Tuesday, October 08, 2024
In this episode, Jared shares his excitement about heading to Aspen for his first wedding gig in the mountains, discussing the challenges of long drives and balancing various music gigs. He recaps his experience playing at the Adams County Fair and how these performances can lead to future high-end bookings. Jared also talks about the importance of finding your musical niche and why the journey to success is all about persistence and passion.
"I keep thinking to myself, this is what I do for a living—I get paid to play music. How freaking cool is that?"
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What's up, renegade musicians? It's Jared Judge. Welcome back to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. I am on my way to a gig in Aspen, Colorado.
This is my first gig in Aspen, and I'm excited because the drive here has been beautiful. I am about 3 hours into this drive, which. It's a three hour, 45 minutes drive, almost 4 hours of driving, which is just crazy.
It's super long drive. But the gig itself is a wedding ceremony plus reception. And I'm actually being subcontracted by one of the larger conglomerate bands that I've talked about in previous episodes.
So if you want to see which one I'm talking about, you'll have to binge listen to all of my episodes. Actually, there's one that calls them out by name. You could probably figure it out.
And so this specific gig is, they're paying me a. It's a have to drive, you know, three and a half, 4 hours each way, and then play probably like 4 hours of music. And so I actually did the math on this, and it comes out to roughly $66 an hour, which is actually quite a bit lower than what I normally would take for this kind of gig.
You know, I'm not getting paid 66 an hour for the performance. I'm getting paid 66 an hour on average, including the travel time. But so I wouldn't normally take these.
In fact, I've been offered gigs in Aspen from the same company for $500 that did not include the reception performance. And the reason why I'm taking this one is truly because this is my first time that I will be playing with a band. And this specific band, they do tons of gigs, these high end gigs, not just in the mountains, but also in Denver proper, which.
Denver is a big metropolis, there are mountains on one side of it. But in general, if you play a gig in Denver, you don't have to do mountain driving. And you can keep your commute under an hour to get from one side of Denver to the other.
But because this gig is my first one with a band, I think it's a great opportunity to show them what I'm capable of as an electric violinist, fiddler. And my hope is that they start to ask me for these other gigs and I become a more regular member of their roster. Up until this point, I think that I've been, like, on the bottom of their sub list just because they don't know me.
The one up in Chicago that my string quartet still plays for when they do gigs in Milwaukee, they know me. So I'm the first call in Milwaukee. I don't play any of those gigs, but I subcontracted to my team up in Milwaukee.
But I'm the first call in Milwaukee. Here, I'm just, you know, small potatoes, no name Jared. And finally, you know, in fact, the way this came to me was that one of the people who plays electric violin for this band also has played a couple gigs for extreme strings.
And they had some health issue come up where they reached out to me because they knew that I could play both the ceremony and reception. Because there are two different skills for violinists. Most violinists are classically trained, and so we can play wedding ceremonies very well.
Even though the majority of wedding ceremonies are like covers. We're playing, you know, Taylor Swift's wildest dreams as the bride walks down the aisle. But it's still, you know, not that far away from our classical upbringing, where we read the sheet music and play beautiful music in rhythm.
Good rhythm and good, good intonation. But playing with a band for a reception is a very different skill that, luckily, my past couple years of learning strumboing with Tracy Silverman, which is how to play your electric violin, kind of like a guitar. And just the experience of playing with backing tracks myself puts me in a pretty confident position going into this, even though I've never played with a band before.
So I'm excited, not really nervous. Like, the big thing that I was am nervous for is the drive, because it's a long drive. I'm about a half hour away still, and my foot is very tired.
I've been using cruise control quite a bit. I've had to stop and use the bathroom a couple times, which is the reality of driving to gigs. And actually, one of my stops was in Vail.
And I actually didn't realize that Aspen was quite a bit further than Vail. I think once you get to Vail, you still have an hour and a half to go to get to Aspen. So I stopped in Aspen, and I stopped at this gas station on the far west side of the town, which, there's a traffic circle right around, right in front of that.
That gas station. And as I'm, like, getting back into my car, I hear tires screeching, and I see a motorcycle go down. And it was really scary.
But, like, I went over to see if they were okay. Other people had already gotten to him, and he was okay. There was no injury, and his motorcycle didn't look damaged.
And he actually got right back up and turned on his motorcycle and then just kept driving. I don't think that he crashed into another car. I think just going around the.
Around the traffic circle, he may have like leaned a little bit too far and clipped some of the metal on the underside of his bike. So that was kind of scary. The other thing is, you know, like, I know my car needs new tires and it's kind of an older car, so, you know, hopefully nothing goes wrong on these gigs.
At least when you're a half hour away to a gig, you can always Uber there. Here, you can't really Uber from Denver to Aspen. It'd be a very expensive Uber drive.
So anyway, I will let you guys know how that goes. I am very excited for it, but I wanted to do a little recap of this past Thursday, because this past Thursday was my first ever fair performance. I played for the Adams County Fair, which is a county fair based in Brighton, Colorado.
I was about 30 minutes, 40 minutes away from where I live. And yeah, it was so cool. I've never played for a fair like this before.
