🤐 the secret 7th skill

[plus: The Galway Girl]

RIFFS:

Michael texts me in a panic.

The show he’s producing starts next week…

…and he still has three songs that need to be charted. Do I have time to bang out a few charts? Well no, not really.

But what are the songs?

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Turns out he already has two of them.

We played them in a different show he produced.

Five years ago he paid someone top dollar to write charts for those songs. It either didn’t occur to him to search his archives, or… could it be that he somehow doesn’t have his own IP in a searchable format?

This is low-hanging fruit.

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And yet almost no one does it.

The bar is so low that *any* savvy here is basically a superpower.

I’m talking about organization. (Maybe it should’ve been #7 in the Six Skills Series.) This would be table stakes in any other industry, but…

Any musician who does these will seem like a gotdang wizard:

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1/ Empathetic Emails

Anticipate their questions + include the answers.

• Asking a fellow musician if they’re available? They want to know where, when, what it pays, who else is on the gig, and whether or not it’ll be a pain in the ass.

• Sending your bandmates pre-gig info? They want to know the setlist, attire, load-in time, parking, showtimes, what’s backlined, & when they’ll be paid.

• Responding to a potential client’s gig inquiry? They want to see reviews, want to know your repertoire, and want to see video¹.

Speaking of which…

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2/ Great Assets

You are a business—act like it.

Fit & finish matter a lot. These days we expect corporate-level sheen, even from mom & pop businesses.

But don’t sand off the quirks that make you unique! Just put a frame around it so we know it’s art.

• you need well-lit video

  • (with great audio)

• your business card should be designed by a pro

  • (you can save money by using a template)

• get the same questions over & over?

  • practice your responses

  • keep the winners in a text expander

And on the topic of oft-referenced items…

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3/ Bar Numbers, Section Names, File Names, & Date Stamps

Great tools have nice handles.

If it’s not obvious how to pick it up? If it’s not obvious what it does? Then it’s probably not a *great* tool.

• this is why charts have bar numbers

  • “hey what chord are you playing in measure 35?”…

  • …is way better than wasting time with things like “hey in the chorus when i go boop-de-dum-de-dum, what are you doing?”

• section names too!

  • “in the RE INTRO, let’s play a football in that 4th bar”

• label the work itself

  • if my PDF says “Call Me Al” when the song is actually titled “You Can Call Me Al”…

  • …then each member of the band is going to text me separately, saying “hey I don’t have a chart for…”

  • paying attention to these details now saves work later

• there is always a 100% chance of revisions

  • when you export, use the “wildcard” to add the date:

    

    (this makes it obvious whether or not you’re working from the current version)

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RECS:

Two great quotes culled from

Austin Kleon

’s newsletter:

The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”
-Eden Phillpots

My plan is to keep going until I don’t.”
Kate Bingamon-Burt

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CHARTS:

This weekend I’ve got my first St Pats gig of the year.

Every March I get requests for Steve Earle’s The Galway Girl…

…and then I kick myself for not knowing it.

Here’s my chart:

(PDF, Sibelius, musicXML, & Ableton Live files here in this Dropbox folder)

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SMARTS:

So why don’t I already know this?

I think there are three things that make this non-obvious:

1/ Each verse is slightly different

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2/ These 2/4 bars are sneaky

3a/ The melody is a little wabi-sabi…

It’s played by fiddle, tin whistle, & concertina.

Each of these articulates it a little differently, without much thought given to playing it exactly alike. It’s endearing & infectious (even if it does make transcribing slightly more difficult)

3b/ …and I struggled to arrange that melody for one guitar.

A great sign of progress:

When you re-attempt something that previously defeated you… and find it kinda easy.

Here’s my TAB:

https://www.soundslice.com/slices/WD2lc/

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That’s all I got this week.

See you next Wednesday,

Josh

1. But don’t quote them a price in the first text or email. Set up a time to do a “discovery call” and—if you’re sure you can overdeliver on their expectations—tell them the price over the phone. You’ll close the deal waaaaaaay more often.