Ever wonder how that cocky local band that can barely play an e chord, got to open up for one of the bigger bands around? It’s called pay-per-play and it has nothing to due with talent. What exactly is pay-per-play? Basically a band signs a contract promising to sell x amount of tickets for y amount of money, usually the band buys the tickets up front and at a discounted rate, the theory being the band sells them at face value and makes their gas and expense money. All ready the older players are getting in an uproar,” I’d never pay blah blah blah blah back in my day we got paid blah blah”, yes that was true years ago but the times they are a changing, and yes if you are playing 3 sets of cover tunes you should be getting paid and not paying, but shut up and listen for a little bit and you will realize that it doesn’t include that type of music, but can, and might help you fulfill a dream or two. That being said I’m going to try and explain all sides of this touchy subject so everyone can better understand what exactly what is going on.

First off bands CANNOT look at a ppp (pay-per-play) show as a quick trip to a record deal, because it isn’t going to happen. Do you know where the cd you give the lead singer ends up? It’s not into the hands of their label or manager or whoever you got them to say they’d pass it on to. Musicians (even in big bands) are people first, and will usually be nice and tell you what you want to hear, take your cd and then forget it back in the dressing room when they leave. Just because a well known band is playing doesn’t mean that there will be lots of record execs, a+r guys or other industry personal, in fact there won’t be any, remember it may be the highlight of your life, but to them it’s just another day at work. Also don’t expect to be able to kick it and hang out with the big band before and after the show, it’s not going to happen, all the band wants to do is relax for a bit before the show and not be bothered, and after the show its merch sales and autographs, then once again they just want to unwind for a little bit before they head out on the road. What they don’t want is someone hassling them for shows or a helping hand etc. etc. Just don’t confuse basic human kindness as an offer for friendship. The road to rock stardom is a long hard path that doesn’t begin by opening up for a band.

What ppp shows can be is a great way to get some new exposure and contacts while playing on a great stage and sound system, and if done right can be a great little money maker for the band. What make money? Yes make money, remember it is only ppp if you don’t sell your tickets, and in all honesty it’s not different than playing for the door. If you are lazy and don’t promote and spend money for a play for the door show it’s going to cost you money as well. How? First off is gas money, then figure in all the food you eat on the trip all the booze you drink, the cost of string, sticks, amp, skins and speaker wear and breakage etc etc. Don’t forget to include the costs of flyering and merch as well as the hassles of trying to talk everyone you know and see into coming down to just see you and a few other bands they haven’t heard of. Now offer those same people a ticket to see their favorite band in a smaller venue of 500 people or so, at a price of usually half of what it would cost to see them at a huge venue and you have an easy no hassle sale, it’s like selling a heater to an Eskimo. And you are making a few bucks per sale, enterprising bands can turn more cash doing this than playing for the door with the bar skimming, all you have to do is choose your shows right (see list below) and invest a little money. While the contacts you will make won’t be industry big whigs, they will be much more important and useful, a bunch of like minded and genred bands and their friends and fans, that will more than likely want to trade shows even if not worse case scenario is you get to hang out with a bunch of cool bands and listen to one of your idols play on a stage you just sweated on. This is also an audition of yours for the promoter, if you are as good as you think you are and conduct yourself in a professional manner more than likely you will be contacted to play again without having to sell the tickets.

While on paper it all sounds hunky-dory but many people have left ppp shows with a bad taste due to promoter “scams”. While I’m not jumping to conclusions most of the time the “scams” are due to the bands either lacks of understanding or knowledge in business.
Most of the time it is usually just a band getting sold what they want to believe (read above) and not seeing the whole picture and instead of seeing what happened, and how stupid they were its they got “scammed” I have heard some good ones by bands and from promoters, bands breaking up and wanting a refund, bands missing the show and wanting a refund, bands who don’t contact anyone for months then out of the blue want a refund, and the sad thing is the craziest and idiotic ones are from bands complaining, so far from being in the right but so clueless they will never know. One of the main real scams going is the promise of a huge band and then on show night that band doesn’t play for some unknown reason, and a few are probably legitimate I’m sure. However it is pretty simple to not get caught up in an out in out scam so I really can’t feel sorry for anyone on that. What follows is a little list to keep in mind before you commit to a ppp show.

1. Stay away from Emergenz type festivals, with multi cities and huge amounts of bands. While it’s not a scam in the legal sense, they are just selling you what you want to believe. What happens is you play in some small room or club way away from the main area for a bunch of other bands that got screwed the same as you. When was the last time you heard an interview go “well after we won emergenz, we went on to get signed, sell a ton of records and get famous” trust me if it has happened it would be in all the damned emails they are constantly bombarding you with. Once again
YOU WILL NOT GET SIGNED DUE TO A PPP SHOW OR BATTLE OF THE BANDS
no matter who they say will be there or what they promise can happen, in all honesty if you were that close to hitting it, you would be playing private auditions for industry reps.

2. If the band seems to big to be playing that venue, they probably are, the easiest way to find out is to email the bands label or management (usually found on their website) don’t however say you are in a band, in will get deleted once they get that far, under the assumption you are begging for a deal or to play, simple inquire as a fan that you had heard so and so was playing, and you wondered how you could get tickets.

3. Stay away from shows that have more than 10-12 bands playing or ones that have multiple stages, chances are you are just going to get disappointed.

4. Once again if they promise you anything more than a good time and a great show are wary because that is where the dance begins.

While this may still not make sense, look at it from the promoter’s eyes, the local promoter doing it not the big national types. Bands are notorious for lying about draws, their talent etc. etc. its part of the game. But the game is also the promoter/owner’s job, and how they pay the bills, you feed them a line of crap saying x amount of people come to see you and you send them your slickly produced cd that took 2000 takes and 3000 overdubs to complete. Then on show day, you bring nobody and your noise drives out their regulars and who is left holding the bag still having to pay the utilities and employee wages? Say you bring 30 people that’s a good draw, those people would each have to drink 10 drinks that the owner is making a dollar off of, to just cover the $300 guarantee They aren’t making a dollar per drink either, by the time you factor in loss, theft, giveaways, salary of whose pouring it, cost of glass its being poured in, cost to wash that glass etc etc. Just because the drink is 5 bucks doesn’t mean its 5 bucks in their pocket. A few bad nites can ruin a place a lot of times, or at least end any hopes of having bands there. This way no matter what the bills are getting covered, and they get to scout out the more self-motivated bands to play on other nites where the headliners aren’t national.

Once again its only pay per play if you don’t sell your tickets…

U of I Fighting Illini Fight Song

Ok as the college football season starts , I am getting deluged with ads promoting the U of I team, which has some new coach or something, I dunno doesn’t matter. All the commercials made me take a little trip down memory lane, remembering a song we used to do that was based off the illini fight song, so I decided to incorporate it into a lesson. The same riff can also pass for the Braves , FSU etc. fight songs as well, so it’s not exactly an Illinois only type of thing. So here we go:

There are two ways to play it, a mellower one played on the D and G strings, and a heavier version played on the E and A strings in dropped D tuning (the E string is tuned down to D)


mellow way

^ = pulloff
G--7-7-^-5—7-5--2-2---------------------------------|
D-------------------------------5-5-^-3—5-3--0-0----|
A---------------------------------------------------|
E---------------------------------------------------|


pretty simple and straight forward the only thing being tricky is getting the pulloffs between the 7 and 5 and 5 and 3 down and sounding right. I also slide back into the 2 from the 5, its not needed but just sounds good. The timing may give some of you a problem as first, but just run the song in your head over and over until you get it. I used this as the intro with the drums coming in as a build-up into the heavy part. Also the part just needs to really be played with your fingers to get the right sound.

pretty much same deal here only play it with a pick, and make sure you are in dropped D tuning. A little palm muting would probably tighten it up a bit as well, I probably did when we were playing the song, I’ll try and dig up an mp3 of the song to post to help give you some ideas…

How to Protect Yourself From Spyware

Ok,I’m going to step into geek mode for a little bit and while this isn’t directly bass or music related, it does relate to the box around this or attached to it via a cord (the computer for all the guitarists and singers reading). So if you do a lot of band stuff online it very well may be directly related. But here we go…

This week my step mom got a new computer, while she’s pretty computer savvy, lol when you have a geek like me around you take advantage of it, and she was worried about my brother getting it infected with virus and screwing it up, like she had heard me complain about many times that he did to my machines and didn’t want it to happen to hers. First I explained that what the problem wasn’t virus actually but spyware, which it some ways is worse but in some ways better than virus. The stereotypical VIRUS that kills your system dead in its tracks and most users are scared of, don’t really exist outside of childish chatroom or forum “wars”.