It had your typical carnival games. It had those rides that, you know, they're temporary fare rides that look really scary and rickety that my parents always kind of forbade me from going on just because they're like death traps is what my parents would say. So that was really cool.
And they had me on. They called it the entertainment stage. They had two stages.
One was like, there was a rodeo stage, really big gigantic line array with, you know, ten main speakers and several subwoofers. And that was for like the big name national acts that they brought in, most of whom were country. And then they had the entertainment stage, which was right by the bar.
I think there was only like 1 bar in this. This fair. And so the entertainment stage was under a tent and by the bar.
And they had picnic tables underneath this tent. But this also was a pretty big stage, probably like 75ft across. And there also were two.
Two nice line arrays on either side of the stage, probably like five speakers, and then three subwoofers under each. And then on stage there they had backline, there was a drum set and then lots of amplifiers there. I didn't need any of that because I play electric violin with backing tracks.
Then there was also a nice lighting array and a smoke machine. And so they had a lighting engineer there too. I played from 730 to 830, and there was supposed to be somebody from like six to seven, but there was no performer there.
So the sound engineer and I, we just kind of chilled out for a bit and then we got to get set up early, I plugged my backing tracks and my electric violin into. He ran a couple di boxes to the front of the stage, which I still don't exactly know what Di boxes do. If anybody can enlighten me, let me know.
My crude understanding of Di boxes is that they kind of eliminate signal noise for a long stretches of cable. Like, I think they invert the signal. They run two copies of the signal.
One of them is inverted, and then at the end of the Di box, when you plug it into the mixer, it kind of uses the. The main signal and the inverse signal, and they sum those signals together, then they get the pure interference signal, which then they subtract from the main signal. So you get just a complete clean signal.
That's like my. I guess that is kind of a deeper understanding of it, but I don't know if that's actually accurate. So I would love, if somebody has more experience, could tell me more what these mysterious boxes do and why they're necessary.
So, yeah, I played an hour set, played some fun music. My wife and her brother came and cheered me on. And I also got some great footage.
I put my phone on a tripod. I did bring a DSLR camera and a separate tripod for it, but I forgot the battery for that DSLR camera. Second time I've ever done that.
So I could not capture two angles, just the one. And then my wife caught some photos and videos from the audience perspective, which was really cool. And then, you know, I had so much fun playing.
But afterwards, there was this couple who came up to me from the audience and asked me for my card and asked if I ever do weddings. So I thought that was fantastic. It was a great way to funnel potential, you know, high end gig clients to come hear me live.
And I don't know if they came because they saw on my website that I put this on our schedule or if they were just there, you know, looking for a fun concert to go to. But either way, I might get a wedding gig out of this, too. And the fair paid pretty well, too.
$500 for an hour, which is not bad. And that's just as a soloist. So, yeah, all in all, it's been a great, great week of gigs for me.
I've been taking so many gigs, I'm feeling like I should probably slow down a. A little bit, you know, don't get me wrong, I'm having so much fun, but I don't need to be doing all of this, so I'm going to probably slow down just a little bit and it'll naturally slow down as we get closer to the winter months. It is August 3 right now or something like that.
And yeah, it'll slow down as we get into like October, November, December, which is good because that'll be time to settle in and start promoting for the next year. And my goal is not to necessarily take on more and more gigs here. It's to keep raising my rates so that I don't have to take more and more gigs.
I think I'm already off to a pretty good start with that. And then hopefully, you know, this band that I'm about to play for thinks I do a great job, starts asking me to do these thousand dollar gigs closer to Denver so I don't have to commute. And, yeah, just keep.
Keep building the brand. So thinking about tonight, I am going to scope out the situation. I did bring my tripod for my phone, but because it's somebody else's gig, you know, I'm gonna be very cautious about recording this gig, mainly because I don't necessarily have permission to do so.
I might try to ask the bandleader if that's okay if I take some, some video. The main reason is I have no footage of myself playing with a band. And I think that would make great marketing and promotional materials for myself.
You know, not that I'm going to put together a band and compete with them, but even just to show other musicians, like, if you're considering bringing a fiddler into your band, here's what I could do for you.
So I'm going to try to record some, some footage from the evening reception and maybe from the ceremony, too. That would be pretty cool to get some string quartet footage, but the main goal is to get some footage for the band.
So that's all I got for you guys today. I'm going to pay back attention to the road, but I appreciate you guys coming on this journey with me, and I'm excited to see what comes out of it. So hopefully you guys are pushing and promoting yourself just as hard as I am.
Because it's a lot of work, but it is so incredibly it, like, I keep thinking to myself, this is what I do for a living. I get to get paid to play music. How freaking cool is that?
And I'll be honest, back in Wisconsin, when I was playing a lot of weddings in the string quartet, I didn't really have that thought.
So I think I've found my niche. Like, the thing that really brings me joy is this electric violin playing modern music. And it's so much fun.
So I hope you guys are having as much fun as I am, so I'm gonna hop off here. Thanks for tuning into another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast, by the way.
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