Just curious to hear about your experiences in bands / generally making music with others. Considering all the potential egos, artistic differences, sensitive temperaments, hangers-on, substances… Seems like a miracle so many groups can stick together long enough to make an album, let alone a career.
Any stories? Tips for making it work?
-. Do the members share the same vision?
-Are the musians slave to a singers ego?
-. Is it serious with a professional plan. Or just for fun. If its just fun…it better be really good fun!
-. A performing band can sink money and resources…get ready.
-. If each member is writing make contracts clearly stating who has contributed what. Saves hassle later if everyone is serious.
-. Again, its best if its really, really good fun with people you like (especially today) being in a band or bands is not for everyone.
Finally ask yourself what is the true motivating factor of wanting to join or create a group?
what i really don’t like is touring with others.
especially if groupies and substances/alcohol abuse involved.
everything else is more or less OK (once everyone attends rehearsals in time).
I grew tired of always being the responsible one in the band. It started with me being the only one with driver’s license and driving back home at night sober while the other guys were drunk, but it soon also meant that I sent the invoices for the played gigs, took care of the rehearsal space rent etc. The band was/is with my very good friends but nowadays we hardly see each other anymore.
Touring and everything that goes into that, made us grow apart somehow. I loved all the other aspects of being in a band.
same here.
i’m always the only one who cares about such things as spare cords etc etc.
Yup, it was always my mic stand that we used and I didn’t even do any vocals in the band. We lost two or three mic stands due to drunken behaviour and it was always me that bought a new one. It started to feel like looking after schoolkids as the only responsible adult.
This is one of the factors that killed music for me. I’d be sober, write 90% of the music and pay 75% of the costs of shows, tours and releases and then watch someone else bask in the glory when I had to go to the office the next day and they slept in with some rando hookup.
What I miss is writing and performing with people that were able to get into the same zone and bust out jams that connected with people.
Solo projects, however, feel like I’m talking to myself and I don’t enjoy doing that, so therefore my output has fallen 99%. That’s life, innit?
I love the idea of doing my own solo thing. Just me and my synths at home creating music, releasing it and never touring, never doing a single live gig. This far it just hasn’t come into fruitition.
I have synths, I do half baked attempts at songs but I miss the synergy of having other people around to take it further, to finalize my half baked stuff.
as for me, i’m excited to live at the times when i can perform on stage and even tour alone.
The thing I remember about bands are those spinal tap moments that are funny to look back on. I started a synth pop band with a mate in the 90’s and one day he rang me up out of the blue and said you’re out of the band it’s not working and went with this other guy who was a good singer. Couple of months later he rang me in secret and said do you fancy doing something so we met at the rehearsal room and set up and within half an hour there was a large bang on the door and this other guy walked in, must have been stalking us, and he said oh you’re back with him are you, had a massive fit and then stormed out, proper spinal tap. Has anyone watched the documentary This is Anvil, very funny about the rock band Anvil.
Im jamming regularly once in a week since two years with a friend of mine. At first our sound was awful, now i would say it´s ok. At least we like it.
But it´s not about a specific endresult, just for fun and became kind of a group therapy/ritual.
At first setting everything up make sure that all works fine. Then we go out on the balcony and have a drink/smoke.
After that we spin some records b2b to warm up (for around an hour or two) until it´s time for another round on the balcony.
When finally jamming (my mate with ni maschine; i with a single elektron box [AR,A4,OT]) we decide beforehand who is creating the drums and who is in charge for bass/melody. Then we jam until we think its time for break… on the balcony. For the next round we change the drums/melo parts. Everything continues until someone is too tired to go on.
What we have learned so far:
listen to the other one - in the beginning everyone did his own thing but it´s better to complement each other
don´t criticize/ judge too hard. It´s about making music together in the first place
We also let this other guy join the band and he couldn’t play any instruments so we taught him a basic bass line to play on the Casio cz1000 and his only other job this particular day was to start the drum machine at the start of the second verse (we didn’t use sequencers) . So we started the song, get to the drum machine bit and this guy missed it about 5 times at which point a massive argument began. The thing is we always taped the whole 3 hours rehearsal on cassette so the mics picked up the argument. I still have it on tape nearly 30 years later and listen now and again and have a good laugh 
Living the dream!
At least once a week 
The balcony has been really useful 
I’ve been in various bands for the last 20 years, and I’ve been in bands with one guy for around 15 (and still am now). This also seemed to turn into more of a touring guide than a writing guide, but nevermind.
Overall you just have to compromise a lot - you wont get your own way all the time, but that’s part of the point. I’ve written bits of songs that turned out comepletely differnt to how I imagined they would initially.
Our analogy was always that being in a band is like being in a relationship with all the members at once. You just need to talk everything out and make sure everyone’s on the same page.