Why? For one all the major email providers that almost all of the internet users have, use state of the art virus scanners that simply won’t allow you download them, even if you want to. I myself forward all my domain based emails to hotmail and gmail accounts for that reason (yahoo and aol are all up to par as well). Secondly, spyware just makes
More sense for the programmer to develop[p as you will read in a bit. What would you rather spend time writing a program to do? 1. a program that may kill a few computers of the very stupid or 2. write a program that will turn every computer it touches into a cash generating machine, and can’t be stopped by any virus scanner until after its infected, and is completely legal because you the user has “agreed” to download and install the program. Easy choice huh? If you have ever downloaded something from the internet that you should have paid for, go to band sites that have pop ups, or have ever visited a porn site chances are you are infected with spyware.

While no spyware is good, there are 2 distinct classes, that I’ll call greyware and blackware (SEO terms), the greyware are from semi reputable companies, that are up front with their install process and what they are doing. They of course pretty it up a bit, spinning their aim to help deliver you what you are looking for when you are looking for it, such as a pop up ad for travel as you are on a travel site, that bypasses your pop up blocker, making you think that the site had a pop up ad. Often they will track your online surfing habits to sell to 3rd parties. These programs are usually piggybacked into peer to peer file sharing type programs, where you must install them to use say kazaa. Greyware also gives you easy uninstall wizards so you can rid your system of it thru its own un-install wizard or windows own. Of course the main software no longer works, so the only answer is get rhapsody or stop file sharing lol. Blackware is the nasty stuff, and can infect any computer at any time thru active x controls without you even knowing it or stopping it. Once infected uninstall isn’t easy, often editing the registry itself is required, which is a hairy process for even those that know how. The program also opens a door on your computer for all his buddies to come in and join the fun. Scary huh, and its all legal, due to the default settings in IE, that automatically installs any active X component, it appears that you gave permission for the program to be installed, and agreed to its terms and conditions. Another trick is to take the button that says “no” and thru code actually make it a “yes” button, the only thing that controls what the buttons say is some text you enter inside “ “, or the whole window its self could be a “yes” button if its an image linked right, the only safe way to close these windows is with alt-f4, or the IE x button, if you are sure it’s the actual one. Porn sites, game sites, free hosted sites etc etc, all have these, with the higher value being giving away the sneakier the tactics used.

How can you tell if you got blackware? Probably the easiest is that your hompage gets highjacked , and no matter what you do to change it it always defaults back to some link filled page usually topped by Mesothelioma, or some bogus search engine that looks kind of like google but just not right. Every time you click on a link on that page the programmer gets money, sometimes that same search engine will be your default search engine no matter how hard you try and change it. While scary these programs have a fatal flaw that probably is the easiest way to tell, your computer slows down to a crawl and then locks up as soon as you get online. The programmers getting greedy caused them to write in backdoor access to get in more programs by opening up a port on your computer. Not bad so I now have your default search engine and home page hijacked, and a couple of programs to kick up pop-ups while you browse, minor annoyances but still probably unknown to most users. Then someone got smart, why go thru all the hassles of actually infecting the computer, I’ll just use a port scanner to find computers that are already infected and add my programs there thru the same port opened by the first program. Im sure you can see where this is going, and ends with the crashed computer…

If you are infected here’s how to fix it:
1. unplug your internet connection from your computer.
2. run your spyware scan program and delete all instances the scan returns
3. reboot
4. run the scan again removing any instances found, and reboot
5.keep doing this until the scan shows no new programs after a reboot.

Of course chances are you don’t have a spyware scanner, and all the above did was remove what you had, it won’t stop new infestations from happening. You could clear all the programs off, then go to one site and have them all back again.

If you are infected here’s how to fix it (take 2):
First try and see if you can stay online long enough to download, one of the following free scanners, if you can’t your gonna have to find a friend to send you a copy or use a different computer, break out that old windows 95 with the 33k modem if needed, it may take an hour to download but its better than nothing.

If you have xp use the msn one below its by far the best
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx

none xp users get lavasoft its probably the best one after msn
http://www.lavasoft.com/

once you get a clean computer, xp users can do this little trick to stop almost all the blackware from ever infesting your system.

1. (note you need to have an admin account to do this)go to start >> control panel >> user accounts >> create new account . now create a new admin account.
2. log out of your current account and log into the new admin account you created. (log out don’t just switch users). Now switch all the other accounts you want to go online to limited user accounts.
What you have done is made it impossible for the programs to self install or get installed by a missed click or unknowing user, since that user on the computer isn’t authorized to install programs, no permission is given so the install errors out. Pretty sneaky huh?
However this only works on XP, and 2000, other users need to disable active x completely thru IE if their version supports it, use windows help for more info. And you won’t be able to install any programs at all even if you want to under that account, you have to be logged in as the admin account to install. I used this technique first while doing some interning for a booking agency, I was at home checking out bands websites and whatnot to see who got booked and who didn’t , and I kept screwing up my computer, so I just made a limited account to browse band sites on. Another reason to pay for hosting if you are serious about your band, a good way to not get booked is infecting the booking agents computer. I can’t remember which hosts were the worse, but if you go to a band site and theres a pop-up and its not a yahoo site get out of it fast and never go back. While that’s a pretty broad stroke, and not every free host with popups is bad, but better safe than sorry. So if you like to go to sites like that, or those drunkperson picture sites, or game cheat sites or porn, you need to be careful and protect yourself.

10 sure fire ways to tell the band playing is going to rock

1. The guy you just talked to you in bathroom and didn't brag about being in a band is now up on stage singing.

2. There are alot of out of town people who drove in to the show.

3. The chicken wire is there to protect the crowd.

4. The club is packed, and the singer says he wishes their friends could see this crowd.

5. The band is wearing nothing but socks, and not on their feet.

6. You see other musicians there anxious to see the show.

7. The police have a presence outside the show, 3 hours prior to doors opening.

8. There are almost as many people protesting the show as there is watching it.

9. The crowd knows the bass player by name.

10. You hear the club owner scurrying off to find a goblet of brown m-n-m's

10 sure fire ways to know the band playing is going to suck.

1. When asked what type of music they play, the genre has a pre or post before it, or includes the words avant-garde.

2. The band has the same haircuts and makeup as 80's pop synth bands, only instead of bright shiny clothing, they all wear black.

