Be Effective – Be Heard
What a great night of music, and beer! The NEXT Music Charity Concert Series’ move to the Captain Lawrence Brewery was a hit. NEXT’s Chris Bro had a great idea here.
These pics are only a small look into what was an incredible night and an amazing performance by Black Taxi.
All pics here were taken by our partner Focus In Digital. (except one pic taken by Keith of BNK Productions)
As we discussed in the previous post, the NEXT Charity Concert Series had moved this past Thursday, August 23rd. Now some environments can be particularly harsh to music. A warehouse certainly fits the title of “Hostile Environment” for putting on a concert. When it’s Black Taxi with all their dynamics, well, now we’re really being challenged. We met with the people of Captain Lawrence early in the month to get a view of the place and what we were facing. Concrete floors, metal roof panels, cardboard, beer bottles, beer kegs, huge beer brewing equipment. Really, a very reflective venue. Night of show we came in thinking we were prepared for it, but there were some changes. Bottles. A lot more of them. Right next to the staging area. Ever blow into a bottle to make it whistle? If you’ve done this you have an idea of how they resonate sound. How would it react to 8,400 watts and 102 db of Black Taxi? We were about to find out.
Ok. Enough of the build up. It really wasn’t that tough. It was tough, but we caught it. The place was very peaky, so equalization adjustments in the mid to mid-high range were very touchy. The place, as expected had a lot of natural reverb. One adjustment we will be making at the next NEXT show is to bring in another se of our top end speakers. This will give us a better field of sound to overcome some of the reflections. Anyone in attendance for the next show shouldn’t notice much difference. It’s more for us than the concert goers.
Now, about the show. Holy crap! A sold out show! This crowd was treated to two sets by the Black Taxi crew. The energy level was like building fire. By the middle of the first set it felt like it could explode. The highlight of the evening was to see Ezra climb up a ladder at the side of the stage that lead to a storage area, and then finding a step ladder there, he climbed to the rafter to play his tambourine against the steel frame of the roofing. And no we did not have a mic there. I say this every time when discussing Black Taxi, If you haven’t heard them then you need too. Get on ITunes or Amazon and pick up their albums. Catch a show. Get on their website at blacktaxi.com and find out when they’re playing in your area. Then get over to allthingsnext.com because you really need to learn more about new music, and Chris Bro of NEXT is the professor of new music. Listen to the podcast.
September brings another great show in the long running NEXT Charity Concert Series with another amazing band. My Pet Dragon. Stamford people may be familiar with them from their performance at the Alive At Five opening for Hot Chel Rae. We will discuss this show more in an upcoming post.
Pics of the Black Taxi show will be posted shortly.
For more about the Black Taxi show go to NEXT’s review here.
*Black Taxi is managed by Mezzoforte Productions.
In a couple days, we will be working at a new venue (as previously mentioned) with the NEXT Music Charity Concert Series. We’re really excited by this one. We will be working at the Captain Lawrence Brewery in Elmsford, NY on August 23rd, inside the brewery enjoying craft beers and one of America’s greatest bands, Black Taxi. Originally this was scheduled to be outside, but there are a few factors preventing an outside show there at the moment. We are working towards returning to that plan, but in the mean time we have a huge warehouse full of beer to play with!
This will however, present us with some new challenges as we will be in quite the harsh environment for a sound production company. Nothing we can’t handle! Most specifically, we need to dial in a venue that is designed for brewing beer and storing boxes. Concrete floors and metal ceilings. Brewing vats and countless bottles and kegs everywhere. Reflections will have to be dealt with from numerous areas. Environments like these have a tendency to reflect severely high notes. One factor that will help is cardboard. The stage area is actually going to have stacks of cardboard boxes on both sides. Equalization will be vital here. There will be sections in the sounds you hear that will be drastically reigned in, while others are severely boosted. We’ll follow up after the first show on this blog.
