I Booked Myself to Nowheresville (And It’s Working)
I’m a month and a half into posting regularly on YouTube--five weeks of posting midweek, Tuesday through Thursday. Here's this week's.
What this gig mostly involves is me getting ready for it. And as I’ve advocated for here before, you need a gig to make things happen. But one of the problems is, when you’re doing something pretty different, you can’t jut get a physical gig.
If I was doing dub techno shows in Berlin, I imagine it would be hard to get because there’s so many people doing the same thing. But in the middle of Texas, dub techno isn’t a big deal.
Moreover, it took me a while to get this set up and running. I generally found something I wanted to do with the help of videos from everybody in the world on YouTube. And then I had to get comfortable with where I was and commit to not changing too much.
If I didn’t the keys synth sound, I had to go with the gig, because I wanted to post, typically doing it the night before and scheduling a post the next morning.
I finally got the synth sound I wanted by this wee--week five. Changed up the drums too! Have some ideas for week six. Etc.
The key is I’m walking around thinking about it. I put my weekly on in the background at work yesterday, kind of listen for what was good, what was bad. Added a bunch of modulation so I wouldn’t have to worry about one part of it, so I could concentrate on doing fewer things better.
I’m sure this is bookable somewhere in Austin. But I don’t currently know where. So I committed my own gig on YouTube once a week. And views are in the tens. Not so great. But who cares. It’s for me too, and when I listen back, it’s where I want to be musically.
I think week five is way better than week one, and way better than I was doing a month and a half ago. And had I not scheduled a gig myself on YouTube, I guarantee you I would be in Nowheresville.
All of these can be horrible: YouTube, the internet, the modern state of music in general. But there are a lot of positives. We got what we got, so we have to make the best of it.
I feel great about this blog. Readership is terribly low this week. But I don’t care in a very real sense because for me, I’m putting my thoughts together. And every once in a while, I kind of surprise myself. And I would not be surprising myself if the blog didn’t exist.
So if you’re out there doing something—and I hate to really give advice like this—but you can gig anywhere. On the internet, at somebody’s house, at your own house, to your dog, to your cat, whatever.
Calendar it because it works.