How To Start A Band
…And become successful
Here is my unique take:
The “common knowledge” way to start a band…
… take 4 friends, put them in a box, the least talented gets the bass guitar, the best looking guy is the singer, you put together songs, start playing gigs, record an album, start touring…
… RARELY works out well.
Because of a badly divided workload.
Everyone tries to contribute to everything.
It’s too unorganised and everybody wastes his time.
Picture this: You Start A Band
Band rehearsal.
You agree with everyone in the band to meet up once or twice a week to work on some music.
Usually the guitar player and the singer are the creative parts in the band.
They start to flesh out ideas while the drummer and the bass player sit around bored.
The drummer starts to annoy everyone by “practicing”.
The bass player feels left out and either starts jamming with the drummer (unless he is shut down quick enough)
Or tries to contribute his dull ideas to the songwriters.
(May or may not speaking from personal experience now)
If you pursue this kind of band type of work…
You will have a baaaad time.
You will most likely never go anywhere far.
Whenever I am looking out for a band to potentially join, I am looking mainly at two things:
What have they accomplished so far (Records published or at least listening samples for a starting band)
And what is their productive rhythm.
If they say they rehearse about 1-2x per week to appear “hard working”…
I already assume they fall into the category I described above.
At this point, I have to establish that it is very important where YOU as a person want to go with your band.
Do you just want to meet up with friends, drink some beers and jam some music?
Then the above “model” will work for you.
However if you want to storm international stages, there is a bit more work involved.
What I would suggest to you is this:
If you don’t have a good partner, write the music first, on your own.
Then start recording demo versions of your music and find band members you click with, both personally and musically.
And band members who have a good work ethic and can follow instructions and get things done.
Maybe even bring more skills to the table than just playing their instrument.
When you have a working team and a ready to release debut album, you can start gigging and starting to sell merchandise and build a fan base.
From there you probably already gathered some momentum.
If you want to dive deeper I can recommend finding a mentor who did exactly what you are trying to do.
Here would be one:
