In this episode, Jared Judge reflects on a whirlwind weekend of gigs, including a high-end event at Denver's Civic Center Park and a beautiful wedding at Evergreen Lake House. Jared shares the benefits of playing high-end gigs, the importance of building relationships in the music industry, and how strategic marketing can help musicians secure premium opportunities. He also discusses the recent relaunch of the Corporate Gig Challenge.

"High-end gigs offer luxuries that could be everyday experiences, like having a sound engineer, getting catered meals, and being treated with the respect your talent deserves."

- BookLive: Everything you need to start marketing and booking your act online (without having to hire or rely on a tech team!)​
- Your First Gig: Everything you need to book your first high-paying gig.
- Fulltime Music Masterclass: The Secret To an Unlimited Stream of High-Paying Private Event Gigs …Without Spending a Fortune on Online Advertising or Having Any Connections!
- Fulltime Music Academy (Gig Vault): 24,665 High-End Venues + Event Planners: Use this directory to book your highest-paid gig to-date.
- Breaking Into High-end Gigs Masterclass: How I Went From Broke Musician to Thriving By Breaking Into These Largely Unknown High-Paying Gigs

What's up, renegade musicians? It's Jared Judge. Welcome back to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast, where we see what the majority of musicians are doing and how it does not lead to success, happiness, fulfillment, and money, and we do the opposite. That's the renegade musician way.

All right, so I'm coming off the heels of a very busy gigging weekend. I had gigs pretty much every day, and then I stacked a bunch of things on top of it, including a concert that I attended as an audience member. Some of you might know that I'm a big electronic dance music fan.

And so I went to this thing called Foam Wonderland at the National Western complex in Denver, and it was an EDM concert that actually, the gimmick there was.

They had foam cannons that they were shooting foam out into the audience. And I don't know, maybe I'm just too old for this crap, but to me, it felt like a gimmick.

And the. I don't know. I'm a musician, so I value entertainment and good sound quality.

And unfortunately, the venue, because it was a foam party, basically, they were limited in what venues they could use, right? They couldn't just use a nice ballroom with upholstered seats.

Now, they had to use a place that would be fine if there was foam blasted everywhere. So the national western complex was the place to do that, because at this national western complex, what it's typically used for is, like, all these different activities around, you know, western things, like stock shows where they show off different cattle and rodeo type things.

And so if you can imagine that having animals in this place leaves a certain byproduct on the ground, and they can easily clean it up.

And so that is why it was perfect for a foam show. And so, as a result, the floors were all completely concrete, the walls were metal, there was absolutely no sound dampening.

And so it just had this really difficult sound situation. I felt bad for the sound engineers because there was not much they could do to fix the venue, but they couldn't choose a better sounding venue because of the nature of the foam party.

So, anyway, it's probably my least favorite EDM show that I've been to, and that's okay.

I did get tickets to see Zed in September, October, actually, at Red Rocks, because he is launching a new album in August, and this is the tour for that album. Anyway, so the gigs that I played played one Saturday before going to the concert called Diner en Blanc, which is French for dinner in white.

And this is, if you look it up, d I n e r e n b l a n c this is kind of an international phenomenon that I think started during COVID where a group of people felt like, hey, we're isolated, distancing from each other.

We just want a community. So let's get together at a random location, a park, civic center, whatever, and have a picnic, and everybody, let's just wear white. So I started in France.

The idea caught fire, and now it happens regularly in cities across the country. And so I was hired by the event planner to perform for this one, and it was awesome. The challenge here for this particular gig was I had to wear all white, too.

And I don't know about you guys, but I don't have, like, white clothes just lying around. And so my wife graciously helped me out, and we went to a bunch of different stores and eventually found some.

Some white pants and a white shirt to go along with it, and white shoes and, yeah, there's some videos on my Instagram.

People have posted in their stories tagging me, which is nice. So I just reposted those to my story, and it was cool. A really interesting event, 600 attendees.

And there was a sound company, which that's one of the things I love about these high end gigs is that there's always. Well, not always, but most of the time there's a sound engineer, and there was also plenty of photography and videography there. So I hope that I get some really nice footage of what I.

What I do. So I plugged into the sound systems board and everything. I initially thought I was just going to use my own board and give them an XLR output to their board, but we tried, and because they were using some very high powered wireless equipment, it was interfering with my wireless equipment.

I used the Lakato wireless guitar transmitter to plug my electric violin wirelessly into my mixer. And because their equipment, I think, was using similar frequencies, whenever I played a note, there was just like, a static or warbly sound to it.

So we wound up using their wireless setup and their wireless in ear monitoring, which is actually better because I'm using a Yamaha mixing board.

It's the MG ten xu, for those of you who know that. And the monitor output for it does not have a separate in ear mix, so you have to mix it for, you know, the front of house sound. And then that's the same mix that you get for your monitors, which maybe we'll talk about in ear monitoring in another episode.

But the cool thing about modern boards, they were using, like, an allen and heath board, so you can have a separate monitor mix, meaning you could mix it so that it sounds good to the audience, and then you can mix a separate channel or a separate.

Yeah, I guess it's a channel so your in ear monitors hear something different. And in my case, I wanted to hear a bit more of my instrument in the mix, more so than what the general population should hear.