3. The band has more roadies than members.

4. The band members try and engage you in conversation that leads to them being able to say they are playing.

5. The band is emo or screamo.

6. Everyone in the band is sporting brand new "gig" clothes and haircuts.

7. The band takes forever to set up, and whines throughout soundcheck about monitor mixes.

8. A member is sitting in the middle of the stage stringing a guitar.

9. The band takes more time setting up stage props than their gear.

10. The band and "crew" all have their own homemade all-access laminates on in a bar with 1 room.

Top 10 lies told by local bands

In no particular order other than how i thought of them……

1. we have opened up for “insert big band here”
yes you did open up for this huge band, but most likely at a huge festival, and they played 2 days before on a completely different stage, or on the same stage but 6 hours before the headliner for all of 2 people.

2. we have a huge crowds at our shows
yes when you play on a Friday during 25 cent jaeger shot nite, however the Wednesday night show you headlined drew the drummers sister and her boyfriend, and that doubled your normal attendance.

3. we are signed to a label.
you and your friends burning cd’s in your bedrooms is not a real label, nor are any of the semi-famous indie labels, that just stick you with a big merch bill and the only support you get from them is the privilege of saying you are on that label

4. we have radio play all over the world.
the local music shows, that major stations play during off-peak advertising slots, is not airplay, nor is some college dj playing your song on their show with 3 listeners , same deal with internet radio, if you aren’t being played during normal rotation during the prime ad slots, then you aren’t getting radio play.

5. we have lots of fans
simply put friends aren’t fans, fans are people that have no idea who you are, but love your music enough to come out and see it. Friends come out because you are playing at a place where they can have fun regardless of the crap you are playing, and then tell you in a drunken slur how great you are, and how you should be on mtv.

6. we have tons of myspace friends, plays, purevolume charts etc etc.
ok I have yet to see the headline “top internet band gets signed to major label rock star deal” why? Same reason , mp3.com never produced a superstar, it’s the internet, and all those counting and tracking things can be faked with miminal skill, all that’s needed is time. Don’t believe me? Get a myspace account, make it a total joke, with a crappy song and everything, then browse thru users and invite them all to be your friend. See what the results are. Cheating plays and profile views is even easier.

7. yeah we trade shows.
this is probably the most told lie, and to clarify for everyone, trading shows is this:
A BAND GETS YOU A SHOW IN THEIR TOWN, IN RETURN YOU GET THEM A SHOW IN YOUR TOWN, pretty simple but you’d be surprised how many people can comprehend this.

8. yes we are all over 21
until they arrive at the club and all are 16. What kids don’t understand is the legal risks they are running for themselves and the club owners, in my town it’s a 200 fine plus probation for being in a place that sells booze if you aren’t 21, plus the owner gets fined as well. And honestly you can tell when someone is old enough by the way they act, so a fake id isn’t a good idea.

9. yeah we know how to do a soundcheck and set change.
ok a set change between bands takes 10 minutes, unless you are huge, and probably no one reading this is big enough to dictate this, as much as it sucks your guitar player is going to have to learn how to either set up his massive array of effects in that time, or deal with not having a bunch of unnecessary stuff to use on one bridge of one song. also you don’t need to have the perfect monitor mix either, nothing worse than sitting thru a 30 min soundcheck because the singer wants to have more reverb on the guitar in the monitor, usually after seeing a band pull that, you can pretty much guarantee they are going to suck, most often just too loud to stand.

10. we have toured all over our area.
playing 4 towns within 10 miles isn’t touring, neither is playing each weekend at the major colleges around you. If you don’t spend more than 3 nites in your van it is not a tour.

remember that club owners talk amongst themselves, so you may think you pulled one over on someone, but then everyone else in the area is now hip to your game.

Low Rider by War

Click here for complete tabs
Click here to listen for free via Rhapsody

For this lesson we are going to go south of the border, for War’s classic Low Rider, while this song has been in countless movies and tv shows, currently it is the theme to the ABC sitcom George Lopez. The riff while very simple looking requires razor sharp timing and sense of groove. Listen to the song a few times before attempting to play it, and make sure you have the groove locked into your head and can “sing” the line in your head, once you have that accomplished playing the riff becomes second hand.


G---------------------3h5-----
D-------------3---3h5---------
A-------1-3-5---5-------------
E--1-3------------------------


Extra Credit
This is a great riff to work on your slap technique. I have outlined 3 different methods below to use below, learn those and see if you can come up with some of your own variations.

1. Slap every note in the riff, take care and only hit the string that has the note you are playing, and not the string above and below it.
2. Play the riff normally with your fingers until you get to the 3h5’s , slap that little run of 4 notes out.
3. Slap out the whole riff except the 3h5’s , those you snap or pop with your fingers.

Watts an Ohm?

a guide to buying amps and cabs

Probably the single hardest part of buying a new amp or cab, other than paying for it, has to be figuring out how many watts of an amp for how many ohms of speakers. There is a good reason for that, to fully understand exactly what it all means, one has to have a degree in engineering, it’s that complicated.

Taken from wikipedia.org

The watt (symbol: W) is the SI derived unit for power. It is equivalent to one joule per second (1 J/s), or in electrical units, one volt ampere (1 V•A).
It is the rate in joules per second at which energy is being converted, used, or dissipated.

Lol don’t worry everyone’s head hurts now, okay so now that you see what sort of complications we are working with,I won’t use anymore equations or forumlas, I’m going to attempt to put it all into simple terms that everyone can understand, so please don’t send me emails, giving detailed explantations on how I was wrong in oversimplifying and then attach a 4 page equation that will explain it better.

Ok lets get started with the amp or head. They are rated by watts like everyone knows, watts are basically how loud the amp is, a 100w amp is louder than a 50w, a 200w amp is louder than 100w and so on and so forth. This is just a generalaztion, so don’t send me stories of how much your 50w amp smokes.

Now keep in mine this is the peak amount of power they amp can produce when running wide open/turned up all the way, and only for millaseconds, a 100w amp doesn’t pump out a continous 100w of power, this is the part where amp makers get tricky. The actual numbers that mean something, which are usually hidden on the back or buried in the spec sheet, is RMS rating. Continuous or RMS power simply tells us how much power a given amp can deliver day-in/day-out on a steady basis. (RMS stands for root means square, an equation that specifies average power). So a 300w amp with a RMS of 150w, would run 150w, all the time and peak out to 300w for small amounts of time. (just an example each amp’s rating is different).

That leaves ohms, and keeping with my promise of no more math stuff, I’m going to skip explaining it, as long as you know how to use the number of ohms, you really don’t need to know what they are or what they do, a google search will provide more detailed info, but it is basically the resistance the power has to go thru, using a plumbing example I saw somewhere, if your amp was a water system, water is sound, the water pressure is the watts, and the ohms would be the size of the pipe; which restricts how much water can actually get thru at one time.

Confused yet? I’m going to explain how this all correlates with the cabinet and then give you some easy to understand examples with real products, and a cheat sheet to match up cabs and and amps. Now that you kind of have an understanding of all those numbers and words, you have I’m sure started to realize that the cabs have the same nonsense rating on them as well.
1200w 8 ohm cab 1000rms, I’m sure you have seen something like before, and using our knowledge gained can deduce that the cab takes an 8ohm single and can handle up to 1200watts of power for a small amount of time, and can handle taking 1000watts all the time. Do I see lightbulbs popping up yet?
All right lets break it down in a real world solution using a Behringer bx3000T amp and avatar speakers.

Behringer:300w RMS into 4 ohms.
Okay first we know our cabinet has to be able to handle 300w all the time.
By looking at the cheat sheet below we can run 2 - 8 ohm cabs, or one 4ohm cab.
I like using a 4x10 over 15’s, so I want to buy a 4x10 cab and a 1-15 cab.
So I have to get both cabs in an 8 ohm version, also both cabs must be able to handle 300watts of power at all times. Now off to http://avatarspeakers.com/ , to get what I need.
B410 Neodymium - 1200 watts RMS 4 or 8 ohm
B115H NEODYMIUM - 300 RMS Watts 4 or 8 ohm
Sweet, the 8 ohm version of both speakers match my amp’s guidelines so I’m set.

