Guide for new Bands: Merchandise

Something I've been seeing a lot lately with new bands is this 'Do or die' mentality, where they think that just making the music will get them rich. 15 years ago, and I'd totally agree, but in this day and age, where music can be pulled from the internet in an instant, and CDs sell for less than a CD player, money, especially for new bands, has to come from somewhere else. Merchandise is just one option.

To get started, lets make something very very clear; in order to make money, you have to spend money. The first time you spend money on your own band merchandise, it will set you back a few hundred dollars. You can either take out a loan to pay for it, or just save your pennies and pay for it yourself. The first time you do order it, youll most likely buy a low amount, and I encourage being a little conservative the first time around, who knows how much will sell. Iv seen nights where bands sell one shirt and thats it, other nights, bands run out of merch. Its very hard to tell how the night will turn out, so its easier to say 'Sorry, we are all out' then it is to realize that your not making your money back.

I personally know how tough it can be to get started; though my band isnt selling merchandise yet, I handle the merch for a sister band, and It can be very stressful. When you start out, you will have to force yourself to limit yourself, go kinda cheap. You wont be able to sell those awesome, 17 color abstract design shirts with tribal art on the sleeves, the name on the lower part of the shirt and crazy designs on the back. One place I highly suggest is starting at http://www.customink.com, and using their library of extensive images and fonts to design a shirt. Their prices for shirts range, depending on what sort of shirt you make it on, how many colors you use, whether you put stuff on the back, and how many you order. A plain white shirt with just black on the front, 50 will run you about $6.50 a piece, or $325.50 total. Awesome deal.

Another good merchandise idea is to cash in on the silicone bracelet craze. http://www.wristbands-with-a-message.com is an awesome site that lets you design and order custom silicone bracelets for very cheap. A simple black bracelet with your bands name will cost $1.80 each, or $89.50 for 50. These are a great idea because you can sell them cheap, for example $2.00 a piece, and people love them and I always see people asking what other peoples say. I personally wear 2 each day, and usually once a week, someone will ask what they say. Bam, theres advertisement at work!

The last product/website I want to mention is http://www.purebuttons.com. Oh yea, 1 inch buttons, I see these things everywhere, and they are cheap cheap cheap! Purebuttons sells 100 buttons for about $18.oo. Oh yea, thats awesome, because they can sell to the public, for example, around $0.50 and your making $32.00 in profit! Thats wonderful! These sell cheap, and a lot of times, people enjoy buying more than one. These are like stamps, or charm bracelets for the modern day, and even I have lots. Im not sure a band could go without these kinds of advertisement and money making items!

Selling the merch is the easiest part. Find a buddy who wouldnt mind giving up a few feet of space to hold a few boxes (or heck, you can do it) and make sure they can attend all of the shows, or atleast have someone they can trust who can attend the shows they miss. Have them set up a card table at the venue in allowed areas, lay out some merchandise on the table, and just sit and smile. Its really not too hard, and if you want to be extra awesome, give away some free shirts to some die hard fans. Its pretty lame when you perform a show and not one person has your shirt on.

To wrap up, lets go over some important things to remember with selling merch.

1. Merch WILL make a lot of your bands income while your still new

2. Merch WILL NOT fully support your band

3. Merch IS advertisement 

4. People DO buy merchandise, though it can be slow

5. Merch is something you CAN NOT pass up!

I hope someone can find this useful! :D

Pulse Pro 5 piece review part 2

Continuing with the review, lets now take a gander at the hardware and cymbals that accompanied this set.

The set comes with Pulse 14 hi hats, 16 crash and 18 crash/ride.

First, the 14 hi hats.


Closed, these things are almost silent. They are kinda gross sounding, and really lack that good 'chick' sound we all want. Open these puppies up, and its like you have a new set of cymbals! When open, they are very bright and ring out with a decent decay. Its almost strange, because they are very nice sounding open, but horrible closed. These can be replaced, but if your on a budget, most drummers can live with them. I can, and they were one of the last things I replaced.


