Boards

i ended up hating it when i used to make myself rehearse once a week. now i do it whenever i want. the last few years i've only played about 3 gigs per year. and now i actually enjoy it when i do it.

the music is ALWAYS awful. no exceptions

get it reviewed and stuff - i doubt this will ever happen, but would be lovely to do some beautifully deigned and printed packaging fro some incredible album of mine, i don't really want to end up with 500 or so records just littered around he flat
- i don't want to play any gigs again really
I don't think there's much chance of anyone hearing anything I do, but would love it if they did.

Things have begun to pick up in a major way in the past few months. I've been enlisted to provide press / content for a host of festivals - Pleasure Principle, Dimensions, Primavera, Unknown & maybe a few others - mostly through doing interviews. I had a piece published on Clash with Loefah and another on Noisey with Krystal Klear, and off the back of those two (+ a Jackmaster interview I did in NYC + lots of writing I did for a NYC-based publication), the floodgates have truly opened. Material with Ben UFO, Chunky, Mister Saturday Night, Optimo is all waiting to be published, and this weekend I'm speaking to Juan Atkins / Model 500, with a camera crew for the first time. It's daunting. I've also started to get booked for more DJ sets outside of Nottingham, my uni town. sets in York, Exeter and Leeds, so hardly that impressive, but the ball is rolling.

I appreciate it's not literal music-making, but for someone with strong designs on journalism or - ideally - radio, it's starting to happen in a really gratifying way

unfortunately I'm now at a stage in my life where I make good money and have too many commitments to be in a position to dedicate myself to it enough to 'make it' (hate that term), and even if I did I know I wouldn't make enough money to support my current life. Read somewhere recently that some members of Grizzly Bear cant even afford healthcare which shows what a dire state alot of musicians are in! Like Chis-Budget above I'd like to do a proper release and tour on holidays from work...few support slots of decent bands maybe..

But now not really bothered. It's a hobby, maybe a gig here and there at the weekends but I would never drop anything to take it on full time. You have to remember that most of the bands you like now have given a chunk of their life to music and probably the most important chunk. When your band fails, playing music for six years isn't great to have on a CV.

That is the only reason I'm still alive

and that often holds me back, as I'm never happy with it, so never do anything with it.

On the other hand, as far as it being my primary way of paying the bills, or even just being semi professional, no not ambitious at all, almost the opposite.

I'm almost as unambitious as it's possible to be. I'd love it if I ever got something of mine played on national radio, or even if one song got put out on an indie comp, but I've no desire to achieve those things just for the sake of it. I'm very slow at making music and very lazy at jagging it, mainly because I don't feel any urgency about it.

I feel like achieving my pretty low ambitions would be easily possible if I was single-minded enough about it, but if it's going to happen I'd prefer it to happen because I'd made something good rather than through sheer self-belief/bloody-mindedness.

From everything I've ever learnt about the music biz, success is a mixture of talent, hard(ish) work and luck, and isn't as rewarding as it's made out to be. I can't do anything about talent, hard work can do one, and you can't rely on luck, so *ambition* is out the window for me really.

I enjoy messing around making it, and the process of making it into a 'release' and sending emails around & reading reviews is good fun and pretty interesting. Am happy just plopping things out as free downloads. Would be nice to do a physical release at some point, but wouldn't be fussed about making any money from it.

I don't think there's anything wrong with an expressed intention to be popular - you can only sell out if doing so conflicts with principles you have and it's silly to base your life on other peoples principles.

I think where most bands go wrong is that it's probably better to make a decision that you want to succeed and go all out for it, or decide it doesn't matter and not worry about it. Far too many bands (as my band used to) used to be kind of half-ambitious but never want to do anything that looked ambitious so we just got nowhere. I think it's far better to commit all-in or embrace amateurism.

A friend of mine made quite a compelling argument that merely writing a song was selling out.

No-one.

i would like to make a solid 40 minutes of music I was happy with and put it on a record but just for myself really

also I would like to do some fun free improv type music and get away with spending 10 days going round the country playing in tiny awesome places to about 30 people, that would be ace.

Even just being in a band I find a bit tiring sometimes. Can't be bothered playing gigs or anything, the fun starts to wear off. Right now I'm at the stage where I just want to record stuff in my bedroom and put it on the internet (but so far I'm too lazy to even do this).

on a decent sized indie label, that's the life for me

Nothing fancy. No private jets or anything, just enough to buy a small house and build my own wee studio.

Wasn't there a thread on here once called ''I think my band is going to be huge?'' where someone claimed their band might actually make it and everyone else in the thread demanded to know who the band was but the person didn't want to say and so everyone else was less than encouraging?

But my lack of musical accomplishment playing anything other than messy & noisy guitar music and singing equally messily and noisily, the lack of friends that want to form a band making that sort of thing, the fact that I don't live anywhere near the radar for any kind of audience/record company (currently in Bath, originally from Shropshire) and the fact that I don't particularly have an ambitious and driven personality means this will never be anything but a pipedream.

started considering doing a professional course. There's so much to learn!

does that mean I have lots of or no ambition?

and now everything has gone nucking futs and I am excited, terrified and happy all at once. And my ambitions musically have soared.

but I'm increasingly not so bothered about a 'career' as such (can't see myself being able to play live any time soon or ever, for example), I just end up making what I end up making, really.

That said, I think I'd quite like to release something on a label.

