Money

Image credit: weheartit.com

Money is often top of the list when it comes to arguments between bands. If one person is responsible for providing the PA system being used, they can often have a lot of leverage in band disputes, so it really is up to the other band members to try and make this person as democratic as possible. If arguments end with, “well I own the PA so if you don’t agree you lot aren’t using it anymore,” you’ve probably got a budding dictator on your hands. Avoid these types of people unless you don’t mind them running the show.

Musicians and money problems go hand in hand, and often one band member has got more then another. The worst scenario is when member of the band begin relying on one member to pay for everything, whether it’s gas to get to a gig, time in a studio, or just being sent off to buy new guitar strings. If this is you, say something now and explain how you feel. Most people are understanding and won’t make you feel bad, but if they do, best find another band to join.

Creativity

Arguments about songs and how each member should play are usually decided through a vote. Well, they should be. But if you have a band leader, or a stubborn member that disagrees with almost everything a member does, eventually someone is going to say enough is enough. This is all part of how bands evolve and get better, so disputes over creativity should not be avoided. But what should be avoided is unnecessarily offending somebody or letting someone have their own way.

Test songs, ask for other people’s opinions, and discuss exactly what sounds right and what sounds wrong. The whole point of a band is to play music together, so if everyone is not happy it is not working. If one person thinks a song is bad but the others don’t, it’s down to that person to play the song for the other members, no matter what he or she thinks. Compromise plays a big part in disputes about creativity.

Image

Now this shouldn’t really ever be a big issue if you are a likeminded band and know exactly what style of music and associated image you want to produce. But saying that, there is the problem of one person being the black sheep. If one person doesn’t want to fit into the image of the band, then it totally depends on what the other band members think. Perhaps someone is too metal for an indie band, or vice versa. Everyone has the right to dress the way they want and act the way they want, so this type of thing really tests how tolerant your band is.

Most of the time this type of problem is apparent soon and can be brought up before it really gets awkward. But sometime people attitudes and style change over time, and before you know it you’ve have a vocalist in all black screaming down the mic at an acoustic gig. Well, that might be an exaggeration, but band image can count for a lot further down the line. The main thing is to try and get everything smoothed out as near to the beginning as possible, and this rules goes for a lot of problems that effect bands.

Commitment

Image credit: weheartit.com

This can be a tricky one, because everyone has different commitments and schedules, so finding a time when everyone can practice can often be harder than you think. Band members turning up hungover and unable to play, or missing practice altogether, causes problem for everyone. One way to try and stop this from happening is to have a forfeit system, where the offending member has to do something because they missed practice. This can be a lot of fun, and the forfeits are best left down to your own imagination.

At the other spectrum there might be a member that is super committed and wants everyone else in the band to have the same dream of making it to the big time as him or her. There’s nothing wrong with ambition, but if they make you feel bad because you don’t have the same inflated dreams as them, say something about it. Chances are the person will see sense, or on the other hand they might want you out of the band. Either way, it’s better to let people know how you feel.

After all is said and done…

The main thing about settling band disputes is to not let things go too far. As soon as a problem is recognised, address it and move on. If the dispute can’t be solved, then the band isn’t working and it’s probably best that you go your separate ways. That’s not to say that you should give up at the first hurdle. Perseverance in a band is important, but bad feelings between members will be the death of the group, so get things sorted and try again until nothing more can be done.

Olivia Lennox is a singer and musician who has worked with and been part of numerous bands. These days, she balances her time writing and gigging with cruise lines like Fred Olsen, MSC and Disney.

Guys, DIY projects aren’t just for ladies. Roll up your sleeves and get ready to paint-splatter your own digs!

Coldplay

Here’s what you’ll need:

• Army-style jacket
• Pants – jeans, chinos, khakis… it could be anything really
• A regular old tee shirt
• Funky blue shoes – Chris’ aren’t new high top Nikes, but I liked the crazy pop of color.
• Fabric paint – I think the neon variety works well for this look, but you can choose whichever you like.
• Paint brush
• A paper plate
• Cup of water

Obviously this DIY project can be done to any outfit, but I’m copying Chris’ look as closely as we can.