You should have the basics down enough to go out and buy an amp or cab without fear.
You always have the cheat sheet below to refer to, in case you get stuck.

Cheat sheet
for cabs wired in parallel
2ohm amp
2 - 4 ohm cabs
1 - 2 ohm cab

4 ohm amp
2 - 8 ohm cabs
1 - 4 ohm cab

8ohm head
2 - 16 ohm cabs
1 - 8 ohm cab

Pick Versus Fingers

This debate has probably raged on since the invention of the electric bass guitar, and to me it’s one of the most pointless arguments made in the bassist community. Each method is a techniques no different than a hammer on or trill or slide, so why would you want to limit yourself and your playing ? Would you refuse to to use a hammer on if a group of people, started to tell you that “real” bassists don’t use them? Or would you go tell them to stick it where the sun don’t shine?

In my opinion, those who are so adamant about the finger-style are just looking for a quick ego boost, and a way to argue that bass is harder than guitar. Ego driven players like that really shouldn’t be playing the bass anyways, as the instrument isn’t about glory and fame. Ok now before everyone gets their panties in a bunch, let me explain myself a little more. You should approach each song individually, not your set as a whole, so when you are crafting your basslines you should take into account what is going to make the song sound best, no matter what technique you may need. Let’s say that your band’s newest song is really catchy, it just needs that tight solid sounding bass line that can only be had by using a pick and pumping 8ths, to give the song that last little hook to push it into hit single status. Now if you refuse to use a pick (don’t matter what you say you can’t duplicate a pick with your fingers) because of some credo you read or heard about and therefore keep the song from hitting it would pretty much classify you with what I said earlier.

Myself I follow the school of what’s best for the song I use, now if you are playing in a funk band or something that requires you to play fingerstyle, by all means don’t pick up a pick and try and funk it out, it all goes back to what does the song need, why you may never need to use a pick in your situation doesn’t mean it should be laughed off as inferior or completely ignored as a tool. I often switch back and forth between the two during songs, keeping the pick in my teeth while using my fingers. If the song needs something I don’t let what other people may think get into the process at all, I go ahead and use whatever is needed to make the song sound best.

While some think it takes more skill to play with your fingers than versus a pick they are sadly mistaken, for every great fingerstyle player there’s a picker out there that will make them go “wow”. I was guilty of this myself until our music started to require that I use a pick, and I found out it’s a lot harder than it looks, and that it takes a lot of work to get your wrist in shape to accomplish it. Of course there are people out there that try and claim they can get the same sound with their hands as with a pick; unfortunately simple common sense and physics prove this wrong. The picking sound is made by a solid plastic object striking the string in almost 90 degree angles up and down. Fingerstyle requires you hit the string with a softer flesh covered finger at probably a 45 degree angle, no way to produce the same sounds; you can get close but not the same thing. And really why settle for second rate, when the real deal cost’s a dime and sets in your pocket.

So instead of warring with each other over stupid piddly things that will never have a winner or loser, for every great reason to use a pick only there’s an equally great reason not to use one, let’s all agree both are valid and important techniques that everyone should be proficient with. That way we can start working out how to steal the groupies from the yellers and twangers.

A recent forum post i read at UBP revealed that there really wasn't a simple, easy to use, adfree way to allow people to send you an email message from your website available to the average web designer. So I decided to put an end to that with the Ambglb Mailer, written with simplicity in mind, you can have this up and running by just copying and pasting then adding your email address and band name. More advanced designers can easily customize the page to fit in even closer to the site design, by adding graphics and nav menu, but do remember that it is just a simple contact form and all its job is to send messages so simplicity and ease of use trumps the use of "pretties". Ok so enough yapping and on to the code.

Install Instructions
all you have to is copy and past the entire code to a new file, name it what ever you want, just make sure it has a .php extension.....i added a few setting that can be edited to help customize it somewhat to your sites...
when changing the settings make sure you leave the text enclosed within the " " or it won't work, also make sure you leave the // that mark comments in as well...

the only 2 settings you have to change are
$email = "email@domain.com" ;
just switch out to the email addy you want the form sent, so for me i would change it to
$email = "staff@basscrawler.org" ;

and the
$bandname = "Bandname" ;
which for me would be say
$bandname = "Basscrawler" ;

right now the script is set to return a link to your home page, (what people see when they type in www.yourdomain.com)
if you want to change it, simple swap the / out to the url of the page you wish, making sure you add the http:// if you don't understand directory shorthand
$weburl ="/";

the $text and $confirm are pretty self explain its simply the text that you see

the last 3 are the color settings of the page background, text color, and table outline
make sure you use the hex color codes to change.....

you can view the default version fo the form by clicking here

you can get the source code by clicking here

if your browser doesn't allow viewing of text files, just right click and save target as....you can either save it as a text file adn copy and paste or save it as a php file and upload that directly to your server.

The Death of P2P

I think you can finally say the p2p (peer to peer) file sharing systems like kazaa are dead in the water and with it the general free downloading of music on the internet. While some systems like bittorrent will continue to thrive in their small tech-geek niche, the days of joe surfer getting the new Jessica Simpson cd for free has gone the way of tight rolled guess jeans and hair sprayed poof balls. And before those at the RIAA start celebrating about how their tough cop antics of prosecuting teenage girls for theft actually worked, I’ll give you a more real world answer as to why it’s dead and it has nothing to do with legal ramifications.

What killed it was the peer itself, and more specifically greed of those peers. Which is surprising that the record company couldn’t see that coming and saved themselves millions in cash and who knows how much the bad pr cost. As in the real world whenever a group of people is grouped together in some sort of community, there will be a few who will take advantage of the others either thru theft, smooth talking etc. etc. So what happened was people realized that they could make money taking advantage of all the not so computer literate flocking to use this service. How you ask? When you install the actual sharing program, other software manufactures pay that company to include their program into the file sharing program, so in order to use the file sharing program you must have the other programs installed and running, mind you this all happens without you knowing, you already agreed to this when you installed the file sharing program, check the fine print…. What these programs do is track where and what you see on the web and usually will offer pop up banners for similar products, and since the ad is being opened by an installed program, it won’t get stopped by a pop up blocker. It’s like clicking on a link in a word doc, and connecting to the net. Now someone is paying a fraction of a cent for each time an ad is shown, now multiple that by everyone using a file share system usually in the millions, now multiple that by say 5 ads per person per web surfing session (the programs run 24/7 whether you are downloading or not) and you are talking some serious money. This doesn’t even account for the money made just selling your surfing habits which are a premium for internet marketers. What’s bad is that done carefully and without greed, you would never know what was going on, a couple of well made spyware programs can run on your computer forever without being noticed or affecting computer speed. But money talked so more and more software got added to the install, and the software got sneakier in efforts to bypass spyware detection programs. These programs can open up a backdoor and install even more of their programs onto your system, and it all appears normal to your computer. As more and more programs start running computer performance begins to get effected more and more, until your computer is a crawl and you don’t know why. Then everyone wanted in on the game, so people started to play the system, hiding their own spyware programs as mp3s, and these spyware are the really nasty ones too, they are the ones that just throw pop ups at you till your computer crashes. They also open the backdoor, and fill your computer with all sorts of crap programs. These are also the programs that hijack your homepage and default search engines. While genius programming is behind all the software, common sense is not, nowadays after getting infected a computer is almost immediately unusable online. If you aren’t online they aren’t getting paid, not very smart there as the revenue stream is disabled before it can provide any return. Pure greed and impatience, a constant stream over time makes a lot more than a one time payoff.

