And here is why a manager is needed. This person should take on this kind of things.
Right now when I help my festivals booking department I bump into so many of these people that just make a fool of themselves without knowing it. Like the idiot that wanted to book a show on Tuesday ( the festival starts on Wednesday) and thought that we should call up their booker that had promised them a show on Tuesday. First of all, we don't want to book this band. Sec,ond we don't want to call up your booker to handle your mistake. And if you have a booker why are you contactting usd around the gig, isn't that they bookes job?
Or the one that wanted to discuss the contract in detail? What is there to discuss this is a showcase festival, we onlöy give you a slot, take it or leave it!
In all these cases it shines through how unprofessional they are. Sure in the bigger game you can do that. But pretending to be professional can get you sliding a long way down.
PERSONAL:
And you have to start somewhere. I have been there too. One of the smuck things I did was when I got my first band and we had decided to record a demo. Of course, we thought we where gods gift to music. And now when we were hitting the studio we had to do it in a professional way. The guitarist said we needed to line the whole recording.
I'm not sure anyone knew what lining was, I guess he had picked it up in some music magazine anywhere. Today for you who don't know here is a simple explanation. When you record you can mick the amps and record that sound (called live recording) or you can plug in the guitar in the sound console and then add the effects later. What we did know is that lining took longer time than not. If you line you have to record almost everything separately, with amps you can record in several rooms and get more done at the same time. We know you could do four songs with the mix on a live recording. But with line? We decided on three songs to be sure.
So I went down to the people who had the studio in the same house as we had our rehearsal studio. Went straight into the office and went up to the recording engineer.
- We want to record three songs and wonder if we can do it next weekend?
- Yes, the studio is empty next weekend.
- Ok, we are going to line the whole recording.
The guy looked on me a bit strange.
- Well, are sure you can do three songs and mix. It goes faster to record it live.
- No, it should be lined. We want to do a proper recording.
The guy smiled.
- So you want to line the drums as well?
- Yes, we should line everything, I said confidently.
He just smiled and said we were on. Of course, you can't line the drums, well today you can since you have pads and stuff, but this is the age where you have only normal analog drums. You just have to mick them. He was just testing if I knew what I was talking about. And I hadn't a slight clue.
And it took much longer, in the end, we just managed to record down two songs over that weekend. And the mix had to be a weekend later. So we were even in the mist around that.
The guy though later become my teacher in recording and had always fun to ask me if I wanted to line the drums.
Today you can hear me asking bands if they want to line the drums as well. Usually, it means you said something really stupid that makes you look like an amateur. Unfortunately today the joke doesn't work that good since you can actually line drums quite well.
