Greetings, friends. First, I am very excited to be launching the brand new loydvanhorn.com! This is months of work coming to fruition, so hopefully you all enjoy it as well. This will be my one-stop shop for all things LVH. Find out where I am playing and what I am doing. Plus, with this new blog, I can keep you up-to-date with my various goings on as a musician who splits time with a day job.
That segues me nicely to the point of this blog. I figured no one cares about just any ordinary musician blog.
"Bought some new strings and a guitar pedal today..."
Riveting.
However I feel that as a musician one of the things that is often not discussed too often is the rigors of trying to balance a day job with your aspirations as a musician and performer.
So, here, I hope to show you some of the fun but also the challenges of this split personality lifestyle.
Part of me is envious of people that are in bands. There are multiple people that can help split the workload:
- Promotion work
- Booking gigs
- Managing the social media presence
- Writing songs
- Networking with other musicians and venues
- Hauling equipment
- Set up and tear down at gigs
As a solo performer, I don't really have that luxury. But I also don't have to deal with obnoxious egos, girlfriend/boyfriend drama, people that don't practice between rehearsals, theft (yup, have had my equipment stolen before), alcohol/drug problems, splitting the money...so I guess it works out.
It just means that I have to work that much harder to accomplish what I want. If I am going to book a bunch of gigs, I have to be the one doing not only the reach out to venues (which, usually you have to do A LOT of reaching out at each venue or networking through other musicians to even get a response), adding it to the calendar at all of the various online sites, setting up Facebook events, creating promo flyers/posters and doing street marketing - there is no one there to help with that.
What makes it truly hard is when you also have a regular 9-5 job that you have to work around. The salary and benefits options for musicians isn't exactly all that great, so you have to make some compromises and sacrifices along the way.
So how do you balance it out? How do you make it work? That is what this blog will attempt to explore. As I find little tips and tricks along the way, I will share them here so that other musicians can find perhaps put them to good use. For my fans and non-musicians that stop by, hopefully it will show you the amount of work and passion that goes into writing, recording, releasing and performing these songs.
And if you have any tips or tricks, I would love to hear those too! You can leave comments here on the blog or email them to me at: loydvanhornmusic@gmail.com .
Till next time,
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