Next, the crash.

Another thing that surprised me is how much I enjoy this cymbal! This crash, which is STILL part of my current set up, crashed loud, is nice and in the middle, and the decay is short, but not too short. It sounds great and doesnt over power, even when I ride on it. Surprisingly, I play metal on this cymbal, and after 2 years of slamming on it, it hasnt broke, is just barely, almost unnoticeable warped, and really, just has some stick marks and thats it. Hasnt lost any sound, and is amazing for a cymbal that was FREE!


Finally, the crash/ride


To be honest, I dont like crash/rides. To me, they are just too washy to be rides, and too low and loud to be crashes. But I must review, so here I go. As a ride, like I said, it is pretty washy, but the bell is pretty nice. Remember, this was FREE with the set. As a crash, this thing is loud and loooow, sometimes, it almost sounds good as this low roaring cymbal, but the decay seems like days and just doesnt work for fast paced music like metal. It washes out everything else and just gets rather annoying. Playing it like a ride is alright, it does resound loud enough to be heard, and isnt too pingy, but just not pingy enough.


Now lets talk about hardware.

The pedal.

I have no pic because the piece that held the beater to the pedal, what I thought was metal, broke. Unbelievably cheap. MUST be replaced with a double kick. Almost pathetic how cheap it is.

Stands.



Well, the straight stand and the boom stand are decent, but the wing nuts that hold your cymbal on it, well I have no pic of those because they are plastic and shattered. I dont mean broke in half, i mean, just exploded.



Finally, the hi hat stand.


Yes, that is tape. The nut right there that holds the lower hi hat cymbal up striped almost a week after I got it. Oh yea, that sucks out loud. This is rather poor and will be another thing that should be replaced right away.


The cymbals themselves can be surprisingly good considering that they are FREE with the set. I was rather impressed, they actually sound better than Sabian B8s and Solars. To be honest, if you get new cymbals, you could keep the crash as a second crash and use the crash/ride as an effect cymbal. They are built tough and have taken 2 years of my metal thrashing.

I wish I could say the same for the hardware. It is seriously poor and almost pathetic. The stand wing nuts are a joke, the hi hat stand is almost useless, and the snare stand wobbles more than the cymbals do! Spend money on new hardware and you should have a decent set.

Overall, with this set, new heads and hardware and youd have an impressive set that could revival some entry level pearl and mapex. This set is greatly under appreciated and, take it from me, with a little bit of time and effort, this set will sound awesome.

Cymbal rating (1-10) - 7.5 - Im taking a leap with this rating, but 2 years of metal with little to no damage backs it up.

Hardware rating (1 - 10) - 3 - Id put 2 or 1, fortunately, the stands still actually stand up, witch is surprising.

Overall average rating - 6 + 7.5 + 3 / 3 = 5.5 - Had the hardware been better, this set would be a decent competitor.

Pulse Pro 5 piece review Part 1

I promised a review, but I decided to do a drum review because that is more my style.

Pulse Pro 5-piece drum set with Cymbals
pruchased from http://www.musiciansfriend.com
Price - ~$400 (I got it on sale for 300)

I will be reviewing my personal drumset, my Pulse Pro 5 Piece. I will address all aspects, good and bad, and include pics of all parts.



Lets start out with the biggest and boldest part of the set; the Bass Drum. Boasting a modest 22 X 16 Bass drum, the front head has a 6 inch port and the Pulse logo on front. The bass comes with 1 ply heads which are rather bad quality and very very high sounding. The Shell itself is rather nice and has held up well against my metal playing. Overall, the bass is rather high, but with some muffling and new heads, sounds pretty good.



With my original bass drum heads, the batter head cracked and eventually a large hole, about 8 inches formed and, until I got a new drum head, was simply taped up with duct tape.