First band I was in was a band covering a couple of Go Gos songs as part of our Prom Aid festival to raise money for our high school prom. I don’t think the OP is interested in cover bands, so moving on…
Next bands I joined were just small groups from for the Introduction to Music Making course I took in university. The course should have been entitled Introduction to Experimental Music Making, because more than half the students joined thinking we were all going to just whistle and play castanets to nursery rhymes, or do the hippie drum circle… just something easy. Some fled in horror after the professor asked us how we discover music, what role various marketing campaigns went into said “discovery” of music, etc. - some kids just don’t want to be in a class where you’re going to be forced to actually think and ponder with your own brain. The others who left realized that we were going to do something harder than just castanets and nursery rhymes - we were going to be asked to at least attempt making art out of sound.
First rock band I joined was a punk band that my roommate at the time was putting together. Well, it was really more of an audition than being asked to be a full band member. The roommate regularly went to shows at The Casbah, mostly punk shows but it was through that scene that he got into Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, etc. On the punk side, he was into Slint and bands local to our city like Rocket from the Crypt, Drive like Jehu, etc. I’d never though of the intersection of punk, free jazz and some flavors of prog rock (esp. King Crimson and Faust) before, but that was where these guys were at. After some band rehearsals, I was informed I failed the audition, but we still remained friends and roommates.
I didn’t join any more bands until I moved to the DC area. I got bored one day and look at Craigslist and answered an ad put up by a guitarist who wanted to play music like Mogwai, Explosions from the Sky, and Mono. So I joined as a bassist, later asked to switch to 2nd guitar so a new bandmember could play bass. It helped that the founding guitarist already had songs prepared. I had no idea for songs and neither did the drummer, so we just had to create our parts for the songs. Being asked to switch to guitar got me started on spending money on gear again. In short order, I went from having 0 guitars to 3 in just a few months, got a tube amp, pedals, etc. Anyway, for the first few months, we met up and jammed in the basement like clockwork. Eventually though, the jams started to get shorter as we started to spend more time just hanging out and drinking. Towards the end, we’d meet up and not play at all - just drink and pass weed around. We did play one show with an audience. Then shortly after the founding guitarist moved out of town and that was the end of the band.
The bassist of the band asked me to help her out with her music, after she had gained confidence in her guitar playing and started writing a bunch of songs with guitar. So over the next few years, I was in and out of bands led by her. We’re pretty good friends now but COVID-19 has halted our band activities for the time being, because we live in different cities now. I know some people use streaming tech of various sorts to collaborate online but that’s not her thing.
I really don’t have any pearls of wisdom to offer. I haven’t formed any bands of my own yet. Every band I’ve been in, post-university, has been driven by someone else’s songwriting. As a contributor to someone else’s songs, I’ve gotten the habit of being someone conservative - I don’t add fancy superimposed harmonies or syncopated rhythms. The one area I’m given license to be wild and free is effects and foley-style noise.
I spent several years in a pretty serious band.
I was that guy who was always drunk, breaking shit, not knowing how to set stuff up, not able to drive, etc. Buuuut I also did most of the songwriting, never missed a practice, and put a huge amount of myself into performances. We were all problem drinkers, tbh. It didn’t stop us being good, but I do wonder if we might have been even better without the booze. But who thinks of that, at 25?
I have a theory that every band is good at one thing. Assuming you all have different but overlapping preferences, there will be a sweet spot that plays to everyone’s strengths (and is also objectively interesting and good.) For us, that was abrasive post-punk based around a great rhythm section, tight enough to let guitar and vocals roam freely. There’s a dynamic to these things. Once that felt a little played out for us, there wasn’t a lot of other places to go, collectively, so the band naturally stopped… we had different directions we wanted to try that we weren’t all into. It’s fine.
Whenever I’ve been in a musical period of my life (when not wanting to become a writer instead), I’ve always collaborated with at least one other person. Sure, I’ve made a couple of tracks by myself and put them on SoundCloud to absolutely no followers. But all my most successful ventures have been with other people. There’s just something about bouncing ideas off other people and not wanting to let them down that gets shit done. I’ve gone from nu-metal crossed with Portishead as my first serious band with three others to jazz/classical inspired alt rock as a trio - the pianist just knew how to complete my chord progressions every time, but he was equally amazed at how I broke the rules haha. My most productive periods in terms of actual releases, however, have been from me as a producer working with a vocalist. That’s what I did with Kloudbreak and am doing again with Petit Massif. Even a pure IDM project I did back in the day worked because we would send stems to each other with a no-holds-barred approach to fucking each other’s work up. I can not recommend collaboration enough or at least having a trusted adviser/competition for finishing things!
The one thing that probably keeps most “professional” bands going is a manager or record company that doesn’t want to see their meal ticket disappear
Personally, I’m still jamming with two guys I was in a band with in the late 90’s, and back then the other 3 members came and went every other month. The difference between us and them was we didn’t do substances, didn’t drink before or during gigs, and we always showed up at practice. And we had an interest and respect for each other’s career goals and relationships, so there was never any of the bad blood that comes from different ideas or psycho partners.
actually the most unstable environment I’ve been in is the Weddingg band scene. During the Naughties I don’t think I played more than 2 or 3 gigs where a member didn’t leave.