Musician Guide to Landing a Spot in the Festival Circuit

AUDIO HOW-TO

With summer officially over, gone are the hot months with their Glastonburys and Bonnaroos.

But the heralding of fall doesn’t mean an end to festival season. In fact, fall is a great time for smaller, local fests celebrating autumn’s bounty and the crisp days preceding winter’s long hibernation.

The fall is also a prime time to apply to festivals that happen during the more typical spring and summer season, as many venues book out eight to nine months in advance. But what does it take to get booked at a festival?

Today we take a brief look at the factors that go into securing a performance slot—from raw materials to savvy research. Start here, and with luck you’ll find yourself on the big stage down the line in Somerset or Tennessee.

Any musician knows: your sound counts.

With festivals, the live element, beyond the music, is at the forefront. As such, festival promoters are as interested in the atmosphere of your performance as they are the songs being played. That’s why it’s important to communicate who you are as a musician and who you are as a performer.

On the music end, having quality audio recordings—even just a couple—is key. Investing in high quality sound equipment, be it a fancy acoustic pickup or a unique mic system, can really set your sound apart from the competition. A lot of pickup systems, especially acoustic instrument pickups, produce sound that is artificial and processed. Capturing your authentic sound is the first step in communicating to festival bookers who you are as a musician.

On the performance end, consider the task of needing to captivate a large, outdoor crowd. Reinventing your style to cater towards some wild live act could come across as forced and disingenuous. But, considering ways to engage with the crowd leads to a more memorable performance and future festival opportunities. A musician’s stage presence hugely affects audience reception. Plus, there’s a good chance a pair of adoring eyes might belong to a scout for another gig.

CREATING AN ELECTRONIC PRESS KIT: SIMPLE SPEAKS

So high quality audio recordings are a must. All the better to include video of what your live act is like. But what other raw materials and logistical minutiae does one need to consider when gathering together an electronic press kit for festival planners to sift through?

Festival bookers are looking for a short biography and discography that give them a sense of the musician or band and their influences. Adding to your audio sample, include photographs, and video that provide some indication of what their live sets are like plus a picture of your fan demographics.

A lot of blogs stress the importance of social media and any relevant press as additional peaks into the dynamic between performer and fanbase. But your Instagram brand or a nod from Last.fm is not going to replace or upstage (pardon our verb choice) the media files you send along.

Having a publicist and press strategy, or a booking agent for that matter, can be advantageous. But keep in mind the music and the musicians speak first and loudest.

Regarding the media files, remember that high production value is a useful investment. A single well-produced video can be used countless times over as sales and marketing material.

A quick note on format: along with the audio files, be sure to have your audio online via a website like Soundcloud or Bandcamp. This provides universal access to your sound and helps when the powers that be are sifting through 2000+ applications, each with a handful of songs to be heard.

GO FORTH AND PROSPER

So you’ve got your carefully recorded audio and got the girl from the local university’s film department to make a killer video of your live act. You’ve got your discography uploaded to Soundcloud and finally figured out a bio that speaks to your music and your small but diehard fanbase.

But where the heck do you send it all out?

Finding a festival that is matched to your genre and vibe is crucial. In fact, as Marcato Musician CEO Darren Gallop notes, “It’s not uncommon to see as many as 1000 submissions for a small/medium-sized festival and upwards of 20,000 for larger international events.”

In both cases these submissions compete for anywhere from 20 to 400 performance slots. It may sound discouraging but 20% to 75% of these submissions are an instant ‘NO! NOT A CHANCE!’…because…the artists submitting them are not a style or genre that the festival even programs.”

A good way to leave a bad taste in a booker’s mouth is to send your sugar pop studded press kit to their black metal festival headquarters. Save everyone some time and eye rolls and do your research. Apply to festivals that complement your sound.

A great website which lists a slew of fests in a variety of styles and settings is Sonic Bids. And hey, the first two opportunities have application deadlines next week so grab some pumpkin seeds and some hot cider and get typing!

In the meantime build your live performance schedule as much as possible.

Talking with local farmer’s markets or restaurants and libraries about setting up busking gigs can be a great stepping stone to larger more official venues.

Big thanks to these sources! Check them out for more in-depth festival strategy coverage:

www.thebalance.com
www.musicradar.com
www.bandzoogle.com
www.reverb.com
www.neonstreet.net

YH Music Lab Featured Artist:

Armand Aromin

Violinist and Luthier

On his journey:

I went to Berklee College of Music for about 2 ½ years and then realized I didn’t want to be in music education and then I dropped out, because that’s what you do when you go to Berklee. And then I went to the University of Limerick in Ireland (cause I thought that’s what I wanted to do), for a semester, left, and then went back to Boston to do violin making. I graduated three years ago, and now I’m standing here.

I have a duo with my partner Ben, and we tend to do a lot of folk music, a lot of English folk songs, Irish tunes, English tunes, Swedish tunes, American songs and tunes, like anything that sounds catchy and attractive to us, we’ll kind of make it our own. We’ll even do a few Muppet songs!

Armand Ivy Leaf Project

Photograph by Your Heaven Audio

On the challenges of amplifying his violin:

On the challenges of amplifying his violin: I tried a built-in violin pick-up but that involved tuning the strings down, lifting up the bridge, and I didn’t realize at the time, but it’s an added layer underneath the bridge so the action’s going to be higher, and because this rubber material was going over the top of the instrument it’s slightly muting.