The next part Ill address is the Toms, including the mounted toms and the floor tom.
Like most 5 piece sets, the mounted toms are 12 X 10 and 13 X 11 and the floor tom is a 16 X 16. All three, Iv noticed, are very high, and very resonant. For metal, this isnt that amazing, and is rather annoying, but if your music calls for it, they are good. When tuned, they are all rather nice sounding and are mostly well defined. All 3 heads that come with are rather unimpressive and when replaced, sound amazing.


Next, one of the most important aspects of a good drum set; the snare.
The snare that comes with the set, I could describe in 1 word; Foggy. I was rather unhappy with the snare because it is very very hard to get a decent snap out of it, it isnt very good, and even with a new head, its not that great. Personally, I highly suggest you switch the whole snare out all together. It is a 5-1/2 X 14 steel snare.


Just speaking in terms of the drums themselves, they arent bad considering this set is about 300 bucks. New heads make this set sound like a decent set, and some muffling really can bring your sound down to a more metal style sound. The snare has to be replaced with the heads, and the toms can be rather hard to tune due to the way the toms are held to the hardware. The base is pretty resonant, but, if muffled a little and tuned right, can seriously roar. My band does complain that it is over powering, and honestly, when has that ever been a problem? ;)

Drum rating (1 - 10) - 6 - Not bad, def. worth the money, and serious potiential with some changes to the hardware and heads.

Long night

Oh wow. So its 9:30 in the morning as I type this. Last night was such a party, Im so tired now and my head is throbbing. One of my close friends was having a costume party at her house, so me and the gf went. We are idiots though, so we dressed up as vampires, which oh so original.

Well, we get there, me in my black suit with cap, piercings and dark make up, and Amanda in her also dark make up and a long Victorian dress, and look around... Every girl but Amanda was wearing some fairy-style skirt. One was like a glitter fairy, two were alice in wonderland themed, one was like Goldilocks. Instantly, Amanda was mad cuz she looked at a costume that would have matched all of theirs, but then decided not. Well, we all went to a place called Dinosaur world, where they had a haunted house kinda thing set up. That was fun, not too scary.

After Dino world, we went back to my friend's house and partied a little more. Then, someone made the dumbest mistake... Everyone left the little party room, and went to the living room to watch movies, leaving me, my gf, my friend and her bf in the room, unsupervised, with dance music and lights. -_- Use your imagination...

Waking up, I feel sooooo bad. My everything hurts, so Im like blaaah and I was gonna call my gf and say hey, but she broke her phone. :/

I need to practice and work on my songs, I need to do those reviews, Im gonna die.

Halloween shopping with my beautiful

Today, after school, me and my lovely went shopping for halloween costumes. We made a horrible mistake of going to, of all places, Wal-Mart. :/ There was one aisle of costumes, half were little kids, the other half were trampy adult ones. Finally, an hour after looking through the same 5 racks of slutty female costumes, we found one that was decent that we could match in. She got a Elizabethan Dress/Vampire costume, and Im gonna wear a black suit with a black shirt and red tie, probably dark dark glasses, and a cape and fangs and we will both be vampires. How original...

While I was there, I told my gal that I needed to find something... I did find it, and I walked out with a bag of a couple dozen balloons and a small hand pump. The pump was about 3 bucks so Im not expecting much, just some nights, I dont like inflating too much.

Ill be sure to do a full review on both the Wal-mart balloons and the pump. Thats something I should start doing; reviews of anything I buy. :)

Yesterday, I started another song, so Im pretty excited about that, we are chugging right along pretty quickly. I found a local place that does T-Shirts for mega cheap, and I know someone who works there, so I can get a discount, which means we will have merch for sale during our first show! Hooray making money! :)

Ill be posting later with the balloon and pump review. :D

Wow, pinched nerve and trying to practice

So today, at school, I pinched a nerve in my shoulder and it hurts. I dont mean 'Owie, I got a papercut' hurts, I mean My WHOLE ARM AND SHOULDER ARE ON FIRE!!! I can feel the pain go from my shoulder down my arm and also up my neck. Its so painful. D:
I was trying to move a filing cabinent today for someone, and I pulled up waaay fast and wrong, and just felt like I got hit by lightning and was so close to crying.
I came home and tried to practice drumming and it was just so painful I did about 3 minutes worth and then said screw it.

