Andy D Day

Throughout the decades that rock ‘n’ roll has ruled the earth the guitar has been the ultimate in phallic symbols. Wielded by many of the most famous men to stride the planet in the twentieth and twenty-first century, the guitar and the legendary status it can bestow upon those that have masterfully brandished it, is the ultimate weapon in the battle to pull the opposite sex.

Although many consider guitarists to play “second fiddle” to the lead singer, groupies that don’t fancy the singer will always head straight for the lead guitarist. So if you wanna tap into a bit of that ol’ sex appeal for yourself, either chick or chico, then follow these ten easy steps to “Becoming A Guitar Legend”.

1. First of all you’ll need a plank to beat. So head down your music shop and buy the cheapest one you can get. Don’t listen to guitar fetishist who’ll try and blind you with science, fuck the humbucker pickups and lowered action, what you need is something in a fetching shape and colour that you can strap round your neck. Remember to leave enough change for a cool guitar strap; ones with white lightening bolts down them are always de-rigueur shoulder belts.

2. You should now begin to practice. Don’t worry about being able to play anything just yet, it’s more important to rehearse your stance. Find a brightly lit room with a full-length mirror and hang your weapon of choice from your neck. Adjust the strap length so that your guitar nearly covers your kneecaps. IMPORTANT: do not use your guitar to cover your nipples. It may be easier to play guitar this way, but it is only necessary if you’re short-sighted or a complete gimp.

3. Once you’ve got your stance sorted, you then need to practice throwing some shapes. This should be done somewhere with a lot of space. Rehearse various pose combos until you get that “legendary” feel. You should at least be able to strum the strings with your strumming hand from a starting position above your head. The action should be circular and not angular. If you’re having problems with your technique, then you may require some extra reading. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is a good reference guide.

4. Now you’ve got the basics sorted you’ll need to learn a few chords. Although somewhat tedious, this will be necessary to join even the shittest band. The easiest chord to learn is Em (E minor), so at least learn this one. The whole Grunge genre was based on this simple chord, so its significance – despite its simplicity – should not be overlooked. Another easy chord is A, although a nerve shattering three fingers need to be coordinated to achieve this chord, the importance of doubling your repertoire cannot be emphasised enough.

5. You may have noticed at this stage that there is a certain amount of difficulty in holding down all the strings at once so that the chord rings out. Do not fret; no extra time needs to be spent perfecting the chiming chord, because step 5 is: Buy Yourself A Distortion Pedal. Distortion pedals can mask years of inexperience. Plug together your guitar, peddle and amp (if don’t have an amp you can also use hifis with phono-in sockets. If it’s your parents’ hifi, do not ask to use it first, because the answer will be “no”). Turn your pedal up to full distort and strum your full chord repertoire. By now you should at least be able to play a C chord. C is the most popular chord in pop.

6. You’re now ready to join a band. Put up “Singer, Bass Player and Drummer wanted” adverts in all your local record and musical instrument shops. Or even put one here in the Gigwise forum.

7. Once you have a full line up it’s time to hit the rehearsal rooms. Make sure you take plenty of booze, fags, pasties and fizzy drinks with you. This step is by far the most tiresome. It is also during the rehearsal that you can spot ways in which you can upstage the lead singer with rock ‘n’ roll antics. Make sure you keep a good record of his/her shortcomings; your groupie to guitarist ratio will depend on your ability to look cooler than the frontman.

8. You’re now ready to take your one-man show on the road (yeah I know you’re in a band now, but remember who’s the daddy). You need to make a recording of your band’s performance. Don’t worry about this being of too high a quality, promoters and venue owners rarely listen to them anyway, they just look at your Myspace page and see how many “fans” you have, and if they do listen to your demo, fear not, you will not be booked on the merits of your demo’s sound quality. In fact, to really jump the queue, stick a chocolate bar in the post to your favourite promoter with a link to you website sellotaped to it.

9. OK you’ve got the gig. Time to perfect your image. Root through your parent’s record collection and find something with a picture of a group on the cover. Make sure it speaks to you as an artiste. Faking things at this point could make you look daft. The perfect image is a mixture of current cool and retro classic. DO NOT wear trackies and training shoes to a gig, (unless there’s been a Madchester revivial), EVER, and do not wear your Sunday best. To be a legend you need to look the part, at this point you may wish to watch Pirates Of The Carribean for Johnny Depp’s portrait of a rock musician. Purchase as much of your clobber second hand, this also helps you to look like you’ve been dressing this cool for ages.

