Ethnography Results Week 5 / 6

For the last couple of weeks a main focus of the bands worries has been finding a second guitarist after their last guitarist did not come through for them. Even though the last guitarist had good equipment and a place to practice for the whole band, his skills could not be ignored. The fact that he could not understand basic music theory commands just was not going to work with the band. The guitarist has stayed on as a friend and gives help every now and then, but for the most part he is not dealing with much anymore. This has made the leader of the band quickly scramble for another guitarist to teach his songs and help out. Currently he is using a friend that is still in school to play with the group in order to play several gigs that they have going on in the future weeks. This new guy will only be temporary since he is still in school, but he will help tremendously as they already have a few events scheduled to perform. With the advent of the first guitarist being let go, they then needed to find a new place to have all of their practices. They looked into renting certain places that cater to bands needing to practice, but those were looking to be a little expensive. So just recently did they start practicing in a rented out storage unit. This room is 10'x15' and is half the price of any of the other places that the leader looked.

The practices now consist of most days starting at 10am and going until around 7pm with slight breaks for lunch and dinner. This is pretty necessary because everyone is needing learn all of the songs in the repertoire in order to play the first events of this new band which is happening next saturday. During the practices they mostly consist of the leader simply picking a couple of the songs for a period of the day and running through them while fixing the mistakes that occur. What is really interesting also is the fact that during this time they will also improve on the songs by adding in solo sections, teases, etc. that were not originally there. This will be perfect for making the live aspect better and more appealing.

Recently we all went to the South by Southwest convention in Austin. The band didn't get to play a show this year but there were plenty of opportunities to network with other people. A producer/manager was going to be flying in that the leader of the band knew. He has shown interest in the band in the past but hasn't made a move yet. The leader picked him up from the airport and talked with him about possibly taking him on. The producer still seemed to hold the same stance but showed considerable more interest and just needed to listen to the band's new music a little bit more. Later at SXSW the band was able to get into a promotional event that they thought was not possible before. The band is being promoted somewhat by GrooveShark currently and they were also at SXSW. They had a recording studio on an RV that they brought where they would record audio and video of various bands that they are trying to promote. This wasn't going to happen for my band at first but they ended up having an opening for them that they pounced on immediately.