Here’s what you’ll do:

1. Find an area where you’ll be able to fling paint without worrying about it splattering on furniture or walls – the garage, open space in a basement, or outside probably works best.
2. Spread newspaper over a flat surface to protect it from the paint and then lay clothing out flat.
3. Put a dollop of paint on the paper plate and pour a small amount of water on top of the dollop – about a teaspoon. This will thin out the paint a bit and give it that drippy/sloppy look you’re going for.
4. Use the paint brush to mix together the paint and the water. There are several techniques for paint application. You can fling the paint on the clothing to make small paint splats all over, or you can messily paint it on in a few spots, clustering colors together like the photo. There’s no need to be exact (or have any kind of painting skills); this looks better done haphazardly.
5. Lay it out to dry and voila! You’ve got an instant, one-of-a-kind piece with a funky flair.

You can go crazy with paint or leave it as a small detail. It’s all a matter of preference! Who said the paint splatter look got left in the 90s? Psh…

And, how apropos would it be to listen to this song, while you are crafting your outfit?

Author Bio: When I’m not accessorizing with zebra print handbags in my day job, or schooling people on the importance of solid travel adapters, I enjoy discovering new artists and music genres. My current favorites range from Coldplay (natch), to Sam Cooke, to mah girl Beyonce.

You, the artist, have been born into a cultural sludge I like to call the ‘post-noughties 21st Century’; critics everywhere call it a cultural oblivion – music is dead.

This all comes down to a simple misunderstanding about where the music world is headed.

The sludge is this gloop of all the music created now; there is more than ever. The way to avoid this gloop is not to stop making music or to upload your music to every social network available, indeed; social networks are not the answer either. The answer is developing an audience focused on YOU. In a world where attention is scarce, it is artists who have built something that intrigues, and who have the attention of an audience that will win.

This doesn’t happen with your average rainy tuesday afternoon music, it happens with the exceptional; through the chill, the slow, the heavy, the soft. As musicians reveal themselves through their art, so listeners make their love of the artist known through investing in their world – because it’s something they’ve come to associate with.

Image credit: ache.tumblr.com

Know that a record deal is zero now. You don’t NEED the established gatekeeper. You’re aiming for Oxford or Harvard when in reality you need neither right now. What you need is the drive to do what no-one else is. The only territory worth exploring as an artist is the area without the map – the place where you need to lead the way.

Art is about the new, the fresh, the exciting.

To be an artist becomes; why me? Waiting to be picked is effectively doing nothing at all. Novelists can’t afford to spend their lives waiting for a publisher to choose them anymore so they build an audience, collaborate with other writers and build connections globally.

Everyday should be a trial by fire exercise in seeing what works and what really doesn’t. Artists are really bad with rejection, because art is one of those things, that it hurts when you’re speared in the side. Know that being scared of rejection means you are doing something really close to the bone – something that matters to you, and that matters more than anything.

You innovate and change. There’s no such thing as failing. You don’t get ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than those guys over there. There is no better or worse in music, only ‘listened to’ and ‘not listened to’.

Music is not a neutral exercise – some people will always be pissed off with everything.

There is a future to music, of course. Yours starts when the clock hand reaches the next minute; what are you going to start today?

Marco writes at behyped.com on the the new way of doing things. For the artists, entrepreneurs and creative geniuses of the digital generation who are exploiting the internet to start their own stuff.

Scary Fashion

Skeletons, spiders, and the undead have been on the mind of high fashion designers like Rodarte, Alexander Herchvovitch, and J.Herwitt. Whether it’s skeletal detailing, diamond encrusted spiders, or skull and cross bones, the macabre has been given an upscale twist. KISS and the likes have been pulling these looks for ages, however, designers have been using ghastly inspiration for looks on the runway. But most average folk (and starving musicians) can’t afford to sport such ghoulish fashion.

Here’s some items for shopping the trend on your budget.

[vintage skeleton tee] [spider tank] [zombie tee]

[skull ring] [howling wolf ring] [skull leather cuff]

[beanie] [scarf] [hat]

These items allow for a look that can be streamlined across most music genres, unlike some of the upscale runway options. Black, black and more black are always popular among musicians – it offers an edge that brighter colors don’t. Pairing these accessories with darker options keep with the macabre theme and can be carried on throughout the year (though, Christmas and Easter may be a good time to give these threads a break). But, I say, pull on a skeleton tee and rock on, friends!

Author Bio: When I’m not accessorizing with women’s handbags in my day job, or schooling people on the importance of solid travel adapters, I enjoy discovering new artists and music genres. My current favorites range from Bon Iver, to Priscilla Ahn, to Amos Lee.

The video, itself, is over two years old, but should still be considered very carefully as evidence for the long-standing bond between the fashion and music industries. I am, of course, talking about Vivienne Westwood. From her humble beginnings designing clothes that the Sex Pistols would wear, to her current status as world-famous fashion designer and Dame, Vivienne Westwood has stuck to her Do it Yourself principle from the very beginning.