No matter how much you want to hear a song nothing is worse than having a computer crash, unless it’s taking that crashed computer to the local geek store and explain to them how it wasn’t porn you were looking at and paying a bunch of money to have it fixed. Usually after one repair bill comes the end of using p2p, as that is what the geek said caused it. As this scenario plays its way across the world, you have less and less real people offering up real files to share. This causes the available pool of downloads to fill more and more up with the bogus spyware programs. Making it easier and easier for this scenario to keep playing out until all is left is the bogus stuff.

But while the RIAA may think of this as a win, but really they got beat. For $10 a month I can listen to pretty much anything I would ever want to listen to as much as I want thru rhapsody, before all this downloading stuff started I would have had to go out and buy the cds to hear what I wanted at $15 bucks a pop. I don’t know what world the record execs live in but a $3 cord hooked into a normal stereo turns your home computer into your home stereo, or a $20 set of powered speakers and the computer is a good stereo on its own. So for $10 bucks my “cd” collection contains over a million songs, that are impossible to steal from parties. Do the math, that’s quite a bit of money they are losing.
So I can’t burn it to a cd?, big deal who needs to? I’d be playing the cd thru the computer anyway so you saved me a step thanks. And using an mp3 player, that most everyone has anymore, that same music can be loaded up and taken to cars, other houses, parties etc.
Anyone with half a brain and spare time can rig up a way to copy the songs you haven’t paid for, just think of the old days with a tape recorder and a radio. Oh but you say the production costs and what-not are so much lower selling digital music over real music. Ok everyone who has done the diy route knows how cheap it is to buy cdrs and go to kinkos for quality printing, now think of the bulk discount those record companies get from whoever they buy from, we are probably talking pennies per unit, with most of the cost in the plastic case. Right but they have a lot of R+D costs recording time etc they have to recoup. That is correct, but are they going to promote less for that digital copy? Does the studio give a break since it isn’t going to to be on a cd? No. So roughly they have as much tied into the mp3s as they do the cds . Only I can buy the mp3s for 39 cents, which let’s call $5.00 per “cd” instead of the $15.00 at a store. That is quite a price swing. Assume rhapsody gets the same cut as a normal music store so it all scales the same, and you then have to assume you are paying $10 for some pictures you will look at once and a plastic case that if doesn’t break when you try and open the theft proof seal just provides an easy carrying case and advertisement to a thief. So now for 5 bucks I can get the exact same thing 15 used to buy, only without the throwaway garbage (I mean who cares who the band thanks other than the peoples whose names are in it), plus this “cd” can’t be stolen, or wear out or get lost.? How many times have you had to re-purchase all your favorite cds for one reason or another? How many people do you know that have had to as well? That cash cow is now gone.

Makes you wonder what would have happened if the record companies wouldn’t have made such a fuss. Without their outcry there was no media story, no media story meant everyone’s grandma and grandpa wouldn’t know what napster and kazaa was. Without the mass influx of newly informed people of how to get free music, p2p would have either continued operating in a quiet little corner of the web or suffer its death due to greed like it is now. The result would have been no need for these downloading services like rhapsody and the new napster to exist, the record companies grudgingly accepted them with a “better than nothing” attitude. They want that $15 sale a lot more than the $5 one no matter what they say. This could also effectively kill the “filthy rich rock star” as well, since there is going to be an obvious cash shortage in the future, they can’t pay what they don’t have. So a way to look at it is the music biz (artists included) greed drove up the price of cds, when it takes 3-4 hours working at min. wage to make enough to buy a cd, a free alternative is enticing, add in the rise of the internet and it all fits together nicely. One thing about the internet is that numbers don’t mean quite the same, sites can operate with hundreds of thousands to millions of visitors/users and never be in the public eye at all. So peer to peer could have operated at the same level of participation it was at when the RIAA started to complain, and no one would have known and it wouldn’t have grown as big as fast just sorted existed kinda like bittorrent.(if you have to ask case in point). What I think happened was some pencil pusher saw a few hundred thousand people times $15 per cd being traded and went wow. What they didn’t realize was that one chances are that the music being traded was not going to be bought by the downloader if the download wasn’t there, “if it’s free I’ll take it but I’m not going to pay for it” type of deal. In the smaller setting like p2p was, it was more of a community with people actually buying cds and sharing with others that were buying different cds, it wasn’t until after it became widespread that you had the users that just downloaded and didn’t add new material.. How did it get widespread? Once they RIAA started grumbling about it and the media picked up on it. In an effort to try and stop a small amount of people from trading music they wouldn’t buy, they ended up having to offer their bread and butter consumers worldwide the same exact product for a 1/3 less money.
Oh well goodbye Kazaa thanks for the good times, as I turn up a Coltrane stream on rhapsody full of old records that the record companies played the scam game with royalties so they make the most not he, the same cds I could never find on p2p and a couple I would have bought if I could have ever found them and just giggle on what 10 bucks can buy.

U Cant Touch This or Super Freak
click here to listen to U Cant Touch This
click here to listen to Super Freak

This one is just plain cheesy fun, you can use it to annoy anyone within earshot. For maximum cheeseball effect , play the riff while moving side to side ala hammer.
One can also utilize a variety of Dave Chappelle’s patented Rick James quotes.
Not too much to add about this one, its pretty straightforward, pay attention to the pauses inbetween the phrasings and that’s about it. Unless you spent the last 20-25 years under a rock you should know this groove by heart so playing it will be a snap.


G|----------------------------|
D|----------------------------|
A|--7--5----------------------|
E|--------8--5---5--3---8--5--|


No extra lessons for this one, is just for fun!!!!!!

My Girl - The Temptations
Click here for complete tabs
Click here to listen for free via Rhapsody

This is another one of those songs, that playing it while stammering out the lyrics will get you out of trouble with the significant other. You can substitute guy for girl or their name if it can fit. Don't worry if your singing isn't up to par, more often than not the worse the singing the better, it would take a very cold heart to not break down with a smile and forgiveness, after hearing a heartfelt off-key rendition of the chorus.

OK time for class to begin. The verse riff for this song is a perfect learning tool, it is fairly easy to pick up, involves all 4 strings and most of all is fun to play. To me it looks like it's based off a simple blues scale and has a bit of a 12 bar feel to it. But don't let the simple look fool you, there is a hard part to pick up on this song, only it isn't a note you play it the one you don't. Confused? One of the most important lessons you can learn as a musician is when not to play, sometimes silence speaks greater than a thousand notes and here is a prime example. The slight pause between the 8 and 10 on both strings, makes the groove, without it you are just playing ascale at practice. Try playing the run without the pause using the standard 1 2 3 4 tempo, now play it with the pause, big difference huh? You went from playing a boring old scale from a mel bay book, to one of the more recognized basslines in history just by adding a slight pause, pretty cool eh? Ok now run thru this main riff till its stuck in your head and then we can move on to the hook (lead-in to chorus)

main riff
verse and chorus

G|--------------------------7-10-|
D|-----------7-10------7-10------|
A|------7-10------8-10-----------|
E|-8-10--------------------------|


All right, do you have that pause beat into your head? If so let's move on to the hook, it's just a little run you do as you go from the verse to the chorus. The best way to play it, is to sing along while playing it, if you can sing the part you can't mess it up as the two are so interlinked. Listen to the song a few times and you will pick it right up. The trick comes when you go back into the main riff, putting that pause in the riff feels very unnatural to go back into, so alot of practice is going to be needed to execute the change without going offbeat. Have fun!!!!

