Random musings of Jeromey Balderrama
Good news on the Greenfoot front! You can now find music from our Living Artifacts EP on the Amazon MP3 store! The six tracks can be purchased for $.89 each.
Amazon Mp3 is my favorite on-line music store by far, so I’m really stoked to have our music available here!
See Greenfoot on the AmazonMP3 store.
We went through the TuneCore process to get our songs up and running, so Amazon Mp3 is the first of many additions, including iTunes. Watch in the coming weeks!
Last night Greenfoot played a show over at Herman’s Hideaway (for which I’ll offer some additional thoughts in a later post). As part of the “New Talent Showcase”, one of the important stipulations were the two dreaded words drummers hate to hear “House Drumset”.
I cringed when I heard the news, and after playing the set last evening, my dread was justified.
I understand the reasons why venue owners and concert promoters want to use House Drumsets. When you have multiple bands in one evening, you want to do everything to ensure bands get on and off the stage quickly. Having a large piece of equipment remain stationary makes sense, especially when the drums have mics attached to them. However, I can guaranteed that the person who made/promoted that decision is not a drummer.
When I’m asked what it’s like playing on a house drum set, I give the analogy of driving someone else’s car in a race: Yes, you’ll be able to drive the car and you know where the gas, brake & steering wheel are, but you don’t know the intricacies of this car. You don’t know how it accelerates, how it breaks, how it handles around curves. The same things goes with drum sets. It bothers me that people wouldn’t fathom telling guitar players to play on someone else’s guitar, yet have no problem telling drummers they have to play a drum set that gets pounded night in & night out.
This particular drum set appeared to have a 10″, 13″ & 16″ with Pinstripe heads torque’d pretty high. What this means is that they were “ping-y” and “ring-“, a stark contrast from my darker ebony heads that produce a warmer tone that works with our music. In addition, I had to grow used to 3 toms pretty quick, a departure from my 4 toms. It doesn’t help that I flip the order of my two rack toms – the non-standard configuration probably a bad habit, but it’s what I’ve grown accustomed to. In my bass drum I have a pillow, which produces a more muffled sound, while allowing a good bounce response. The House Drumset had no such pillow, and it took an adjustment.
The policy allowed us to bring in our snare drum, pedals & cymbals. At this point, the only thing that was left of the drum set was the bass drum and three toms – which makes me wonder how much time was really saved.
What owners/promoters don’t understand is that if you give them a staging area to set up their gear off-stage, a good drummer can get their drum on stage and ready to go in roughly the same time it takes a guitar player to set up their amp, pedals, and tune their guitars.
When I was in high school, I played on a foreign drum set each and every day – but school drum sets are different than House Drumsets. With school drum sets you typically get a period of time to be acclimated to the kit before you play it at anything meaningful. With the House Kit the sound check is the first chance you get to sit behind the kit. To borrow a line from A.I., “We’re talking about practice, not the game”. I’m all about rehearsing on another drum set to help save time – but when you’re essentially putting on an audition it’s pretty lofty to expect drummers to be in their elements in a kit they just started playing.
Like I said, I understand House Drum set may make sense to some, but it doesn’t make sense to drummers.
As many of you know, drumming is an important part of my life, and something I thoroughly enjoy. In addition to Greenfoot and playing at my church, I’ve also joined the Wiseacres Jazz Band. Jazz drumming has been a challenge, but it’s also been a blast. Between these three groups there are numerous gigging opportunities, so I’ll make an effort to consolidate and list them on a new page on my blog called “Drum Calendar”. There’s a link for it on the top of the blog as well. Feel free to check it and see if I’ll be playing close to where you live. I’d love to see you make it out!
I’ve been a bit scarce this week because I’ve been drumming pretty much every night. On Monday night I had rehearsal for an one-time “Barnyard Band”, where we’re doing old-school country songs. On Tuesday I had Greenfoot practice, as we have our “we’re back” show on Thursday and ended up drumming for almost 4 hours that night. I came home absolutely exhausted. I got a bit of a break from drumming on Wednesday, but tonight I’m preparing for a full night of drumming. First I have the “Barnyard” gig, then I’m off to Denver for the Greenfoot gig If you happen to be in the Broomfield/Arvada area and would be intersted, we’ll be at the Sweetwater Station around 10pm.
More to come on drumming…
Last week turned out to be a busy one for Greenfoot. Fresh off of playing a show last weekend, we had another one scheduled for Thursday night at The D Note, one of our favorite venues. As with all shows, we have different avenues of promotion: the fliers at and surrounding the venue, posting on our web site and RSS feed, sending out a message to our mailing list, posting on MySpace and our newest method – posting on Craigslist.