In this interview on the Jonathan Ross show, Vivienne Westwood subtly alludes to the punk origins of her fashion career. Dotted Music has kindly chosen to start the video below from the relevant section (3.02), and we hope you continue to Tweet your opinions @Dotted Music. What is it about the music and fashion industries that enables one person to impact to such a degree?

Perhaps only Vivienne Westwood can tell us.

Samuel Agini is the Editor of Andrew Apanov’s Dotted Music.

Do you have a difficult time deciding what guitar exercises to practice despite sifting through countless guitar practice materials daily? Are you feeling confused about which guitar learning method to turn to as you seem to be pulled onto many different paths with dozens of guitar books, websites and videos? Do you want to find out once and for all which guitar exercises to focus your practice time on in order to achieve your musical goals?

Image credit: allaboutyou16 on Flickr

From teaching hundreds of guitar players over the last 25 years, I have found that most musicians do not have a shortage of “things to practice” on guitar. The problem that I see many guitar players run into is not knowing how to organize all of their guitar exercises into an effective guitar practice schedule that moves them towards becoming better musicians. If this sounds like you, then I want to show you how to determine what you need to practice on guitar to improve your musical skills in the fastest way possible.

The first significant mistake that guitar players make with regards to guitar exercises is practicing “too many” of them. As a result, too much energy is spent trying to decide (at random) what exercise to play next, instead of concentrating on getting the most benefit out of each exercise being practiced. In reality, you can very often achieve a lot more by intelligently focusing on a smaller, targeted list of guitar practice materials than you can from a longer list of guitar exercises that are put together at random (more on this in a moment).

Another reason why guitar players struggle to make progress with all of their guitar practice materials is because they make the mistake of starting to look for “things to practice” before becoming clear on why they need to practice guitar exercises in the first place. Keep in mind that guitar practice materials can only make your guitar playing better when they are practiced with a specific objective in mind. Mindlessly playing through guitar finger exercises will not make your guitar playing any better until your mind is clear on several things:

1. The long term guitar playing goals you want to reach and how a given exercise fits into the big picture of developing your musical skills.
2. The exact guitar playing challenge(s) you want to overcome by using a particular guitar practice exercise.

Above all, you must remember that the only reason why guitar exercises are needed in the first place is to help you solve various guitar playing problems. As simple as this concept is, most guitar players do not practice with this understanding in mind. The more specifically you can define your guitar playing problems, the easier it will be to find the most effective exercises to overcome them. For instance, rather than saying: “I want to increase my speed with scale sequences“, you need to identify an exact problem such as: “I need to practice the picking hand motion that happens when my pick is caught inside the strings“.

In order to determine whether or not a specific guitar exercise should be included into your practice schedule, ask yourself this question: “what guitar playing challenge will I be able to overcome by working on this exercise and will this exercise move me closer to my guitar playing goals?” To help you with answering this question, here are several important points to follow that will make your guitar practicing a lot more productive:

1. Identify (in specific terms) your guitar playing goals.
2. Work backwards from your final goal to prepare a list of steps that you need to go through to reach the objectives from Step 1. Check out this free resource about improving your musical skills if you don’t know what steps go into the process of reaching your musical ambitions.
3. Put together a very targeted list of guitar practice exercises that is specific to developing the skills (and/or solving guitar playing problems) that you identified as important to your goals from Step 2.
4. Learn how to create the most effective guitar practice schedules. To do this, you must know how to efficiently divide your guitar practice time among the exercises that you have selected in Step 3. This will help you to avoid wasting valuable practice time and will enable you to make faster progress. If you don’t know how to do this, read this page about how to make your guitar practicing more effective.

Keep in mind that ultimately it is you who is responsible for the results you experience in your guitar playing. Even after you have correctly put together the list of effective guitar practice exercises, you must remind yourself to stay focused at all times on the specific problem you are trying to solve while practicing. Don’t allow your hands (or your mind) to go on autopilot. As you get better at doing this, you will likely realize that you don’t need to practice as many guitar exercises as you imagined before. In fact, many guitar exercises can often be used to develop multiple skills simultaneously (see an example of how to practice guitar in this way in this video about the best way to learn to play guitar).

If you take guitar lessons from a proven guitar teacher (who has helped many people to become great guitarists), he/she should be familiar with the concepts I explained above and should be structuring your guitar lessons with these ideas in mind. However, if you have had a hard time with making progress on guitar up to this point, implement the ideas from this article into your guitar practicing and you will see your musical skills start to improve at a much faster pace than ever before!