G|---------------------------------------------|
D|---------------------------------------------|
A|-------------8-8--10-10-----------12-10-8-10-|
E|-8-8--10-10--------------8-8--10-------------|


EXTRA CREDIT

The main riff offers up 3 extra lessons to help give you that added edge.

1. Play the entire riff only using your fretting hand. This will help build up speed stamina and power, plus it always looks
cool playing with just one hand.

2. This one is kinda fun but tough, we are going to do a little basic 2 hannded tapping.
(instructions are for right handed players, lefties just switch it around)
your left hand is going to play the 8's and 7's like you did when playing it one handed, but now the 10's are going to be played by your right hand. Place your right thumb on top of the neck between the 11th and 12th frets, using that as an anchor take your right index finger and hit the 10's with it. After a few tries you'll get it down no problem, and can be showing off in no time.

3.Now play the riff each time alternating which style you are using, and amaze your friends.....

This is a step by step tutorial on how to upload a picture to UBP Forum using Basscrawler's Gear Gallery. You can use any of the free hosters available online but for obvious reasons, we will stick to the gear gallery. These instructions will also work for virtually all forums as well, the only difference usually being the wording for image. Before we start check the file size of your picture, it cant be more than 1.24 mb in size or it won't work. The most common problem people have with digital cameras is in this setting, by default the camera take print ready pictures or 300 resolution(the high resolution and resulting large file size are needed for high quality prints), however web browsers can only display a 72 resolution. The easiest way around this is , if you are not going to print the pictures, change the settings on your camera to a lower quality setting, the lowest or next to lowest is best for web use. If you are going to print out copies as well as use online, you are going to have to open the large file in an image editing program and save a resized version. I use photoshop for all my image work, but less advanced users may be more comfy using the software that was bundled with their camera or the free editor here.You can also use our online pic resizing tool available here Allright we have our resized image so lets get started.

1. go to Basscrawler Gear Gallery by clicking here

2.we are going to act like you are posting a gear pic, if you want to use the service for non gear pictures, you must sign up for a free account, that will give you a personal album, hidden from public view. To simply add a gear pic registering isn't required. Click on the upload file link in the menu.

3. fill out the form that comes next, take care in selecting the correct album, pics of basses go in the bass album and so forth, make sure you fill out each field and be as descriptive as possible so everyone will know what they are looking at. When all filled out hit the upload file button.

4. on the next window that comes up you will see your pic, and all the info you entered in. Look for the row that says
Link:http://www.basscrawler.org/geargallery/albums/userpics/yourpicname.filename
simply highlight and copy the web address: http://www.basscrawler.org/geargallery/albums/userpics/yourpicname.filename

5. now go to the forum you want to post the pic in, and start to post as normal. Above the text box where you type in, will be a line of buttons, look for one that says image
and click it. a window will pop up asking for the image's url, now past the address you copied earlier into the line provided taking care to not have an extra http:// in the line, and hit ok.

6.finish posting as normal

like I said before this is a step by step guide for posting pics to UBP using the Basscrawler Gear Gallery, but the instructions hold pretty much the same no matter which forum
or image hosting service is used.

Ok probably the most important part of a website is the hosting, without it you have no site. This is also a very confusing part for alot of people and i won't lie to you, choosing the right host isn't easy nor for the faint of heart. So to make it easier i have compiled a list of some required features your host should have as well as a brief explanation of what they are and why you need it. I have also included a list of links to some good hosts at the end of this article to make choosing a little easier.

1. php/mysql/cgi support - these are must haves, if the host doesn't support their use, find another host. For those of you who have no idea what i'm talking about, these items allow you to run all the cool stuff you see on websites like blogs, forums, photo galleries etc. etc.

2.cpanel and fantastico deluxe - also must haves, by having access to these programs you can install all those cool web apps like forums, galleries etc, with just a few clicks of the mouse. This is very handy for the programmingly challenged.

3.FTP Access - this is another required feature, ftp or file transfer protocol is the means in which you transfer files from your computer to the actual server, without having ftp support you can't take advantage of the increased speed and ease of use that 3rd party ftp clients like cute ftp offer. Ftp is also how most web design programs automatically connect to the server to publish, so if the server doesn't support ftp your program is now worthless.

4.Frontpage Support - Windows Frontpage, a very popular design program used by many beginning webbies uses special commands or extensions to connect and communicate with the server, without server support for frontpage installed, all the features that make frontpage such an easy program will be rendered useless.

5.Server Housed in Datacenter - make sure the server is located at a datacenter (basically a secure fortress for servers that guards against power outages, fire, flood etc)and not sitting next to a keg-a-rator and some college students party house.

6.Tech Support - make sure there is some sort of support system, check the site for a forum where users help each other or support ticket submission service, usually you won't have to look very hard for the support info, it should just about jump off the screen and bite you, if you have to look hard, move on.

7.No Pop-ups - pretty simple, you are paying for hosting you should never have popups forced upon you, on a paying account if you do, drop them in a hurry. Also a hosting company should never require you to have a link to their site if you pay for hosting.

8.Storage/Bandwith Limits -
Storage: the amount of space for files stored on the server
Bandwith: is the amount of traffic that is allowed to occur between your web site and the rest of the internet

When using mp3s in your website, make sure you get ample bandwith to support them, a mp3 is roughly 1mb per min, so a 5 min song is 5mb. Each time that file is accessed 5mb of bandwith is used, that mp3 can then get played 200 times before using 1gb of bandwith. (approx 1000mb=1gb)

9.Mp3/Multimedia Support if you plan on having multimedia files in your website make sure the hosts allow them. In an effort to curtail bootlegging many hosts don't allow those kind of files to be streamed.

10.Email and Subdomains - this is the ability to have yourname@yourdomain.com email addresses and whatever.yourdomain.com. You should have an unlimited amount of both, for some reason hosts limit or charge more for extras, if they do and its something you can't live without move on. But it's really not all that important.

Domain Name Purchase
Aplus.Net - $5.95 Domain Names
Register your domain at Yahoo! Only $9.95.

Xen Hosting -where basscrawler is hosted
500mb storage/10 gb transfer $3.00 per month - xen hosting
1500mb storage/20 gb transfer $6.00 per month - xen hosting
2500mb storage/40 gb transfer $9.00 per month - xen hosting

More Hosting Options
Hostgator.com -where ugly bass player.com is hosted.
Aplus.net Hosting

click here for a basscrawler search of complete tabs for this lesson
click here to listen to this lesson free of charge courtesy of Rhapsody

okay tonite is one of those nites that makes me so glad basscrawler exists, during an episode of family guy, peter picks up a guitar and begins to play rock lobster. oh yeah i thought, that's a cool riff, i forgot about that song. so i pull up www.basscrawler.org type in rock lobster and then bam theres the tabs, 3 clicks and im looking at the tabs.
so i pick up my bass and start to learn it, right off i notice something, it feels weird trying to play this, it even took a few times to finally get it right. which is surprising since this riff looks real straightforward on paper. then it hit me, in a since i was moving backwards than i was used to, instead of going from say the 5th fret to the 7th, i was going going backwards say 5th to the 3rd.
which to me said i had been real narrow minded lately in my playing, if going one way or the other on the neck during a riff seems harder than another, you are obviously not working on it enough.
so while knowing this riff will do all the normal stuff playing riffs in this column will do, it's added benefit is to open up the rest of the fretboard, which will double the options you will have when playing....

