For those of you in the US, I was wondering what the best sources are to find musicians these days.
In January I’ll be auditioning bass & drums for a weekend rock bar band, and I also have unrelated recording projects needing things like female vocals and actual musicians to replace my temp tracks. In the latter case I could work with people from anywhere in the world, but I enjoy the interaction and sense of family that comes from working in person. While the bar gigs will pay, the studio stuff is purely for fun, hence my desire for locals.
I’m in north Atlanta and took a decade off from gigging, etc. Back in ancient times, I’d place / read ads in the local Creative Loafing paper, a free arts-oriented weekly (most major cities had something like it), as there was a popular section in the classifieds for musicians. These days printed solutions have diminished to the point of irrelevance in favor of the web, but I’m not sure where to look. Craigslist comes to mind, but it always seems to be the flakiest crowd to deal with.
Seems like there must be some popular places to look for local players beyond music store bulletin boards. What do you guys use to find musicians in your area?
I have had quite a lot of luck using Craigslist, believe it or not. I use it to find session players for recording, but never for band mates.
I setup a talent form on my website to collect all the data so I can keep it organized and have the ability to sort the database based on talent: http://woodcreststudio.com/talent.html
The only issue I had was when I post for a specific talent, everyone and their mother replies with their unrelated talent.
Other than that, I have had good success with it and have met some really cool people. I don’t know where you live, but I am just outside Philadelphia which is dense in talent.
I’m in Atlanta, and while I can’t speak for the region, I, at least, am dense.
It’s encouraging to hear your success with Craigslist. I’ll keep them in the net that I cast. Also, nice form. Since I sling code (and mostly web / database stuff these days) for a living, I’m surprised it didn’t occur to me to include this in my approach. Geez, my geek skills must be deteriorating. I hope they don’t revoke my pocket protector!
As for the other replies, I guess better too many than not enough. If you stick 'em in your database, you never know when they might be useful. Assuming, of course, that you don’t need players who can follow instructions.
Duh… Just read your 1st post again and saw you were from Atlanta. Oops… kinda tired today.
As for the other replies, I guess better too many than not enough. If you stick 'em in your database, you never know when they might be useful. Assuming, of course, > that you don’t need players who can follow instructions> .
As another option, you can always hang out at some bars where they have live, open jam nights etc. It’s a good way to meet musicians & singers, and you can see & hear what they’re made of on the spot. The last time I did a jam night, I played lead guitar on “Surfin’ With The Alien” by Joe Satriani…and the song was current! Yeah, been out of the loop for a while myself
Local rehearsal rooms, talk with the booking guy. Recording studios. Not everyone who uses them needs top dollar or any dollar at all. Ask at these who the top local bands are, maybe go see them and chances are you’ll find that attached to them is part of the local music community, a lot of whom will be looking for work or between gigs.
Only time I saw Southern Tracks was a decade ago at a block party for some friends at On Four Productions (do you know Brian?) I haven’t worked in the studio scene, just a bunch of low rent cover / rock bars with the occasional parking lot full of Harleys.
I went to your site but it’s still in progress. If you’ll go to Page Not Found : Christopher Duncan and drop me a line I’ll reply so that we have each other’s email address. Always good to meet the locals, maybe we can grab a beer sometime.
