John Wicker.com

Facing the future means facing change. Looking back, most of the change I have feared in life have worked out well. I must not fear change.

People ask me what I do, and increasingly these days I kick out some spiel about my day job. Things have been very up in the air with my job, and the time to make a change has definitely come. But all of this activity revolving around my pay check has left me focusing more on what I do to make money than what it is that I do.

In our world, we’re expected to identify ourselves with our jobs. I am a cop. She is a doctor. He is a teacher. They are plumbers. We go about the daily work that we do as if it defines our existence. For people that love what they do, for those that are both talented and lucky enough to make a living by also doing what they were meant to do, well… perhaps that person truly is a doctor or a teacher or a plumber.

I have been lucky enough to make choices about what I do for a living. Having made those choices, I have more of myself invested in my vocation than a guy who has no options. But I also choose what I do outside of my daily work, and those choices are at least as valid as the decisions I make about my vocation, if not more so.

I am defined by what I have done and the choices I have made. I am defined by my priorities and values. I am defined by what I choose to do moving forward and by what I choose to do right now, at this moment in time. I am a husband and a father, a musician, and a guy that has a day job.

To my way of thinking, life is a series of moments and encounters which are all focused through the value that you assign to them. Things will come and go, people will enter and then leave your life. You will grow and change, and your priorities will change as well. At this moment, I am no more that scared kid entering his first day of high school than I am the guy who was almost forced to decide between the lives of his wife or his first child. The past does not determine my future and my future does not define my present. I am what I choose to be, at this moment.

I do not choose to be my day job or my vocation. A bird is more than a feather. A guitar is more than its strings. I will not forget these words lest I become something less than what I am.

So what do you do?

Making Music has a great article that explains the basic controls and functionality of a mixing board. The details get fairly technical without getting too far over your head (well my head, anyways), and I found there were a few pieces of the mixer puzzle that I had a little backwards.

For instance, I had always thought of the trim and volume knobs as being a kind of “big stick/little stick” combo where the trim knob made large adjustments and the volume was a fine control. After reading, I’m thinking completely differently. A volume fader all the way down will be silent no matter what the trim knob is set to. But if your trim knob is at the max adjustment, the volume fader will start pushing that channel into the mix much more quickly than a channel with a very tight trim. With the volume faders maxed on both channels, they’ll be equally loud, but at medium volumes the channel with the wide open trim will sound much louder.

The net result is the same either way, until you find yourself trying to push two channels to max volume and wondering why they’re both the same volume.

Understanding your gear takes a little time, but it’s always worth the investment.

I’ve played with a lot of different people and in a lot of different places over the last few years, and it seems like there are some common practices that people follow when they’re playing out. It kind of sounds strange to think of rock and roll having a set of rules, but if you want to play with someone more than once, and especially if you’re going to be playing with them a whole lot, here are some tips for getting along, getting paid, and getting asked back to play again. The first part of this series part one is already online.

Be Nice
If you hire someone and they treat you like shit or act like an asshole, would you want to hire them back? Of course not! That applies to the bar owner or whoever is paying you, and it also applies to your band mates.

As a musician, you’re at a show to have fun and be adored, but you’re also there to do a job. Handle the audience with respect, make announcements if you’re asked to, talk up how great the bartenders and the waitresses are every chance you get. Pimp the drink specials or the appetizers, or offer up a toast if you can– anything you do to increase sales for the owner will get you moved up the list of bands to invite back, and if you make friends with the employees you’ll have an in there as well.

Requests
Take requests if you can, and if you can’t play what they want, tell them you’ll learn their requested song for the next time you play there. Offer up alternatives. “Hey, we don’t do Brown Sugar but we do Honkey Tonk Women– how’s that?” When you play the request, mention the name of the person that asked for the song.

And when it comes to making dedications for particular songs, bring up stuff that a lot of people will identify with– play songs for all the baseball fans, or all the redheads, or whatever. Whenever I play “Some Kind of Wonderful” I ALWAYS dedicate it to the ladies in the room, or all the blondes, or something. Play one song for the blondes and then do the next one for the brunettes. If you have a big crowd, you can even make up events to celebrate. “We’ve got a special couple here tonight celebrating their seventh anniversary. They wanted us to play a love song.” Anything that gets an audience to applaud and be happy is going to go a long way towards ensuring they enjoy the show, and that’s a good thing.

Birthdays are a special opportunity– learn “Birthday” by the Beatles or some other appropriate song so you can whip it out at a moments notice. Be sure to announce the birthday before or even during the song, and play it up any way that you can– the person with the birthday will either love it or get embarrassed, but their friends will eat it up. Either way, you’ll be remembered and you just might find the birthday person turns the tables on one of their friends at one of your shows later on.

Build a Fan base on Nice
A following is built one person at a time, and being cool to the people that come to see you and the folks that hire you goes a long way. Personal connections, whether they’re based on an actual interaction or on an emotional reaction a listener has to the music that you play, are the way to build a fan base.