Musician

Turn your fans into walking billboards for your work by selling some good merchandise online and at your gigs. It’s all part of growing your brand awareness, so at the very least, you should have some T-shirts printed with your band logo. In fact, you can slap your logo on anything you want: badges, caps, sweatbands, beermats, iPhone cases – you name it.

Overdrive remains one of the most essential tools in any musician’s kit box. The answer to the immortal question: ‘Which overdrive pedal is the best of all time?’ will differ depending on which guitarist you’re talking to. This is because no overdrive can weave its magic on its own, instead, it all happens in the delicate interplay between your amplifier and your chosen pedal – not to mention, your carefully sculpted go-to settings. The world of overdrive is filled with myths and mysterious legends about the magic ingredients involved, but we’re here to find the truth behind it all, with a little help from the stone-cold classic that is the Ibanez Tube Screamer.

If you want to make your bread and butter as a musician, besides investing in your skills, it’s also essential to invest in building your fanbase. If you don’t have people listening to what you’re making or coming to your gigs, it’s going to be pretty hard to make a living from your music. With that in mind, the question is: how do you gain new fans? Guestblogger Maaike van Steenis offers up her top tips!

In this article, we dive deep into hard rock and the closely related style that is heavy metal. What even is hard rock? How do you play great hard rock? And what do classical music and jazz have to do with it?

Just started learning the guitar, bass, drums or any other musical instrument? Then you’ve made a wise decision! Making music is a ton of fun, and it only gets better when you play in a band. If you can’t find a band that plays your style, then you can always start your own using the tips we’re about to share.

Maybe your first booking was at your friend’s or your cousin’s wedding and it was such a success that you want to go professional. More and more couples are getting wed to a live-performed soundtrack, which only increases your chances of getting some gigs booked during the wedding season. Here, Guestblogger and professional wedding musician Kevin Okkema shares his tips to help you get more requests.

Ego-trippers can be found in every corner of the world and, as musicians, maybe we’re the biggest offenders around (at least secretly… admit it). Launching into a nutty drum break or a show-boating guitar solo can sometimes feel irresistible – but while it might feel good, it might not actually work in your favour. Here, Guestblogger, drummer and founder of Let it Rock music school Jemy Gijsman explains why being a good musician doesn’t automatically mean that you’re a good band mate.

Acoustic drum kits definitely have plenty of charm on their own, but the same applies to electronic kits. The basic idea of a hybrid drum kit is to combine all the best bits of an acoustic drum kit with the best bits of an electronic drum kit or percussion pads, giving you the very best of both worlds. There are a few ways to build a hybrid kit, whether it’s using triggers, adding a set of sample or percussion pads, or by adding a drum module. In this blog, we’ll take a look at what’s possible and what you can get when building your own hybrid kit.

Guest-blogger Marc de Jonge is here to talk about relic’ing: the artificial aging of guitars and basses to give them a weathered, played-in look and feel. There are various ways to go about relic’ing an instrument, and Marc has several tips for everyone who’s thinking about giving it a try. It’s definitely something that takes guts, an eye for detail, and a little artistry.

In the world of wind instruments, an ensemble can take many different forms, but if you’re not an insider, you’re unlikely to know the difference between a harmonic ensemble, a fanfare ensemble and a brass band. All of them are different types of ensembles, but what exactly is the difference?

Ever played a gig where the band that performed before you overextended their set, leaving you just a few minutes to set up your drum kit? It’s a nightmare for most drummers, if not an impossible challenge. Thankfully, there are various ways to optimise your kit and prepare it for a speedy set-up when you’re in a hurry.

Whether you’ve just started playing or you’ve been at it for years, every musician faces the same challenge at some point: you want to learn the rhythm or the groove of a track but it’s not working out. Maybe you’re confronted by a new technique that you’ve never tried out before and it seems impossible to learn. Are there any tricks that drummers can have up their sleeves to avoid the frustration? To be fair, there’s only one trick: broaden your horizons by taking on every genre going, and never fear any strange and new playing techniques.