Here I am, with Ice on my shoulder, pain meds in my belly and tears in my eyes (not really) typing this out for yall.

Im so excited, I had Phsysics class today, which is a horrible class. I mean, really; 'So, we know stuff moves, lets calculate why it moves!' And my answer is 'Well, it moves because GOD SAID SO!!!' Yea, so instead of listening, I started working on a song, and Im almost done with the first draft, which is great because we need some original material.



Also today, my rhythem guitarist wrote out a good bass line for my bass player, so she can keep up with them. My bass player is my gf, and she isnt quite at the level the rest of us are, so we are working on getting her up to snuff.

ALSO today, I got to talking to one of our sister bands, and though they are show ready and decent and got their act together, they have 0 merchandise. Now, with bands today, a lot of your money is from merch, and they have NONE. I am gonna talk to them further about it and most likely, Ill end up doing merch for them. This is good because Ill be able to network out for my band, so every body wins. :)

10/19/08 Practice and balloons

So Monday, I got new balloons!!! I'm good friends with a guy who runs a balloon import business, and so I do some advertising for him and so he hooks me up with balloons. I had a gift certificate too... ;)
I ordered some balloons, and he included so many!! I only ordered 72 Black 17" balloons and an Italian 5' Doll. He included an EXTRA Doll, along with about 15 bucks of extras.... Hes awesome!



Today, the band was over for practice. Whats odd, and the main reason we aren't ready for shows yet, is because, when we practice, we have little to no organization and so we waste a ton of time, plus, we have no original songs, so we usually spend 2 hours just jamming and playing stuff that sounds cool. Today was no different; 2 hours of jamming, an hour of talking about plans for the band, and me and my gf making out with the other 2 watching. :)

If anyone ever has any ideas on how to better our practices, please leave me a comment and Ill gladly pass it on, and be ever thankful. :D

Intro Post of sorts

So my name is Josh. I live in Florida, and I'm a drummer. Believe it or not, I'm actually a writer who is writing my first novel right now, just don't be surprised if I type like a total goof-ball on here, as I'm not really trying to be super proper. I will try to break this post up into many different "categories" of sorts to better describe myself, so lets get into it.

My first and greatest love is my girlfriend, and for many privacy reasons, I will refer to her as my girlfriend. She is an amazing girl who is more beautiful than any other (oh yea, I went there, who wants some?!) and I say this knowing full well that she wont be reading this. My full intention is to speak the truth, and she is truly one in a trillion, and totally amazing. She plays guitar, Ibanez, and is dropping back in my band to play bass, as a new experience for her. She is a year younger than me, and we love going to the movies, renting movies, and playing with my balloons. :)

My biggest hobby is collecting balloons and playing with them. I love balloons, from small water balloons up to huge 72" climb-in balloons. I love blowing them up and covering my gf with them, or sitting on them. I do not pop them though. Popping them is a waste, and it hurts my ears. Its rather upsetting when they do pop. :/

Finally, I'm a drummer for a Metal band. Quite the contrast to the lover boy who collects balloons. I do try to keep it secret from my friends, so that I don't lose my hardcore persona. My band is still pretty new, consisting of 2 guitarists, a bass player, and me. We are currently hunting for a vocalist, for now, me and our lead guitarists are making do. Right now, I have a rather basic set; a 5 piece Pulse Set with 4 Sabian Cymbals. I have a double pedal and am quite good with the set I have now. I plan on expanding my cymbals soon, and then getting a second double bass.


For my band, we have a goal of being show ready by the end of the year, playing with 2 of my friends bands and kicking butt. Right now, we don't have any original songs, but we can do a few Blessthefall covers.

That's about it for my introduction, hope y'all will stop by and read my posts, Ill try to post every day or at least every other day. :)