I want to make real all the ideas I have/make the best possible realisations of the many songs I've half-written and endlessly mulled over and annotated.

then I want people to hear these songs and feels strong feelings/sensations.

it's like the music is there, and I want people to delve into it and be transported.

like... all the best music I've heard makes life transcendent, in the immediacy and afterwards.

but mostly it's for me. it's a necessity. it's all tied into the fabric of my life, as in I have poured myself into it entirely to the detriment of my mind, my mental health, my life itself. I'd say it's a way of reaching out in a world I feel distant from.

blew it up by hand / mouth then strapped it up with string to the ceiling of the venue. got changed in a run down kitchen, passing guitars forward through the bodies, people stuck on the steps leading to the toilets.

pure noise and sweat. people losing their shit, an old man with a big beard pulling his bobble hat over his eyes then blindly flailing,. his wife helping him back up as/when he hits the floor/... accidentally turning on/off all your pedals// pulling your leads out.. shoes worn on hands, high fiving. no need to even use the mic

sweat dripping from the walls, screaming in the faces of your friends/anyone. latvian work colleagues fist pumping with joy, crowd surfing.

eventually they ripped the swan down and it was hossed around the shoebox for the remainder of the last song... culminating in a blind bundle, people grabbing for the mics, holding each other up like a rugby maul

thats all i want really, but all the time. everynight. proper gigs
bo selecta

Doing a music degree, when I leave I'd like to do music therapy if I can afford the 2 year full time MA (unlikely), but I'll most probably do some sort of music based community work, perhaps working with a music therapist- I'd specifically like to work with elderly people or adolescents with disabilities. Ideally I'd be self employed. In my spare time I'd like to get involved with sound design for stage, as I'm really getting into theatre, already done sound design for one play which was fun. I'll probably always write songs, but I hate playing gigs/being involved in local music scenes, so it's unlikely that I'll ever do much on that side of things.

Alternatively, Glasgow School of Art do a Masters of Design in Sound for Moving Image which could lead to somewhere interesting, although that's not strictly music.

But yeah, music and caring roles are the only things I'm good at, so a cross between the two is probably most likely. It's hardly headlining Brixton Academy-sized venues, but it's still a music based career.

but I feel like I've never given it everything... even when I thought I was I guess deep down I knew I wasn't. Since my last band split I've said to myself that it's all on my shoulders now, and that's actually helped motivate me a lot (my first album - with or without a band - is being mastered as we speak). I just find it harder to motivate myself to play gigs when it's just me.

I'm fairly realistic about my music career; I know i'll probably always need to support myself (and in the future, my family) with a 'proper' job and I don't think I'd be able to make a decent living from it. But I'm only really interested in making music I'm interested in at a given moment. I also think there's something to be said for music create by people who try to juggle all that.

Being able to sell enough records to justify pressing records, book tours, reach a few people etc is the goal. So I guess I'm ambitious enough to try to achieve and maybe sustain that. As ever, I'm pretty clueless as to how to achieve that!

I started a band when I was 13/14. We didn't play any gigs for 5 years. Did nothing but develop the music all that time. When we felt the music was good enough, we moved it around a bit online, and our music eventually was found by a guy (with connections) who is now our manager. Recording and publishing contracts have swiftly followed. It may seem like luck, but I believe if the music is good enough then it will eventually happen somehow....

You have to be willing to sacrifice a lot. I personally spent those years (and still do now) thinking about my music far more than anything else.

Unless you are very ambitious, either give up, or rethink your philosophy and work hard.

I must note that I don't come from London or somewhere where there are tons of bands. I come from a farming background in the rural West of Ireland. Of course this atypical background story for an alternative band helped make it more interesting for industry heads too.

My band are readying a debut EP (with another to follow) for release on an independent label which has been our dream label for years (you all know this label, but lets just keep this confidential, because that's not what this post is about). Then we will be making an album for release on a major label.

Apart from all this, you may be picking up the fact that music really takes up my life, and I am possibly a psycopath.

I wish all of you the best in your endeavours.
<4

With my last band I was fairly ambitious. I think we probably could have been much more popular (though still not enough to go very far) but we were held back by two things:

- my bad guitar playing, which meant we were never tight enough to really be *that* good.
- us all being too old and set in our ways to really go out to lots of gigs and see and get to know other bands like us.

The second one is probably the most important to a band like we were - essentially pedalling the same ATP-inspired guitar sound as so many others - since it's the way you get to do gigs outside London and play in interesting shows. Everyone helps everyone else out and a lot of making some headway is about making a lot of effort to get involved.

I wish the Adam and Joe 6music show was still around, because that is classic EGGCORN material.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn
http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1921132

and get a few more people interested in my Bandcamp site. Wouldn't mind a collaboration with someone sympathetic either. But that's about as ambitious as I can get at the moment.

to places I want to see it sold. 100 run will be ample I expect. White vinyl, like, 1kg weight or something. Play a few gigs, get out the house. That would all be nice. I'm hampered by a lack of confidence and ability, but I think ability will come on better once I gain the confidence to persevere with an idea instead of dropping it because it sounds too much like something else. I should start not caring and putting some blinkers on and keep playing something over until it has conviction. I'm too old to have blind conviction in myself for no reason - that's the advantage young bands have and why it doesn't matter that they are so unoriginal and uninspired. It's because they believe that they are worth it.

I'm not going to go that far, just far enough to make something I'm proud of.