And so that was a nice benefit of using their system. I should have just used their system from the get go, but it all worked great. Music was good, and, yeah, interesting thing about this, it was outdoors in, I think it's called Civic Center park in Denver, a really cool spot by, like, all the courthouses and things like that.

Public library, art museum right by. But it was at, like, 06:00 and it was still hot. I think it was, like, high eighties, maybe early nineties.

And because it was a French themed thing, you know, you had to bring your own food. It was a picnic, but they provided wine to all the attendees.

And so about halfway through my, my set, somebody at one of the tables, well, I didn't notice this, but somebody at one of the tables passed out, and their face was, like, on the table, and I didn't notice this.

The only reason I noticed it was when I started to hear sirens and saw a fire truck and an ambulance pulling into the park where we were. It was interesting.

Nobody, like, communicated with me or anything, and, you know, there were still 599 other guests who were still enjoying their meal, so I had to keep playing.

The show must go on. Uh, so I kept, kept going, and then they took care of the person who passed out.

I saw them come too, so it's not like they died, which is good, because I don't know if that's ever happened to me where somebody has died on a gig, and I hope it never does, but, yeah, as a performer, you know, I'd say that was challenging to me, because I had to keep going despite knowing that the, there was, like, somebody having a health emergency during the gig.

But, yeah, it was good afterwards, like, a couple of the attendees just came up to me, like, hey, do you accept tips? And I said, sure.

And somebody gave me a 20, the other person gave me a ten, and then the third person came out, gave me a couple of, like, ones, which is really nice. I did not expect to get tipped on that gig, but they tipped me anyway.

And then the sound engineers said, yeah, you sound great. We're based in Colorado Springs. We work a lot at the National Olympic Museum.

We're the exclusive av provider there, and I'd love to give your card to the organizer down there. I think it'd be great. And I said, sure, sounds good.

And then the organizer of this specific event also said, yeah, you did great job. And she mentioned, like, she typically hires this other string group called Spinfany, based in Denver for these things. And she's like, you did such a great job.

I don't need to hire Spinfany again, which I felt really nice, but like, I'm not here to take jobs from other musicians, I'm here to create more jobs for all musicians. So I hope that they still get a plenty of work. And I'm sure they do.

They. They're incredible. So that was that gig.

And then I went back to the garage where my car was parked and changed from my all white clothing in my car to an attire more appropriate for a foam party, and then went to the national western complex.

So that was fun. And then the next day, Sunday, I played my first ever wedding at the Evergreen Lake house.

Really beautiful venue up in Evergreen, Colorado, 40 minutes away from my house, up in the mountains. And it's gorgeous. Surrounded by mountains on a lake.

And the wedding was actually like on a patio dock right on the lake. So there were a lot of like kayakers and paddle boarders who were kind of watching the wedding from in the water, which was nice.

And yeah, I played the ceremony and the cocktail hour, and I don't remember if I've done an episode about backlinks yet.

But for marketing your act, you want to be found on Google when somebody is searching for your specific type of entertainment for their event.

And one of the ways to influence Google to put your link towards the top is actually by getting links to your website from other people's website.

So I've been implementing a really cool strategy, which I might dive deep into here where I trade blog posts with other people in this industry.

So, for example, I wrote a blog post recently about an officiant that should publish actually, like today or tomorrow, unless it's already been published. Gotta check with my assistant. So I wrote an article about this officiant and she wrote an article about me, and we published it to our own websites, and so we gave each other backlinks.

I also did the same for a photographer, Christine, where I wrote an article about her. She wrote an article about me. We published it to our own websites and published it and got more links.

And the crazy thing is that at this wedding, both of those people were actually working the wedding with me. Like, it is crazy. The way the world works.

But none of us had any idea the other would have been working at that wedding. So it was like, oh, hey, oh my gosh. We just had a chat on Zoom and wrote about each other.

How cool is this? That's what I'm talking about when I mean like building relationships with other vendors in this industry. And I gave a link to them and yeah, they gave one to me too. But this created opportunities for us to meet over Zoom, get some face to face time.

And then at the wedding it was like, we're friends now. Like we said hi, hugged it out, you know. And the photographer took an extra picture of me posted to her Instagram.

And so there was a story of me playing on her Instagram. I put that on my story as well. And so that's just the power of building these relationships.

So crazy busy weekend for me. Today's Monday. I'm exhausted.

Kind of want to take a nap, but I. The show must go on, right? So I'm working today, working on building some support articles for BookLive's support website. That way you want to know how to write a contract using the BookLive software.

There will be a video showing you exactly how along with written step by step instructions. So yeah, you can find that at support@booklive.com. alright.

By the way, I've relaunched the corporate gig challenge. This is an encore version so it's pre recorded. But if you're interested in taking the corporate gig challenge to learn how to book some high end corporate gigs like this dine en Blanc, go to FulltimeMusicAcademy.com

corporate challenge and you should see a registration link for the free challenge right there. So that's FulltimeMusicAcademy.com corporate challenge.

All right, that's all I got for you guys today. Thanks for tuning into another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. Remember, “Your music will not market itself!”.

Bye, everybody.