G|---------------2-1-------|
D|----0-1-0----------------|
A|--3---------3------------|
E|-------------------------|


bonus lessons:
1. first learn and play it with a pick until it feels natural and you have it down
2. now play the riff with your index and middle fingers until it feels natural and you have it down.
3. now slap each note of the riff with your thumb, taking care to only hit the string containing the note you are playing and not nicking the open string above or below it,until it feels natural and you can play it cleanly.
4. now we put it all together, but now just slapping some notes and playing the others with your fingers, i wont give any examples as to not influence you, so be creative and try all sorts of combinations.

now take the way you came up to play the riff in #4, and listen to how it sounds when you play. pick up your pick and try to duplicate the sound using the pick. a quick upstroke on a string can make a really passable snap, as can a passable slap be made as well, experiment and see...

for the complete tabs of the song in this lesson click here
click here to listen to this lesson free of charge courtesy of Rhapsody

This is one of those basslines, that everyone should know. It can be used at parties to impress the opposite sex, at home to prove to your parents that buying you that new bass isnt a total waste of money, and on stage to cover for broken guitar strings etc.

like it says on the right over there, im not going to get deep into all the theory and background of the notes being played, the smarter writers take care of that, so that being said here we go

G|-------------------------------------------------|
D|--------------0h2-0-0----------------------------|
A|------0h2-3-3----------0h2--3-3-3-3--2-2-2-2-----|
E|--3-3--------------------------------------------|

just sing the bass line in your head for the timing

this is a great exercise for those working on playing with their fingers, start playing with just your index finger, when you get it down with that finger, add in your middle finger, using it to play every other note, your two fingers will be making a walking type of motion.

for more advanced players, take the riff and play it all the way thru using just your index finger, keep going till your finger fatigues out,now start over with just your middle finger, repeat this process with every finger on your picking hand, until that hand cant take it anymore, now switch to your fretting hand, and play the riff with just hammer ons and pull offs with that hand (hint: to hit the open notes, give the string a slight upward flick with your index finger, on the open d's you may need to go up to the 5th fret on the a string for a bit more natural sound) dont worry about it not sounding quite right, or being almost impossible to do, the main point is to build hand speed,strength and dexterity in both hands, that will pay off later on.

ok, before everyone gets all in an uproar, let me clarify something real quick, there are select locations in areas, where posting a flyer is beneficial , and you are a fool not to put one up there, what im talking about is the practice of printing out a 1000 flyers for a show and posting it all over town in any place where there is room. you know, the tactic preached on every band resource book, website, newsletter etc. in the known universe. i will go out on a limb and say they are all full of crap, other than those few locations, general flyering is a waste of time and money.

years ago before the internet took hold, this was a good practice as it was the only way to get the word out about shows, but those days are long gone. when was the last time you actually looked at another band's flyer? when was the last time you went to a show on a whim cause you saw a random flyer? when was the last time you went to a show after seeing about it on a bands website? or from getting emailed about it? how many people not in bands pay attention to the street post plastered 10 layers deep with flyers?

before you go saying how its like billboard advertising, and getting your name out and seen, yes if you get rent a billboard you will get the benefits without a doubt, but to expect the same results from an 8x10 soaked and stained piece of paper is just naive. once again when was the last time you checked out a band from a flyer? how about your friends not into the local music scene?

to be honest flyering will cause more problems than good, for one alot of the bands have flyers that are questionable in taste, and shouldn't be in public, im not a prude, and can talk dirty enough to make a sailor blush, but there is a time and a place for all that and your local streets aren't the place. while you may think you will get alot of notice with shock value, and actually you will, it is just going to alienate you from everyone that matters, club owners and promoters. they control the venues, and no matter what they say, they are in it to make money. who's going to come out to see the band that has put the nasty flyer all over town? who is going to want to take the chance? hmmmm i can book a band that will make enough to pay the bills, or book the band that pissed everyone off, and actually offended me as well, easy choice.
just remember you don't go from your practice space to stadiums, you have to start on the local level.

plus flyers just make your town look trashy, have a little civic pride, a good reputation will help you more than any flyer, group together with some bands, and clean your town of the flyers everywhere (hint: you wouldn't be able to buy the publicity this would generate) while this is sort of hippie sounding it really drives me nuts, being in all these different cities, that are beautiful and pristine, then come across blocks where every flat surface is covered with old and torn flyers that no one ever read or cared to read. luckily many towns are adopting laws that prosecutes offenders.

okay i have pointed out a problem, now ill give a solution, or two solutions to be exact.
1. use websites - most local scenes have forums, message boards, gig calendars that allow you to list your shows for free, people actually interested in music and going to see music read these, and will actually pay attention to and attend shows advertised there, if your area doesn't have a site that offers these services, start one, its pretty easy to do...
2. newsletters- give visitors to your website the chance to sign up for email notifications of shows
3. take the time you would spend flyering, practice instead, if you get good enough people will find out about you, don't worry.

Today we are going to talk about what not to do when making a website for your band. There's tons of tutorials on what to do, and yes i will write one myself, but sometimes the most important knowledge you can have is knowing what not to do. i won't claim to be a super expert, and my way may not be the best way, but by following the advice that will be spread across these next few columns, you will be unknowingly using the same basic techniques used by internet marketers to make millions over the internet, so if something doesn't make sense now it will when we get further into things, so lets get started shall we?

1. Don't use Flash Movies as forced intro movies.
if you must have one, use a link that will open in a new browser window, roughly about half of online users are on broadband, the other half is on dial-up, so you automatically are losing half your visitors right off the bat, not even accounting for those who don't have the right flash version installed, and in this day of spy ware and virus no one is going to download something like that from a band website. Also the skip movie link rarely works correctly all the time, even on professional done sites, so basically you have to ask yourself if it wasn't about you would you sit thru one? or would you sit thru the same thing to see the band who played at the bar last nite?

2. Don't autoplay music on a page load.
for one its annoying to have music blaring without starting it, its my computer and i want to control when and what's playing over it, also not everyone coming to your site is there to listen, places like this do go to websites to get the data on bands they review, and copying and pasting is the best way to make sure info is correct, and often multiple trips to a site are required, and if i have a song blaring out everytime i have to check for dates or song titles, i can pretty much guarantee that the band lost the review, same as for booking, while interning for a semi major booking agency i know of a few bands that lost good gigs do to this. from your standpoint as the site owner having this actually costs you, each time that page is called by a user, the file starts to load, often it will preload it fully before playing, so you are being charged for the bandwith of a whole song even if the person hears it just for a second, then clicks the page closed...

3.Don't use mousetrails or custom cursors
its just cheesy and annoying, if i wanted words following my cursor, they would be there already.

4.Don't use javascripts to open browser windows.
for one the pop up blocker installed on almost every browser, won't allow it to open and unless the user is savvy enough to know to shut off the browser, they are going to just assume that your site is broken, also the search engine spiders can't read java script, rendering the links to other pages invisible, this will make more sense later when we get into more advanced topics.

5.Don't expect people to buy your music
have at least one song available for free play and download, the publicity you can get from anyone in the world being able to hear your best song and send it to everyone they know, pales to what you will make from cd sales, and to be blunt and honest, by the time you have to worry about free downloads costing you money, the money you are losing won't matter, so put the ego away, and throw up a song.

6.Don't use free hosts with banner ads and pop-ups.
Spend the few bucks a month and get a decent hosting plan and drop the 8 bucks to buy your own domain, if you aren't serious enough to spend 30 bucks for a year on the band you aren't serious about your band. many of those free hosts also install active x spy ware to users, making it look like you infected them...

7.Don't use flash for navigation menus or content
see the reasons for #1 on loading and usability, once again the search engine spiders can't read flash files so all links and text is invisible to them. this will again make sense later on..