Late Wednesday night I posted the following ad for our Thursday show: Come see great band @ one of Denver’s best live music venues – TONIGHT. On Saturday I got an email from a musician through the ad (didn’t even leave a name), basically chastising us for any reason he could find. I know that people just have a random ax to grind, and I’m not going to dignify his email with a response – but that doesn’t mean I don’t have any thoughts about it.
First off, I don’t understand why musicians feel the need to make playing music some kind of pissing contest. In the shows we’ve played around in Denver, we’ve seen some really good bands and we’ve seen some not-so-good bands. We’re all entitled to our personal opinions, but we keep those within our band – we don’t speak negatively about the band to other musicians, and we surely don’t rip on the bands directly. We’ve put our music out there and have received some constructive criticism – and welcome that. I don’t see how someone takes pleasure in ripping on other bands – maybe it makes their ego feel better about their band. Whatever.
I do want to react to a few things he wrote in his email though:
[The subject was “Govt Mule meets Led Zeppelin????”] seriously?? Do you really think your band compares even one microshed to these two powerhouse legends? You need some humble pie and an honest assessment of your band from another working local musician. Good intentions are here – believe me.
If you look in the original ad, I never said that we were the next Led Zeppelin or Gov’t Mule. I specifically wrote “[our sound] been comparatively described as ‘Gov’t Mule meets Led Zeppelin’.” This guy is reading into this line a little too much. This is music marketing 101 (and credited to the Musician’s Cooler podcast): Instead of saying “our band has a very unique sound”, try to think of some of your major influences (specifically ones most people would know) and use those influences as descriptive’s. That way, when someone reads that and says “I like those two bands, I’ll give it a listen”. Every musician has influences, it’s not an insult to use those influences when you describe your music. In the case of this guy, it worked – he just took it the wrong way.
I checked out your YouTube videos. Gov’t Mule meets Led Zeppelin? Hardly. More like “High School Garage Band Rehearsal” meets “Really Bad Jam Session.”
Good intentions are here – believe me.
As a fellow local musician, I REALLY recommend some more woodshedding before you put your name out there on YouTube, Craigslist, etc. First impression is a lasting one.. I for one will never come see your band because of the first impression I had after seeing your YouTube videos.
This makes absolutely no sense to me. YouTube and Craigslist are great publicity tools, but we’re not talking about sending a CD to Rolling Stone or a video to MTV. I’m not supposed to use these web sites to promote our band’s music, but somehow we’re supposed to expect people to magically come to our shows without any promotion.
Secondly, first impressions are important, and I’m proud of the work that we’ve put our on our web site and on our videos. Does it have room to grow? Of course, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t use it as a promotional tool. In the case of the YouTube video: it was put out by the venue we played at, we can either pretend it doesn’t exist or embrace it. It’s a great performance so we were happy to put it out on our web site. As we grow as a band we’ll make better recordings and better videos. That said, we don’t expect everyone to like our music. Everyone has different tastes and that’s fine. Frankly, if this guy treats fellow musicians this way, then we don’t want him at our shows.
Do NOT EVER compare yourself to bands like LZ and Mule unless you can back it up. It really leaves a disappointment when I read that part of your ad, hit your site, and find the very elementary and mediocre work you guys are doing. Booking managers will feel the same as me TRUST ME.
Ok, calm down. We used some comparative descriptions, we didn’t shoot your dog. I’m not going to re-hash my argument from above, but just that this guy shouldn’t take this so personally. We put ads on Craigslist for people to come check out our site and hear our music. We hope people will like it, but if you don’t then that’s fine. I’m sorry this guy felt like we wasted his time, but apparently his time isn’t so valuable that he can’t compose a diatribe about how he hates our band.
And booking managers will feel the same? Some may and that’s fine, but we’ve had a steady schedule and played at a lot of great places this summer and met most of our goals. We’ve worked hard and it’s paid off, but I guess booking managers feel the same as this guy.
I do between 60 to 80 gigs a year with my bands and I book 95% of our gigs. You really need to think of a different way to market yourself besides the LZep/Mule thing. What a disappointment.
Ok, so this guy can pee further than we can. I’m glad his head grew as he wrote that sentence. This guy is comparing apples to oranges. When you want to make it big in music then it’s probably your full-time job and probably do need to play 80+ gigs per year. That not our band’s goal. We’ve all got our own careers, families and other priorities. The music is simply a release for us, we’re happy with playing 3-4 shows per month. We work hard and welcome any success, but our livelihood isn’t dependant on playing 80 shows per year.
And with his 95% of 60-80 gigs booking experience, the best advice he can offer us is “don’t say Led Zep and you guys suck”. Thanks for the substantive advice! I really appreciate all this guy is doing to support his fellow musicians, nothing like tearing other people down to help think better about yourself. But good intentions are here – believe me.