It Has To Be Great

If you’re going to go back on the road it has to be great. The show has to be great.

That’s the only way it’s worth it.

If all you’re going to get up there and play your songs then stay home and do a Youtube Live.

The show has to thrill the audience. To cause them to suspend their anxiety and apprehension. To drop their worries and troubles for a while…so when they pick their worries and troubles back up they’re infused with hope and in a more beneficial priority than before.

You must give attention to every detail. It’s got to be locked in.

Opening the show, sustain, pace, lifts, lulls, builds, climax.

The moments when people pull out their phones to take pictures should come as no surprise.

The climactic end should never be in question.

The vacuum that the audience feels when you walk off stage should be heart stopping.

Your show isn’t too small that it doesn’t need this type of care and attention and you’re show isn’t too big that it doesn’t need this type of care and attention.

Dig in. Make it tight. Work the flow.

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Drop me an email: gabe@gabethebassplayer.com

The Long Last Paragraph

If there are a few short lines

and then one long paragraph,

it builds expectations for what the last paragraph is going to hold.

You don’t have to be a journalist or in marketing to start seeing what works and what doesn’t. When you open an article or an email and there are a bunch of long paragraphs in a row, most people see it as too much. It’s hard to go from line to line for that long with no line spacing in between. But a post like this? Yeah, it works. You knew the flow before you even started reading.

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Drop me an email: gabe@gabethebassplayer.com

Links We Click

In the beginning there were no links to click at all.

And then links showed up.

We have types we click. I click on this kind of link, I don’t click that type. But it wasn’t always this way.

We got trained. We didn’t always know what to do or what we wanted. But through recommendations, similarities, repetition, marketing, curiosity and time we now each have our types.

Why does this matter?

Because you want people to click on your stuff and you’re frustrated that not enough of them do.

You need to train them.

Make it fun and part of the culture for your people to click/interact with your stuff the way you want them to.

Do you want comments? Click through? Plays? Likes? Shares? Emails? Phone calls?

Do things that cause the type of interaction you want and over time the results (ie. the culture) you desire will bloom.

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Drop me an email: gabe@gabethebassplayer.com

Spinning The Unexpected

Things going wrong on stage is a gift if you’re willing to be open to it.

Something wrong is often merely something unexpected.

And if you learn the skill of spinning the unexpected into something beneficial, you’ll never have a shortage of benefit.

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Drop me an email: gabe@gabethebassplayer.com

Luck

Just because you put in the work doesn’t mean you’re going to get the result you want.

You will simply get what results from the work.

The entertainment business (and making money in it) isn’t built on fairness. It’s built on talent, hard work, connection and luck.

And it’s that last category that gets really frustrating…and it doesn’t care about the others. Luck doesn’t care about justice or feelings or will power. Sometimes talent, working hard and connection seem to cause luck, or entice it but luck is unreliable at best. At worst, it keeps acting like it’s going to show up but never does. That’s painful.

So there’s the result you want from the work, and what results from the work.

I hope one way or the other they can be the same thing.

Best of luck.

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Drop me an email: gabe@gabethebassplayer.com

Watching AND Passing Around

Lots of artists going live on the internet right now.

And that’s a great thing. You should keep doing it. It benefits everyone involved.

I’ve watched a lot of them.

But…I’ve yet to be sent one from someone else saying ‘you gotta see this’.

There’s still room to push. To be extra creative. To try something new. To be not only worth watching but worth passing around.

Keep going.

***Important to note…Your goal doesn’t have to be to do the type of thing that gets passed around. I’m simply pointing out that there seems to be an opening for this type of thing.

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Drop me an email: gabe@gabethebassplayer.com