This generation of musicians were prepared for the pandemic
This generation of musicians were prepared for the pandemic
21:37

This generation of musicians were prepared for the pandemic

Music
[MUSIC] This pandemic has hit every industry across the globe, but one has been hit particularly hard, and that is the music industry. Live concerts are cancelled. There are no outdoor festivals. Bars and nightclubs are closed. So where does that leave artists to perform their music and make a living? Now what? Joining me today are two very accomplished musicians Laura Weinbach and Anton Patch Nerve foxtails brigade. Thanks for joining me. I haven't talked to you in a long time. Thanks for having us. It's good to see you. Yeah, it's good. Good to see you guys too. So full disclosure I work with these guys have a professional relationship with them. I mixed an album for them 2016 so if you ever get a chance go check it out. So we're talking to artists just about How their lives have changed after the pandemic has occurred and how has it affected you guys Anton, you go ahead and go first and the I'll say mine Well yeah for me I;m kind of like the lucky guy, because I Spent the last 10 years of my life learning how to make recordings in a bedroom. Which, you know, I think people will make fun of that for a long time and there, you know, it didn't seem like the professional way to do it and now, all of a sudden that's how we do things and I know how to do it and so I've been getting a lot of work actually. With people hitting me up to produce and record instruments and stuff, I kind of have a little bit of a head start. So I'm kind of lucky. Mice. Yeah for me, I. I was making my living as a musician doing lots of like gigs and events and stuff like that. But amazingly enough, about five months ago a very good friend of mine got me interested in teaching music which I did not think I ever wanted to do or that I would be good at and she Just saw something in me for some reason, my friend Sarah Glass who's an amazing harpist and piano teacher and she teaches all kinds of instruments. But she really wanted me to teach one of her little seven year old students that she had, this little kid who wanted to learn guitar. And so she just Asked if I would come in and do a guest teaching spot at her house with this kid, and I tried it, and the pay was very good [LAUGH] and I really I enjoyed it. I was like, My God, this kid, this kid just he went from knowing nothing about how to play guitar and never really even having strum a guitar before to suddenly he was able to do something by the end of the lesson and I got such a feeling of gratification out of that and I thought, wow, I actually would totally be down to do this. And it was kind of also cool that like all her students just come right to her house, which is. Pretty much what I have going on too. So pretty much after that I was like yes, I will totally do this and I didn't know how it was gonna find students but I decided to just do a post on Facebook for the first time ever like using my Foxtails brigade page reaching out to our fans and just letting them know, okay, I'm gonna give lessons now. And within a day I had all of a sudden like 10 or 12 students or something like that. And so I've been able to generate a really decent income from that since like September in addition to having playing a lot of gigs and things like that. And so, when the pandemic hit, it was I was like pretty much well equipped to be able to generate a living even you know even though I wasn't able to do as many gigs like the teaching. Just you know pretty smoothly transferred over to being online for me like all my most of my students were okay with. Just doing the online lessons doing what we normally would do in person online and I've been very thankful for that. So [LAUGH] What's been the platform of choice for doing your lessons online? I've been doing zoom. I was teaching some lessons online before the shelter in place even was forced for people who were not living in the same city and I was using like Facebook, just Facebook Messenger. And that was actually pretty cool but then all of a sudden, zoom became just such a thing and it seems to be the way that most you know people who take their lessons or schooling online now are used to using so I've been using that It's been pretty good. It's been good actually. I noticed that you guys have been like busking online. Having live stream performances and then you're soliciting tips via Venmo and PayPal. You guys have the parlor shifts like a regular thing you do. Talk about that. Well Like many other bands out there, we just, we kind of decided to get back on the bandwagon of doing live streaming, which we had been experimenting with and doing quite a bit of a couple years ago. But. You know, once shelter in place happened, it just seemed like the obvious thing to do to still continue playing music. And I had been seeing other bands doing a lot doing live streams and putting their Venmo and PayPal links in the descriptions and I thought, you know, I had thought of doing that before. For some reason we never really did that before, like when we did pass live streams. But also I think that Given the current climate as people have been saying quite a bit lately. A lot of people do wanna support musicians. And so, I think, people are more