Tom Hess is a guitar teacher online, composer and a touring musician. He plays guitar in the epic metal band Rhapsody Of Fire. He teaches guitar players in his rock guitar lessons online. Go to tomhess.net to get more guitar playing resources, guitar playing eBooks, and to read more guitar playing articles.

You’ll see that layering is best for mixing and matching, and signature-style making. That’s the great thing about layers – you can create an outfit that no one else has. That’s something most musicians take pride in, a style that’s unique. But, where do you start? Let’s start at the bottom and layer up.

Pants

Whether you prefer relaxed jeans, hipster skinny pants, a prepster pant, or ragin’ leather bottoms, pants create a good foundation. They can be the focus of your outfit, or fade into the back.

[slim chinos] [slim fit check pant] [light wash jeans] [cords]

Shirts

If we’re talking layers you may want to go with something light, but comfortable. This can obviously be altered as temperatures change. i.e.. go with a light v-neck in early fall and switch to a thermal knit for winter.

[v-neck tee] [tank] [thermal crew] [henley]

Second Layer Shirt

Intense layering calls for more than a tee and jacket. Go for an open button down over your base shirt. Think flannel, plaid, and denim. Here’s a great place to insert your personal taste with pattern and texture.

[sweater] [plaid shirt] [denim shirt] [vest]

Outerwear

Another insertion of patterns, texture, or your signature item, outwear can be anything from a light jacket to a heavy overcoat. For fall it’s best to stick to a light jacket, but a light leather can easily be incorporated.

[military jacket] [leather jacket] [blazer] [hoodie]

Accessories

Layer on funky hats, scarves, sunglasses, belts, rings, necklaces, etc. The more crazy and unique, the better!

[scarf] [aviator sunglasses] [driving cap] [belt] [leather cuff] [fedora] [cap]

About author: When I’m not accessorizing with handbags in my day job, or schooling people on the importance of solid travel accessories, I enjoy discovering new artists and music genres. My current favorites range from Bon Iver, to Katy Perry (yes, really), to Amos Lee.

Whether it’s “exhaustion” or some bigger problem, as suggested via Twitter, the group has gotten some attention as of late for many reasons.

Caleb’s recent marriage to Victoria’s Secret angel, Lily Alderidge, made him recognizeable to a mainstream audience. And there’s no denying this rocker’s style – he pulls in some retro and rocker and melds it together to make a relaxed look.

Wanna steal his look? Pull off his style at a price you can really afford.

• Blue shirt: Forever 21: Elbow Patch Shirt: $27.90
• Jeans: Asos: Lee Macky Slim Jeans: $72.40
• Sunnies: Sunglass Warehouse: Retro Wayfarers: $14.95
• Hat: Nordstrom: Free authority ‘Ramie’ Fedora: $29.50
• Watch: Kohls: Relic Leather Watch: $37.50
• Belt: Asos: Peter Werth Leather Belt: $31.03
• Boots (not pictured): Amazon: Giorgio Brutini Men’s 66014 Boot: $46.20

When I’m not accessorizing with handbags in my day job, or schooling people on the importance of travel luggage scales, I enjoy discovering new artists and music genres. My current favorites range from Mumford and Sons, to John Coltrane, to Beyonce.

Be the first to contact us and claim your Spotify code, if you don’t have one yet. Be quick!

The trick to not looking over the top is keeping the rest of your wardrobe pretty basic. Some skinny jeans and a black top will set a blank slate for you to accessorize. Add an edgy handbag for function and glam.

Guys, don’t think this look doesn’t translate for you! Nix the handbag but keep the color palette, shades, and bling. BAM instant rock star wardrobe achieved.

Look like Fergie!

• Tee: Agent Ninetynine Cropped Box Tee: $40
• Jeans: La Garconne: Knight Skinny Jean: $42.50
• Handbag: Handbag Heaven: Logan Quilted Hobo: $84.95
• Sunglasses: Sunglass Warehouse: Shield Style Sunglasses: $16.95
• Earrings: Max and Chloe: Blu Bijoux Geometric Drop Earrings: $40
• Bracelet: All Saints: Sandyha Bracelet: $30
• Bracelet: G By Guess: Metal and Rubber Chain Link Bracelet: $19.50
• Bracelet: G By Guess: Dotted ID Bracelet: $19.50

When I’m not accessorizing with handbags in my day job, I enjoy discovering new artists and music genres. My current favorites range from Mumford and Sons, to John Coltrane, to Beyonce.