Holiday Party Gigs Are Here

Hey, what's up gigging pros. It's Jared and welcome to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. This episode is a warning that it is now November. I'm not sure exactly when this episode will be published, it is November, which means holiday party gigs and those bookings are in full swing. And if you are not taking advantage of them, if you have not gotten any inquiries for them, that means that you have to change your marketing. So I've been working on this, this has been very top of my mind, because I've been getting a lot of holiday party leads, I have a profile on gig salad that has been just killing it. Since I moved to Denver, it's been getting so many leads and inquiries, and a lot of them have been holiday and Christmas parties lately. And so today, it's November 3, was the day that I decided I was going to cater towards those with my videos. Up until this point, I've recorded a lot of videos for all of the other events that I play, you know, your typical cover style music, which for electric violin, we do everything from, you know, top 40s to classical to some jazz standards. But today, I had never up until this point had any holiday music in my repertoire of examples. So I got out my electric violin, a lot of you know that I've transitioned recently to electric violin, partially because it's really fun. And then partially means a partially because it means I don't have to recruit other musicians. And actually, if you listen to a past episode called going solo or with a band, you'll hear my reasoning why starting solo is a lot easier, especially when I moved to a new city. So I have had no holiday examples in my videos. And today, I just decided let's go for it. Let's record some holiday videos. And I picked two. And I picked two because I enjoy them. Plus, it was thematic for today today in Denver, we're getting a snow storm. So the first one that I picked to record was let it snow. And the way that if any of you play with backing tracks, you know that there's a variety of ways that you could accomplish this, but I love the website karaoke version. I think it's just karaoke-version.com. And you can find a lot of you know, backing tracks there, basically karaoke tracks intended for a singer to sing on top. And this specific website has a lot of different versions of lead. It's no and a lot of versions of other songs too. And so I specifically chose a Michael Bublé version, because I want to target the higher end holiday parties. And Michael Bublé tends to be you know, jazzier, which, in my opinion, and from my experience playing these higher end gigs in the past, they tend to want a more jazzy up tempo style thing rather than classical. So I chose the Michael Bublé a version and downloaded it, got some sheet music off of musicnotes.com I believe is where I got the sheet music from. I pay for all my sheet music, I know that some of you don't. And I'm not here to judge about that, but I do everything above the book. And so I got the the sheet music for that. And when you do that, it tends to match up with the, with the backing track very well. This one in particular had four key changes that it matched perfectly, so I didn't have to do any custom arranging. And so I have a nice camera and I mentioned this also many moons ago and this Gigging Musician Podcast, it's a Canon EOS 90 D that I have actually hooked up to my computer. And I also, I use the software OBS, which is actually a streaming software, you can typically use that for live streaming, but you can also use it to record video if you've got a camera connected to it. To be honest, I'm not happy with the results of the video. It looks like OBS dropped a lot of frames in my video, which means that instead of smooth motion when I'm playing kind of looks a little choppy. And if you look me up on YouTube, you'll probably see that but the way that I recorded the audio was that I've got Logic Pro, which is my DAW. I'd actually don't remember what DAW I think it's digital audio workspace. And I first started stands for. using that when I took a technology Music Technology class back in college. So I learned how to record I have my focus right USB interface plugged into Logic. And then from my focus, right, I plugged with a quarter inch cable into my electric violin. And then in Logic Pro itself, I dragged the backing track into one track and then I have my electric violin as the other track where I applied some reverb and compression and just a little bit of EQ Very basic, like I'm not a great music technology person, like I know more, I know enough to be dangerous. Let's leave it at that. So when I had that all set up, I hit record in logic, and then I hit record in OBS to record the video. And then once I hit record, it, gave me a count in and started playing the backing track. And I just played on top of it with Michael Bublé, Let It Snow, I did a couple takes, you know, you never quite happy with the first one. But the recording process per song was probably about 10 minutes. And I'd never played these songs before, because I have my iPad with my sheet music setup right under the camera, which is kind of sneaky, because that means I don't have to memorize anything. So just with like three takes I was happy with the third take, it wasn't perfect. I know a lot of musicians, we think we have to put out the most perfect thing. Like we don't want anyone to hear our sour notes or incorrect rhythms, or even flubbed some passages. And I'm not gonna say like mine was terrible, but it definitely had a couple mistakes in it. And those of you who listened to it a couple of times will probably hear them. And those of you who are, especially in tune with intonation will probably hear those, but it doesn't matter. Because I put it out there. And I know that's more than many musicians can say. And then what I did next, here's like a secret that I've been