And because you’re not having the wood-to-wood contact between the bridge feet and the body, you’re also kind of missing out [as] it’s vibrating less freely. So, that was annoying!

So, more regularly I use a clip on condenser, an Audio Technica one.

But, because of the nature of some of my gigs, I end up getting annoying feedback, especially if I’m trying to play with a band that has amplified instruments. It’s such a nightmare! It gives me like, anxiety to play a gig like that because I know that they have to crank me up, but they can’t because that’s just going to feed back as soon as all the other instruments start playing.

On trying the CloseUp® System for the first time:

This [CloseUp® System] is pretty awesome! It sounds like my instrument. Yeah, I really like it. It’s nice because it just sounds like an amplified version of what I’m already playing.

The low end doesn’t sound too muddy or boomy at all. The high end is not overly bright. It almost It almost doesn’t sound like there’s an amplifier next to me. It just sounds like my instrument somehow got louder. Which would be awesome!

3 Essential Rules For Recording Natural Acousitic Sound

EVERY ACOUSTIC INSTRUMENT HAS ITS OWN VOICE…

Acoustic sound and thus, recording natural acoustic sound, is never completely standardized. As Your Heaven Audio founder, Steve Schwartz, has experienced in his own music: “One of the things I’ve noticed as a player is that very often, I’m driven to create something based on the natural acoustic sound of my instrument. I have often sat down at drum kits that are sort of hodge-podges, and I just start tapping lightly around, doing this and that, and at some point or another the instrument itself tells me what to play.” Choosing an acoustic mic for recording that’s as true to your instrument’s natural sound as possible is the key to producing pure music, as it was intended at inception.

The beauty of acoustic music lies in its fluidity and unpredictability.

Photograph by Your Heaven Audio

“There are certain combinations—oh, if I hit the cymbal two times and this tom-tom once and then the snare, that makes a nice sound—and it’s not a conscious effort like that, it’s just noodling around. All of a sudden I find that this combination sounds nice on this instrument. So at that point, in terms of recording, what you want to do is capture that sound.”

The beauty of acoustic music lies in its fluidity and unpredictability. Good musicians can take even a lower-quality instrument and create music that works with its natural voice. But being in the room with an instrument is one thing—how can you capture that same experience in your recordings?

Steve shared his rules for capturing clear, natural acoustic sound:

1) Know Your Environment

Not everybody has access to studio space with high-end acoustic mic systems for recording completely pristine, uninterrupted sound. Cost can be a barrier, as well as time and convenience—or you might be trying to record live. In any case, minimizing ambient noise is only one piece of the puzzle.

Pay attention to the acoustics of the space, and how your sound reverberates within it, keeping in mind, you’ll need to choose and mix your ampification and/or acoustic recording gear accordingly. The space you’re in can cause undesirable effects, but it can also add dimension to your sound which you may want to preserve. Wherever you record, you can capture sound you’ll feel proud to share.

The Anstendig Institute provides an oldie but goodie in-depth primer on concert hall acoustics: CLICK HERE TO READ

2) Know Your Mic

Now that you have your space, you need to know what kind of acoustic mic will capture your best sound. You can use a standard instrument pickup to isolate tracks, but most musicians agree, acoustic pickups don’t come close to the quality of studio-recorded sound. The Your Heaven Audio CloseUp® System is engineered to record only the natural sound of acoustic instruments, resisting ambient noise and feedback in any environment. Understanding what sound your mic is capturing, and how it interacts with the space you’re in, will give you the control you need to achieve a perfect take.

3) Enhance, Don’t Compress

So you got your take—now what? You want to enhance your recording so the full spectrum of your instrument’s voice can be experienced. Many audio engineers will achieve this through compression, or amplifying the entire track so that the lower frequencies can be heard along with the louder, higher frequencies—but this approach can actually detract from your sound.

Steve explains:

“The human ear has evolved to hear sound at roughly 2K-4K cycles per second, but not every frequency is heard at the same volume. We are more sensitive to higher frequencies, or those around 4K cycles per second—they take less energy to hear, and sound louder. We can turn them up, but at some point the human ear can only process so much, and the extra volume makes no difference.

Conversely, the lower frequencies around 2K cycles per second take more energy for us to hear, and need to be turned up much louder. Compression takes all those frequencies and turns them all the way up, so the higher ones reach their maximum volume and the lower ones have a chance to catch up.

The problem with compression is that it flattens sound. At high volumes, dynamics go out the window, and quieter and louder segments of a track will only sound loud with slightly different tone qualities. The natural voice and experience of hearing acoustic music live is lost. Instead, a good audio engineer reduces excess levels of high frequencies, and finds the natural levels where a particular track sounds its best. The goal is to amplify the subtleties of acoustic sound and create an experience as close as possible to the real thing.”

For more on the physics of hearing CLICK HERE.

Your Best Sound

Whether string, percussion, or any other kind of acoustic music, recording your best sound is a matter of respecting and amplifying the unique qualities of each session. Great music is not about achieving a standard average—it’s about creating a one-of-a-kind experience with your own unique instrument.