12th of July Blog update

It’s a cloudy overcast day in Dublin, but still warm. It feels like there is a thunder-storm on the way. But then again,  that feeling has lingered around for few days now. We have a house quest for the next month and a half, which means I had to pack up my little office, including my recording equipment. I’m glad to do this though. And even though I felt myself resisting the idea first, It will do a world of good to me to work in a different environment for a while. Besides, I like having guests 🙂

Next week I am heading out with Sliotar to play some shows in Italy and Czech. I’ll be on the road for twelve days, so It will be a nice concentrated tour 🙂 And I’ll get to see a lot of friends along the way, which I am really looking forward to.

This week was a busy one, and even though I spent Thursday cleaning the house (one of my least favourite past times) and packing away my office, It was a good week. We had a great rehearsal, and managed to film quite few new videos. The sessions in the Porterhouse were great and the shows with Sliotar are in that pre tour mode, where you get to iron out the finer details of the set. I also got to catch with Rory from Melosity and it seems things are moving along nicely there as well. For those of you who contributed to the track we record in Melosity, let me just say it is sounding great 🙂 We still are in the process of adding all the other instruments in to the track, but we’ll get there.

I learned some interesting lessons this week, some of them will have longer term effect on how I conduct  my business 🙂

1. I learned how little importance a unit price has in arts, if you let people help you. This is a big one and I will write about it more in the near future.

2. I learned how resiliently people resist the truth, when they want to find a shortcut. I was guilty of this in the past as well. And if you spell out the truth, not everyone is going to like it.

3. The value of finding out what your customers want by asking them. This was a lesson I learned from Rory, and will be looking into ways to implement it as an artist in the music business.

4. I realised how much I enjoy seeing people take my advice and putting it to good use.

And now off to this weeks posts 🙂

This weeks song “Alone at last” looks into how so many of us are scared of being alone. Again free download available from Bandcamp. Check it out here:

Alone at last

Last week my Facebook page reached 5000 likes, and I thought to share with you some of my tips on how I did it:

My tips on getting 5000 Facebook likes on your bands page

Concentrating your career in the idea of getting signed, instead of trying to do it your self can seriously slow your success:

Quick tip 131 The misconception of getting signed

The streaming services are here to stay, no doubt about that. Now can we move on? Read more here:

Let the dust settle on the streaming storm

Here are some of my tips about booking shows for beginners:

Quick tip 132 Booking shows for beginners

Music promotion can be time-consuming. Here are my five tips how to simplify things:

Can’t Keep up? 5 Ways to Simplify Your Music promotion

Once you get your first few gigs booked, you’ll soon find out that you need to have the sound engineer on your side. Here’s my tips on how to work with Sound engineer:

Quick tip 133 Working with sound engineer

If you see music as a competition, you have a long and tough road ahead of you:

Camaraderie over competition

Continuing with the tips about your first few shows, here’s a one I come across all the time:

Quick tip 134 Practice your setup

Have you hear of Jem Mitchell? Check him out here:

Share love, music and art part 3

The wonderful SumoMe app introduced a cool new feature that really works. Check it out here:

135 SumoMe Welcome Mat

And here is the first of the videos we filmed this week. Let me know what you think:

“Northern Boy” live at the rehearsals

So that wraps up another week. Next week as my office is packed up, I’ll be doing most of my writing out of the house, and from Thursday onwards from the road. I’m sure the trip will inspire me to write few more juicy blog posts 😉 Until then, keep rocking, loving, churning and learning.

J.P.

The author J.P. Kallio is a singer songwriter
To get EIGHT of his songs for free go HERE