teaching my Fulltime Music Academy students is that when you upload it to YouTube, you know, YouTube automatically generates a thumbnail for you kind of picks one of the random frames from your video and sets it at that, which usually, unless you have like a stellar backdrop that you're just playing in the space looks amazing. Usually they're not very good. And so what I did was I actually went on Adobe Express, which is an online version of Photoshop, not as fully featured. And I use the template for a YouTube thumbnail, I actually had to use their Facebook post template, because they don't have a YouTube thumbnail template, but it's kind of the same size. And I picked a holiday themed template that had some words on it. And then I uploaded a picture of myself playing electric violin, and used their free tool to remove the background from that picture. So that it was just the cutout of me and my violin. And put that on top of this holiday themed template and change the words up so that it said Let It Snow, Michael Bublé Play and download it. It looks amazing. Like it took me 10 seconds to do it and upload it to YouTube and the thumbnail is so much better than the one that YouTube would have generated. So that's another sneaky little tip. So we got Let It Snow, Michael Bublé. And then I decided to do another one, which is one of my personal favorites. And let me know if you liked this album too. But it was Christmas time is here from the Charlie Brown Christmas album Vince Guaraldi. So good. One of my favorites. And one of my favorite musicians back in Milwaukee like he just kills it at a jazz club every single year they have a Charlie Brown Christmas show. So shout out to Anthony Deutsch, miss you buddy wish you could have connected when you came down to Denver. But anyway, so that's one of my favorite songs. Christmas time is here, did the same process set up OBS plugged in my computer, my electric violin and my computer and recorded did three takes again actually probably four because my cat came in and started meowing, so I had to take care of the cat for a little bit. And then I got to record another take and then uploaded it to YouTube opened up Adobe Express made another thumbnail with a different Christmas themed template and uploaded a different photo on top of it and put that thumbnail into YouTube. Hit publish. And then the next part was important. I uploaded both of those YouTube videos into my gig salad profile. And set those as the main ones that people see when they find my profile. And then also I took a screen I took that same thumbnail and set it as my gig salad thumbnail. Way back I think in some one of the original episodes of The Gigging Musician Podcast, I talked about the hook story offer framework for marketing. I'm not going to get into it right now. But I'm going to focus on the hook. The hook is what gets people to click on your stuff and buys you enough attention to tell them a story through your videos or whatever else you have in your marketing. And the problem is most musicians don't throw out enough hooks and they don't throw out unique hooks. So if you go on like the gig salad director and you search for violinists in Denver, you would probably see photos that all look the same, even though they're different musicians, they all kind of look the same to a non musician. And so what I did when I uploaded my thumbnail to my gig Sal The profile, it stands out, because it's the only one that has like Christmas lights in it. And it looks kind of fun. And I don't know, it makes me feel like, I don't know, think about the elf movie. So that was I think one of the things that's going to help me generate even more holiday party traffic, and then just having the videos, people are going to be sold on the idea that, hey, this guy plays holiday music, he would be perfect for our holiday party. So that is about 10 and a half minutes of solid advice on how you can book holiday music and holiday parties. Because now is the time to get on that you do not want to delay, you're going to miss your opportunity. And it's a very short window. And the bonus part is that when you upload when you record these videos, you have them for the rest of your life. Like I don't have to go and record let us know again, I don't have to record Christmas time is here. Again, I could just reuse those videos going forward. So go ahead and take whatever advice you want, record some holiday tunes and put them up on YouTube, share them on your social channels. And I am sure that you will get at least some positive response off of them. I already got a comment on my YouTube video for Let it snow, which was great. Great to have some comments on it. So I'd love to know if you enjoyed this episode. If you did, shoot me a message on Facebook or Instagram or email me Jay AR ed at book live.com. And by the way, I want to help you get your first gig. If you have not booked your first ever high paying private event gig. Now is the season to do that, especially as you know, the economy is not doing as great as it used to who knows how long this climate will last. And that's why getting into high paying gigs is a guaranteed way to earn more money than playing a bar gig or earn more money than playing in a community theater production. So high paying events are where the real money is. And I want to help you book your first high paying private event gig. And if you're interested in that, go to your first gig.com And I'm still working on getting the domain working for that. So if that doesn't work yet go to FulltimeMusicAcademy.com/your-first-gig That's your first gig with little dashes in between and go ahead and grab the your first gig offer and I will help you book your first high paying first or next by the way, high paying private event gig. So thanks again for listening to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. Remember, "You are just one gig away!".