inclined to kind of tip online. But, it's not been Like an incredibly huge source of income for us but. [INAUDIBLE] I'm saying yeah it's been really nice people have been really generous giving us tips. But we are not just doing it for the money like we are doing it because we want to put on a great live show every week and we can We wanna have some way to monetize that. And right now it's tips but that's going to evolve. For example, we're just starting to launch something that's gonna be the Patreon songs of the week. So people who subscribe to our Patreon which is a paid Basically kind of fan club type of platform. People who subscribe to that are able to vote on what songs we're going to play in the Patreon song of the week. And so eventually I'd like to I'd like to figure out other ways of monetizing rather than just straight taking tips. Also, we're trying to get our store together in a better way so that we can sell merch and we're also getting a bunch of cool new merch together. So I think that being able to take tips is great for now. And that's what a lot of our friends are doing and that's why we started doing it. But that's just kind of the first step on the way to a bigger plan I guess. That's cool. So are there like organizations out there that help musicians and artists and times like this? Like do you guys know of any that you could share with other artists? Yeah, there's a really great one. Called music cares that helped a lot of my friends. That's a charity that's run by the Recording Academy and they gave out $14 million to. Over 20,000 musicians in the early days of the pandemic. Unfortunately, they just ran out of money. Wow. So they're looking for more people to donate, and if anybody is interested in donating to the music community, I think that's a great way to do it. They're gonna do a good job of distributing that money. Properly to musicians that really need it.>> Have you guys done anything to adapt as a band I know you have more members of your band?>> Honestly we we haven't really been able to like, include other members of the band and In the performance of music or even production, I mean, we could we certainly could, but we're continuing to record at home. We're working on new recordings and new releases hopefully coming out, one new thing coming out pretty soon. Trying to do live streams with the rest of the band seems like out of the question right now. We tried doing. I mean, we've done a couple of little festival like online festival things and little, you know, kinda show shows where there's multiple bands on a bill. And sometimes those work well but other times the, the quality is downgraded so much like depending on sort of what platform is being used and how it's Happening that. I mean, I'm happy to do more stuff like that but trying to Yeah, bring the band into playing with us. [LAUGH] In a live performance type of thing online just doesn't seem like we have the Technology personally to do that right now. Yeah, yeah. I'd also say, in the case of our band, we have a little bit of rotating cast of members anyway. And Laura and I are the kind of the two core members of the band. So. Which isn't to say that, We love the, Dominic and Alex are still playing with us. I mean when things go back to normal, they will. It's just we haven't really being able to collaborate. But on recording a lot of times it's just me and Laura anyway, lately. Lately. So that hasn't been Yeah, I mean it, we're still doing that. Yeah, W e're lucky that we're quarantining together. Yeah. We get to make music together and, we could still put on a show as a band rather than just as a solo person, Right? What's your tech setup Like? Yeah, we use like an external mixer and interface. To end run that through OBS, usually when we do live streams so we have a little more control over sort of like you know, the sound EQ and Effects. Yeah. And things like that and we use like all of our pedals and stuff. Yeah, I use a TCL helicon voice live play for my vocal effects and I run my guitar just through, a little tube preamp. Nice. Which gives like a really nice boost to my acoustic guitar and then that just goes directly into the mixer. And then I like a little digital reverb. Like boss favorite pedal. But yeah -Yeah,with the image, it's just our laptop. It's just a two thousand and twelve MacBook Pro camera. The main thing, the day that we went into shelter in place, I ordered a video light>> [LAUGH] . Like a really nice video live>? [LAUGH] Because People think that the camera is like super important. And yeah, it does make a difference. But the lighting is the bigger thing. Yeah. Which I don't think a lot of people realize. So having a light makes the picture look that it's the laptop camera look like 100 times better. Yeah, eventually we'd like to get a nicer camera, but for now I think it's kind of cool and I think. There's kind of a relatability to just using the laptop camera. And also I think that the audio is by far the more important thing in the music broadcast. Have you guys run into any like technology hiccups. So yeah, Laura. She spilled. Water on her laptop, and so she ordered a new one, and it was a refurbished one, 2012 which is our favorite kind of laptop, that came and it was working. And then we were set to go on the livestream with that, and literally one minute before, Our