8.Don't have personal news on your site
keep your main site as professional looking as possible, no one cares really what you and your drummer did last weekend after the bar closed, that is what forums are for.

9.Don't forget contact info
i know it sounds silly, but you would be surprised at how many bands leave off an email address or contact number from their sites, if there's no way to contact you, how can people contact you?

10.Don't use transitions
yeah those "cool" things that you can to as pages load and unload, like dissolve, fade, etc, are a no-no very very annoying, and i'll admit to using them back when they were first available but even then it got old quick.

For this issue im going to go briefly into what i think are the top 20 tips for surviving a band trip or tour, some of the tips will work regardless of the length of the trip be it a day or a week or a month, some of the tips will also work for road trips and budget vacations.
Next issue i will go into each tip with more detail and explanations, so with out further ado here they are the top 20 tips for surviving the road

1. quality toilet paper....just cause you are on the road don’t mean you don’t go, and if you ever used rest area facilities you know what im talking about. buy one of those family packs from wally world....

2. toilet covers aka butt gaskets....those paper things you put on the stool before you sit, pretty self explanatory

3. wal-mart gift cards...you can buy anything with these anywhere in the country..

4.get insurance on your gear and personal property, and make sure its all covered no matter if its in the van, club or in between.

5.if possible rent a van, we rented a van for one tour got it for a month for a grand, was less than a year old and had around 12k miles, if it did break down a new one was just a call away

6.only eat from grocery stores not drive-ups, you can feed a band of 4 stoners with the munchies for $2-3 a meal minus drinks...

7. KEEP IT IN YOUR PANTS lol, an old drummer learned that the hard way, and now has to pay close attention to valtrex commercials...

8. don’t act like an immature idiot in towns you are not’t from, its a good quick way to get a free tour of the town jail, and if your lucky a face to face meeting with a nightstick lol....

9.make sure your van doesn’t look like its a band vehicle, no stickers, signs, naked mannequins etc etc, you want to look like a family taking a summer vacation, so don’t dress and look to wild while on the road, wait till you get to the club., if anyone important asks you at any of the major point of entry of entry stations along the interstate, you do admit to being a band when asked, but you are a Christian {insert music genre here} traveling to bring his word to the kids who need it most...etc etc. don’t say you are a stoner rock band, whose songs glorify drug abuse and cop killing....

10 the most important one BRING QUALITY TOLIET PAPER

11. if you stay in a hotel, pick a major economy chain like motel 6 or super 8, don’t stay at an independently owned motel, even if its cheaper.why? you will have probably 4-5 people and everyone of those people have to pay extra to stay. at the place where the owner is at 24/7 they are going to notice 5 people pilling into a single room since that is money straight from their pocket. at the major chain the desk is going to be ran by most likely a normal employee that only really cares what time the shift is over not how many people are in a room, chances are the clerk is in a band as well and will cut you some slack. i recommend telling the staff there’s half as many people as there really are, if an odd number go up, so for 4 people say 2, for 5 people say 3, don’t say 1 person then call the front desk for towels for 8 people. using the half rule you can request another round of towels in the morning for the half that didn’t shower(you should always bring a towel or 2 anyway) or gets to use a clean towel.....don’t act like rock stars or you will end up sleeping in the van, and getting no refund for the room, use the hotel to sleep and shower, stay away from the public areas like the pool hot tubs etc, if you all look like your in a band, 6 people swimming covered in tattoos surrounded by family's stick out like a sore thumb, esp. if there is only supposed to be 3, have your fun in the clubs, on stage, after hours etc., outside of that the more you look and act like a normal member of society the less hassles you will have.

12.dont over extend yourself, keep it simple at first do traveling weekends for a month or 2, to make sure everyone can actually stand being together for a long amount of time in confined spaces, then bump it up to a week, then 2 etc etc, don’t go from playing shows in just your town where everyone comes and leaves separately to planning a 2 month north american tour..

13.try and only book shows at legitimate businesses, or funded centers at towns, churches, schools and stay away from promoters who just rent venues or have them in their house, while these shows are often the best more often than not they get cancelled and shut down and you get no notice at all....

14.dont expect to make enough money at the shows to live on, even if its in contracts, as they say sh#t happens, and the club owner/promoters don’t have a shady rep for no reason, have enough cash to cover any and all expenses, look at it like you are going on one hell of a vacation and get to play music also, this way any money you do make is bonus, and you will never end up broke and running on fumes...

15.showering is not always an option, and while some places say use the showers at trucks stops, but that just grosses me out, i used to suggest buying a bottle of .89 rubbing alcohol and .99 bag of cotton balls for keeping your face and neck areas clean (look at your fave skin astringent number 1 ingredient is alcohol, the rubbing alcohol also works wonders cleaning your cord ends, pick-ups etc. after our band had members experience parenthood, baby wipes made an appearance and quickly shuttled the alcohol to cleaning electronics only. all the major chains sell big family sized boxes of luvs, huggies etc brand for less than 10 bucks...don’t try and save a buck or two here and go generic, buy quality you will thank yourself for it later.

16. an often overlooked section of financing a tour, is your bank itself, you need your bank to have nation-wide branches atms, so you can get cash in case of emergencies without paying an arm and a leg in fees, and every travel guide ever published has said to never carry large amounts of cash, so
in the event you have a really good nite money wise, you are still only a few miles from a place to safely deposit your cash with a teller, or for 69 cents most gas stations and convenience stores sell money orders, the money order can then be deposited via atm with no worries about loss...

17. buy travel sized toothbrushes, toothpaste and deodorants, they all fit inconspicuously into one pocket, add a handful of baby wipes in the other pocket
and you can walk into any nice clean private restaurant/gas station and give your self a decent cleaning without the staff knowing....places that have these nice facilities usually don’t like them to be used in this fashion, so don’t walk in and ask for the key/or where the bathroom is, carrying your towel, shaving kit and toiletries all in your hands and don’t spend hours primping, you have the same amount of time to clean up as someone with slight digestive troubles so don’t dawdle

18.make sure your van is equipped with a power inverters of at least 500w preferably 1000w....this will cost between $50-$100, but the inverters is a piece of equipment that changes 12v dc to 120v ac, or in laymen’s you plug it into your cigarette lighter, and then you can plug what ever normal appliance you want into the inverters and it will power it up. we used it to power a tv, vcr, playstation, and powered speakers, so we could watch movies, play games etc, before shows at nite, while driving etc, without having to go buy fancy 12v appliances.

19.switch your audio system over to mp3s, instead of tapes, and regular cds. for $20 bucks walmart sells a portable diskman that plays mp3 cds, an mp3 cd holds aprox. 300-400 songs or 30-40 cds worth, as you can see all those giant photo albums of cds, that take up so much space, are now condensed down to a single wallet sized holder, and by adding that adapter that goes from headphones to tape player, and the diskman plugged into the inverter, you are now rocking with a digital music system for less than 30 bucks, you can also use mp3 players such as ipods etc, in the same manner if you wish to bypass cds altogether, anything with a headphone jack can be ran thru a tape player so your imagination is the limit. if money is no object id suggest buying a satellite music system, as its definitely the best option for those long nights driving thru the prairie with nothing but a fuzzy fm station doing farm reports and a bunch of am stations preaching fire and brimstones, or thru the desert with nothing at all but static.

20.check the fluids on your van at every stop, no matter if they are 10 min. apart, every time that van gets off the road you are checking the oil, washer fluid,brake,transmission etc., when you get out look underneath to see what the space looks like as you pulled in (try parking in spots with no stains) and when you get back in look for puddles, or drops, often this will tell you of a leak before the dipsticks will, and will alert you to any problems that may be upcoming.