Black Taxi, in case you are severely musically challenged enough to not have heard of them, are the modern answer to the Rolling Stones. Dance-able, creative song writing with high entertainment value. These guys are a lot of fun to watch. Honestly, if you don’t know who Black Taxi is, then you’re definitely not listening to NEXT Music on the radio or on ITunes. So head on over to www.allthingsnext.com and click on “podcast”. Pick your preferred method of listening (Stitcher, ITunes, Stream it right from NEXT) and catch up already! You’ve got till Thursday!
Here’s a little help:
Food will be provided by Bridgeview Tavern and The Cookery pizza truck. So, you got great freaking beer, an awesome band, great eats, and Chris Bro to talk music with. Why anyone would stay home this Thursday I do not know! It’s kind of like the keg parties of our youth. Only! We’ll be partying at the kegs house. And with better food than most parties.
*Captain Lawrence Brewery is so easy to find you have to be careful not to drive past it. (Come on. Admit it. You’ve done that before!) 444 Saw Mill River Road, Elmsford NY. Exit 2 on I-287 West (Route 9A).
*Black Taxi is managed by the super capable Nicole at MezzoForte Productions . Please visit their website if you book bands. She works with some great talent.
Today the music scene is awful for young original musicians. The music industry has failed to survive the internet thus far. The record label behemoths have fallen. Popular commercial radio is consolidating to very few stations and formats in the big cities. Clubs would rather hire DJ’s and some cover bands than the original bands. Potential fans attentions have moved away from the new musicians coming up, and the DJ is the new “Rock Star”. Bands today must work harder, for far less money for a long time building up a following that will raise their value to potential venues. Fortunately there is the tools of social networking out to help you do this. If used properly and consistently, a band can still build up a huge following.
A proper social marketing program for any band should include Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and Google+. They’re all free. They all have millions of users, meaning if used right, millions of potential viewers. Bands also should have a Sonic Bids, Reverb Nation, MySpace and last but not least their own web page. Your own web page will be your hub. All these social media pages will center around this webpage. It should also contain your “Press Kit”. Direct them to your page by putting out content that is on your page, but linked out to the social media world. For example, host a video of one of your songs on your web page. Post a link on your Facebook page with a preview and statement saying check out our latest performance (or similar). Viewers of your page will then see this on their news feeds, click on the link, and be taken to your page to listen to the music.
You must post at regular intervals. Not every 5 minutes, but hourly would help. The more you post, the more you show up in news feeds. The trick is to find the interval between presence and annoyance that makes sure people see you out there without hating you! Using insights on your Facebook page will help you decide the right interval by seeing when people are most likely to see your posts.
Content is vital! What all these sites do is help you get content out to people. What is content? Content is pictures, audio clips, video clips, and little fun blurbs about the band. All of this must be of the best quality you can afford to get, so spend some money and invest in yourselves! If you’re going to put out lousy videos with awful audio, you’re going to give people a bad impression. BNK Productions is one of many companies that are able to help you with this. Load your pages with 3 or 4 pieces of music/videos to be rotated in a regular rotation. Post on your Facebook and Twitter pages links to the new content. Companies like ourselves come out and record a multi-track audio recording of your show, a bunch of photos, and some videos that can be mixed with the audio recordings. Now you have new content for your pages. as you write new songs, or refresh old ones you can get more done.
Again, the quality of the content is vital. Fuzzy audio, pixelated video, and blurry pictures are absolutely annoying. You will lead people away with that kind of content. If you want to be taken seriously you need to appear serious! I’m sure most people who read this have gone on to Youtube to see a video only to find it was from someone’s phone and you can’t see or hear anything! It’s annoying. Do it enough and people will avoid your band and that will defeat all this effort!
For a great example of using the social net to market yourself, find yourself on Daria Musk’s Facebook , Google + and webpage . She is a perfect study of how to market yourself in the Social Music biz…and could be considered the music queen of the Google Hangouts.
For information on bringing us out to build your portfolio of content email us using the contact link above. We offer all kinds of marketing/promotional help for bands.