10. On the big night make sure you’re fully prepared for every eventuality, remember that fucking lead singer will try and be the sexiest and the coolest onstage. Once the gig is in full swing and you’ve thrown a few rock ‘n’ roll shapes you can now smash up your guitar in an unnecessary fit, dowse it in lighter fluid and burn the bastard. Don’t worry about widdly-widdly lead breaks and playing nice tunes, no one likes those bits anyway. You’re now well on your way to becoming a legend. The groupies are now yours. You’ll need to repeat step 10 a number of times until you attain widespread acclaim, and once this is achieved you can then unleash the guitar legend stock tools of the trade; alcoholism, heroin addiction and suicide/drug overdose. If you’re still alive after five years then either quit music (you’re obviously not up to the job) or return to step 1 and repeat the process.

When you’re building a business there comes a point where you have to hire some staff and obviously you want to hire the most talented people. But where to find them?

According to common belief (and Wikipedia): “Talent (in the sense of natural ability or giftedness) is not the same as skill, which is a learned process, and one which is enhanced or inhibited by an underlying talent.” That idea of talent being a god given gift that certain chosen people are born with has permeated mankind’s thinking since the beginning of time.

That’s not the case though and there seems to be a growing buzz around the idea that talent IS a learned process, it IS skill in fact. Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers mentions the 10,000 hour rule, where experts in any given field are more than likely to have spent at least that many hours learning their trade. Likewise, Talent Is Overated by Geoff Colvin makes the point that every virtuoso spent at least 10 years of hard graft before they produced anything near a prodigious masterpiece and natural ability is down to ambitious parenting skills. There’s a great aticle on Boston.com about Grit being the real source of talent.

So how does this relate to the hiring process? Well, I’ve heard it said so many times that you need to have a degree to get a decent job nowadays, but I don’t think it’s a requirement at all. In my company there are 6 members of staff, two of which have degrees, of the three hired in the last three years, only one has a degree. There are also currently five  interns who work different days, one of which doesn’t have a degree. These people are where they are despite their education.

I didn’t study at university, so that clearly influences my belief that a degree isn’t required, but more than that, when I’m hiring people, I look more at work experience than anything else on a CV. I prefer to see a number of work experience placements and internships from as early as possible on a CV than just a three year study period. I believe that the best people are the ones that are passionate about what they do and who are willing to work at getting experience anywhere they can to make their prospects as good as possible.

Of course that doesn’t preclude us hiring graduates and I would certainly encourage anyone looking to study to pursue that route, as a three year study period can equally prove that someone has passion and is willing to work hard.

What I’m looking for  is people who are dogged, are willing to learn and who will go the extra mile to make something happen. And with time that equates to “talent”.

Have you noticed how often our culture, particularly in the UK, is to encourage people to stick with what they’ve got instead of pushing yourself to do more? How often have you heard the old adage that birds in the hand are worth more than birds in the bush? What’s this message supposed to be telling us?

Stick with what you’ve got.

Boring.

The truth is that what you’re looking at in the bush, is worth twice as much as what you’ve got now. The safe option is to stick with what you’ve got, but meanwhile opportunity is tweeting away right in front of you.

Recently a friend was speaking to me about something that they’d been thinking about doing for a long time but had never put any effort into making it happen. I could tell that they’d put a lot of thought into planning how they could achieve what they’d been thinking about. Perplexed, I asked why they had never gone through with their plan. Their answer? They were afraid that if they did, it might turn out to be a bad decision.

What’s the problem with making bad decisions?

Do the maths (or math, if you’re a yank), I can either:

1. do nothing, no chance of a pay off.
2. do something, chance of a pay off.

Say I make 10 decision, five of them are bad and they put me into shitty situations. Four of them aren’t so bad, but I don’t get anywhere with them either, just shit decisions, no-one notices, phew. Finally, I make a half decent decision. It pays off, woot! So, I have some shit to deal with and a pay day.

We all get hit with moments of indecision, but a decision, even if it turns out to be bad is better than giving in to fear and doing nothing.

I’ve recently started using Amazon to sell a load of old books and I’m hugely impressed by what a brilliant platform the site is. It’s got me thinking about how my businesses can Be A Platform too.

We’ve recently opened up our CMS on Gigwise.com to our contributors so that they can have more autonomy over publishing their own work. The old way was for them to email work to one of the editors who would cut and paste into the CMS and edit it, add photos etc. Now our writers can publish their own reviews and blog posts and photographers can publish galleries. It’s hardly ground breaking but it’s cool to see some of our contributors really getting involved and in our small way we’ve provided a greater platform for music journalists and photographers.

I’m sure there’s more we can do to open up what we have to be a platform for others, so I’ve got my thinking cap on and hopefully I’ll have some insights to publish soon.

After the database of my last blog going kaput I’ve finally pulled my finger out and got this working again. Is there any point though? I was fairly rubbish at blogging before but I’ve promised myself that I’m going to put extra effort into it this time.

I’m going to be writing about the stuff that I’m interested in, things like music and the media and their relationships to eachother, web development and technology that I find interesting. I may occasionally blog about any other crap that’s on my mind.