live stream was gonna start her computer died. The new refurbished computer died well did that screen thing where it just like shows colors and then it just kind of turns off. It was the logic board basically. Yeah, sleep. Bad computer. Luckily Yeah. You know She had a warranty so we sent it back [CROSSTALK] So I sent it back and ordered another refurbished 2012 Mac. And that's the one I'm currently using but this one might be not good either. How have you guys been continuing to build an audience? I mean online, like what are the platforms of choice. I know you're on Instagram Instagram, Facebook, I mostly see on Facebook. We have the most followers on YouTube. Because of, you know, we had like a really viral video that we put out a few years ago. But and that generated a lot of new fans but, as far as live streaming goes, we've been using Facebook Live a lot, but we're really excited about this new one or it's not a new platform, but it's called rush text, but they just Created a new live streaming feature on their platform and to me that the way they have the interface set up, it's really artist friendly. And it's they have the thing that I have been wishing All of these different platforms that do live streaming would finally get but none of them ever have. And I could ask myself the question like hundreds of times Why? Why do none of these platforms just have a frickin tip button?>>Yeah That is easily accessible visible to the viewer and can they can just press it and pay however they want to pay and. Rush Tex has that, which is really cool. I mean that to me that's like a game changer. [LAUGH] You just have a gig on there Thursday night at 7pm, right? 7pm pacific time. And we're gonna be playing the entire foxtails brigade 2016 self titled LP which you, Mixed. It's one of my favorite authors ever worked on? [LAUGH] Man, thank you. That is to say, but yeah, the people who run rush Tech's are like really smart and very supportive of us. And so we just are really glad to be able to do it. It's seemed like a challenge that kind of tried to shift the, the audience that we kind of have on Facebook to try to kind of the idea of switching that over to a new platform. It seemed a little overwhelming at first But they are just like really helpful and I feel like it's a good thing. And I think we're gonna probably keep doing more live streams with them. And who knows, I mean we're still gonna continue doing Parlor Shift on Facebook Live. But we're in the experimental phase right now. so Russ Ticks, it's in the early stages, it's They used to be a live event company and they put on live event. And so since the pandemic hit, they like pivoted their whole business model and now they're going super strong trying to become a live streaming platform and one that specifically made for concerts. So The chat on there is a little I think it's a little more fun than on Facebook. It's more geared for musicians and comedians. They're just now starting their social elements. So they've made you can you can make a profile and you can add friends and stuff. Cool. And that's new, its like really new. Yeah. And they provoke this.>> But the concerts are really cool. Yeah. And its, I don't know, we tuned in the other night to Sam Chase, Yeah. It was really fun. I think its more fun watching a show on rush takes, than on facebook personally. They really encourage sort of artist. And interaction. [LAUGH] I don't know. It's just, it's cool. I like it. And I also like how helpful the people who run it and have been to us, I mean they just been like, I don't know if they do this with all the shows that go on but they like you know, they'll kind of be watching when you're doing a live stream and kinda make sure things are running smoothly. Because one of the big challenges, I think Doing live streaming especially when we first started doing it. I know this is an issue many artists experience when they're doing live streams for the first time is wondering, Is this even working? Are people even seeing this video right now?and if you're just doing it by yourself, it's really like a two, at least a three person job. Ideally you want to be performing and then you have somebody else kind of making sure things are going well. In another room watching the live stream monitoring things and helping with whatever issues might come up. And a lot of people don't have that and sometimes we don't have that But what's cool about Russia, at least for us for the few shows we've done, that woman who's one of the founders of the company, she been monitoring [LAUGH] And making sure things go well, Okay. And helping with any issues that arise and things like that. So that's just a big Huge thing to me. That's really helpful. So will you guys play a song for us? Yeah, we will play the song last still standing. It's off our 2016 cell title LP which you mixed. Meaning those songs can have a lot of impact and resonance with me when I write them and they also change meanings with the times and kind of with my life experience and Maybe this song has a newfound relevance in the current sort of situation that we all find ourselves in. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] Thanks, guys, I really appreciate your help. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having us. [MUSIC]

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