is a taste of the music video for “Death Cycle”. You can see the full video next week exclusively at the CD release show for Go Bat Go! March 24th at 3 Kings Tavern.

Go Bat Go! was recorded at KGM Audio, which is the studio I co-own. I handled the mixing and production.

When I’m working on mixing songs I always check my mix against a variety of setups to ensure that it’ll sound decent on as wide a variety of systems as possible. My workflow will usually proceed as follows:

1. Mix on studio monitors
2. Run through pre-lim mastering process
3. Check mix again on studio monitors
4. Check mix on car stereo 1
5. Check mix on car stereo 2
6. Check mix on laptop speakers
7. Check mix on ear-bud headphones
8. Check mix on over-ear headphones
9. Check mix on shitty boombox
10. Repeat steps until mix is refined to final state

In my opinion, the car mixes are the most important as that where the majority of people tend to listen to their music. With such a large number of listening environments things can get disorganized pretty quickly unless you have a process in place. I used to carry around a paper notebook specifically for mix notes but I noticed that it tends to get a bit messy. Sometimes I forget if I’ve already made a fix I took a note on, sometimes I don’t have my notebook with me, etc. While I still keep the notebook around for quick notes now I’ve switched over to using Evernote. I first heard of ever note when I went out to SXSW in 2011. I used it at the conference to take notes on my iPad while on the go. Evernote stores all of your notes in cloud storage so you have access to them from any computer, tablet or smartphone. This is much better than copying files back and forth from a USB drive, you never need to worry about if you have the most recent version if you are making changes on multiple computers. They have native applications available for desktop, iOS and Android in addition to the website interface. Since Evernote worked so well for me at the conference I decided to start using it for other things as well, such as taking notes down on mixes when listening in my car. I can just update the mixnotes notebook from my smartphone and then look it up later when I’m in the studio. As I make the changes I just take them off the list. Next round of mix listening I take more notes from my phone or desktop and repeat. The free version only limits the amount of data you can transfer per month, since most of mine is text I have yet to really run into going over my allotted bandwidth.