I know that it's difficult for everyone at the moment given the economic turmoil that's affecting most of the earth. This is just about being a musician and trying to fund it.
A packet of half decent (Ernie Ball) electric guitar strings cost £6, not bad at £1 a string, but every guitarist should have a main guitar and a spare guitar, strings tend to only last four weeks before they start to noticeably lose their tone and ability to be tuned correctly. So that is £12 every month - £144 a year just on strings. Then there is the usual maintenance problems with amps in particular proving a pain in the arse. A full service and re-valve on my Bogner recently cost me over £500, I'd put it off as long as I could until it stopped working.
Then there is the whopping bill of my effects pedal board, my Strymon Timeline alone cost me £300+, that's just for a delay unit, even the frame that it sits on cost me a small fortune. I think in total my pedal board has cost me around £1500 this year and it's still not quite right (Dear Santa, please don't forget the Strymon Flint).
I made a conscious decision to solely be in an original band as it really is where my soul is and, me personally, I don't want to spend my life playing covers, though you can make good money doing this. It is different for bands doing original material, you may not know this but even some of the bigger gigs for original bands don't pay much more than £200 such is the state of the industry. So & So have survived by self releasing 'Sugarstealer' and more recently we reached out to our fan base to help fund the next album via Pledge Music (thank you so much if you have pledged, without your help we would have found this impossible to acheive). Factor in fuel costs for a gig in London (4/5 of us live in the north west and Andy lives in Plymouth) and all of a sudden the profit has gone.
I'm one of the luckier musicians, I have a day job (that I like) that I have alongside my music career and although I'm not rolling in it, I can eat and I'm warm at home. I know of a fantastic musician in the north west who has an incredible voice but he relies solely on gigging and that is a really tough life, it's anything but a champagne life style that we all thought musicians have.
I hope that no-one thinks that I complaining, I adore being a musician and wouldn't swap it for anything in the world (...maybe a porn star...nah, being a guitarist is cooler than even that), I'm just giving small insights.
Nice post, Dave. I'm a gigging musician in Finland, and yes, it can be tough sometimes. I'm lucky to have never had to (or desired) take a day job, and have been able to make a living out of doing music (covers) all my life.
ReplyDeleteI've heard a saying that goes, 'If you love music, don't do it for a living', and I can understand how that applies to a lot of people. After a long tiring weekend of gigging for money, sometimes the last thing you want to do is pull out the guitar/keyboard and write stuff.
As luck would have it, I run through patches of no work, sometimes weeks at a time, but I try to take advantage of the situation and take that time to write and develop as a musician.
Cheers!
- Duke
Hi Duke, it's the great thing about music and how you make it what you want it to be. The best part of being a musician is the more you do it, the better you get at it. Thanks for reading :)
ReplyDelete