DIY Bands – What You Need to Know

For two hours every day, you strum lock step with a thunderous beat. Four strings saturate the room in low end while Cindy shreds arpeggios like a San Francisco bookie shreds betting slips. It’s rhythm and melody as two pythons body wrestling. It is glorious in the few seconds just before the garage door opens, and dad’s station wagon eases in, coming to rest with a tap on the steel ring of the bass drum. Welcome to the world of DIY bands.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 70,000 musicians working in the U.S., and census data puts it at close to a million. This is likely a vast underreporting, as most indie bands wouldn’t show up in statistics. Unsigned, indie, “Do-It-Yourself” bands are even less likely to show up. Yet almost all bands start out DIY.

Despite any opinions that DIY is lazy or “devil may care,” including any pictures of jury-rigged electrical panels and improvised jackhammers on social media, forming a DIY band is like forming any band, it’s hard work. It’s even harder than being in a more professional, polished band.

“Professional bands,” they have two things DIY bands lack: money and connections. If a band is scraping by, they’re likely a DIY band, countering money and notoriety for high labor and innovation.

Success is an uphill battle for unsigned DIY bands, but there are things out there that can help.

The first thing you need to realize is that Joe BigBand can afford studio time, and you cannot. So you need to practice twice as hard, be twice as good. Because you can record with a free app like Audacity, but you won’t have many bells or whistles.

Second thing is that you will need to do your own social media. You don’t have a media person, and here’s advice you don’t want – don’t bitch on social media. About anything, really, but especially about band stuff. You want to wow people at a show, not in a comments thread.

You will need to do your own design work; posters and stuff that you’re going to put online. And here’s the cool thing; art is subjective, so if it looks like shit, tell people that was the point.

And finally, you have to book shows. You’ll likely be playing for free for a little while. Probably not a good idea to go to the owner of the only club in town full diva, keep that in mind.

With all the challenges out of the way, let’s talk about love, hate, and indifference. You are entering into maybe four relationships that might end up being closer than the one you have with your current sweet’ums. How everybody navigates these relationships is everything.

Everyone should bring in their own influences, but it’s easy for a band to tear itself apart over creative differences. Talk about your influences and the hills you’ll die on. Make sure everybody’s dying on the same hill.

Once you have a good communion of sound, you have to be on the same page of what success looks like. Does one band member take care of someone, or has kids and can’t tour the country? Is that what most of the band wants to do? Figure this out ahead of time.

And finally, everybody’s got to put in. If the singer shows up late, the drummer’s always stoned and losing time and the bass player is doing all the promo, you should probably go to a retreat. Or get drunk and slug it out, whatever.

Gear is important. Without gear, you’re singing doo wop on the street corner, which isn’t all that bad. But we’re going to say you need gear. But before we get into that, you should be able to make any instrument sound good. Old bluesmen were nailing a wire to their brooms and going to town. Buck up.

Should you get new or used? Good question. Maybe it’s preference. New instruments are shiny and, well, new. They’re probably free of defects and you don’t need to take them to the repair shop every other day.

Used gear has character, though. It has history. Did I mention it’s cheaper? But the caveat is that if you don’t live near a repair shop, you might need some schematics. You can of course get used stuff at your local store, eBay, and you can get new and used instruments at the online store Reverb.

Aside from Reverb, you can go to other online stores for new and used gear. But if you have a local store in your area, please give them the business. It’s a better experience, and you get to try stuff out first. But if you have to, try Musician’s Friend and Sweetwater.

Now you have gear. So now for the recording part. That can get daunting, especially if you want more complicated stuff. The blog Groover has a list of apps for musicians which contains descriptions of audio workstation apps like Garage Band.

You may want to splurge on commercial audio software. There are a lot of options. Music Radar put out a good comparison of digital audio workstations (DAWs) worth checking out. But the free program Audacity is used by many. It’s simple, lightweight, and, of course, free.

Mama and papa gotta eat, and Spotify streams won’t buy you a brisket. Merch is a moneymaker if you dedicate to getting it out there. One site I like for merch is Big Cartel. It’s really a salesfloor. You plug in a printing service like Printful, and you create your merch and Big Cartel creates the shop. I like Printful because they have a ton of stuff you can custom design.

You also need to sell your music, and I’d recommend Bandcamp. You can do Apple Music and a couple of other things, but most of the DIY bands I know use Bandcamp. And having bought albums from them, it’s a good sales experience. There’s also CDBaby, worth a gander.

Of course, yes, there’s Spotify. Kind of throwing King Kong on the back burner here. Spotify should be a go-to for your music, and some people would sacrifice their second-grade teacher to get a million streams. Just know that you can be big on Spotify and only earn a cup of coffee.

On to shows. Shows are the lifeblood of DIY bands. And your mileage will vary as to how hard it will be to book a show. If you have a lot of friends in bands, you might get booked as an opener. And if you’re playing for free, that helps. Or your area might have a promoter.

Keep in mind that no club can run off of a good lineup. They aren’t going to pay you for your talent. They’re going to pay for your ability to get drinkers in the door. That’s how bars and clubs make their money. And promoters usually get a cut of the door. So if no one shows, there’s probably no money to throw around.

Are there unscrupulous people in the local music scenes? Yes. But you still have to manage your expectations. Make sure someone’s actually screwing you before accusing them of it.

Another point here. There’s nothing stopping you from throwing a show in someone’s basement. Well, maybe neighbors or the cops, but get creative. Find cool places to play. Run a generator out in the woods if you have to. Music thrives in adversity.

DIY Bands can be a lot of work. You have to play twice as hard to sound half as good. But challenges build character, and if you’re carrying more weight on your shoulders, it means you’ll be getting jacked.