Your Band Will Break Up - Prepare Ahead of Time

[articles]

*When things are going great for your band, it's easy to think that great things will continue to happen. Well, it's very tough keeping 4 or 5 people together over the years. This article will discuss the unfortunate truth that your band will break up and will give some tips for you to confront and hopefully avoid it.

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[Spunky Munkey]

At this point after having been in many bands many aspects of music are funny to me.

Here are some of the things Ive seen,

-the relation aspects within a band,

-a secret group within a group, emails, telephone calls that all band members dont get,

-hidden agendas by some members that come out as the band evolves, this corresponds to my next point,

-not discovering a big jerk until you get to know them better,

-band laziness as far as members not practising and showing up at practice not prepared,

-the basement syndrome, too much practising in the basement without getting your butts out,

-the leader of the band thing, this is something I avoid these days after having played that role to the extreme, what eventually happened was that the band could not think for itself, I was tyranical and dictatorial shutting down songs for reasons after the fact that were trivial,

-travel time required by members, living too far away to get to practice
This current band The Rockaholics has evolved atypical to what Im talking about, the bass player contacted me, he was all excited to get it going. I joined he brought in another guitar player friend, I found a drummer, we got a lead singer. Shortly thereafter the other guitar player quit because he and the drummer clashed, then the bass player the guy that started the whole thing suddenly packed it in so we found another bass player.

Now the real funny thing is that the original bass player has contacted me again and he wants to put together a 3 piece and now he is all excited again.

I think the best thing to avoid band politics is just be open and honest in a calm way, although I'm still me I am much more diplomatic discussing band issues and in turn everyone responds usually in a similar way, bottom line the band is really another family you are part of.

[brandondrury]

Great post, Spunky Munkey.

I was tyranical and dictatorial shutting down songs for reasons after the fact that were trivial,

I think there is a point where every band gets this way. Not so much with one Tyranasaurus band leader, but everyone getting too picky about little things that don't matter.
If a band member really wants to play a song even if most of the band isn't really for it, go with it. Let him have his fun. Assuming he is not total garbage, he'll return the favor.

I think this mentality comes from being overly cerebral about the whole thing. When you go to the water slide, you don't analyze the angles of the slide and calculate vectors, you grab a mat and slide down the water really fast.

I think with bands, there should be less talk and more playing. Just make noise. It's supposed to be fun. How many songs are serious painful to play? Hell, I bet that damn Titanic song isn't that horrible to play from a musician's standpoint.

-band laziness as far as members not practising and showing up at practice not prepared,

This is the other big one. Successful bands aren't always THAT talented. They just work WAY harder than everyone else.

I read that Trapt (who actually had a few good songs buried on their first record) had gotten 500,000 downloads of a song on their website. This was before Myspace. How in the hell do you do that? I have a feeling it involved a lot of ball busting work!

Brandon