Memorial day fatness

I can't speak for the other members, but I personally grilled 4 separate times this weekend. Portabello mushrooms, hot dogs, hamburgers, corn, cheesy potatoes, bean salad, tossing the baseball, badminton rackets, vollyball, kickball, you name it.

We also played 3 shows and met all sorts of amazing folks in charlotte and grand rapids. Thanks to john for getting us on the showdown in hicktown. Thanks to Fight Scene and Envy League for rocking the DAAC with us even though it was too hot and the PA sucked.

how was your memorial day?

Eventful - Tour Smarter!

Being a new touring band can be a drag. Playing show after show to 3-10 people; making barely enough to keep the van rolling down the highway; eating nothing but granola bars and fruit roll ups; faking showers; spending weeks without lying down, days without showering, and hours without a cigarette.

Tours shouldn't be so grueling. Touring should be one tactical strike after another. Playing in towns where your fan base can grow exponentially with each performance. Playing shows where you sell out of merchandise, sell out the venue, and get invited back with smiles on the faces of every promoter who invited you.

Wouldn't it be great? A gas tank that's always on full, reordering merchandise in the middle of the tour, selling out every venue. Thanks to the magic of the internet you can!

Ok, maybe it's not quite that easy, but with eventful.com our band will be able play where the fans are. Click the javascript button thingy on the right to request the Cobra Punchers wherever you want them! Get your friends to request us too. When we get enough requests in an area we will go there and rock your faces off!

In Transition

Sorry about the hiatus on the blog, but currently the Cobra Punchers are in a state of transition.

First, have made the leap from basement rockers to actual bonafide rock and rollers. We have started playing shows in the lower peninsula of Michigan. If you want to catch us live (which i recommend highly) here is a list of shows you can catch us at in the upcoming weeks.




26 May 2007, - Showdown in Hicktown w/ know lyfe & more
Charlotte, Michigan 48813

16 Jun 2007, 21:00 - Hamilton St. Pub W/ Born
Bay City, Michigan

30 Jun 2007, 18:30 - Skelletones W/ The Orphan, Kamilla, A Texas Funeral, + Ridgemoor
Grand Rapids, Michigan

06 Jul 2007, 21:00 - The Painted Lady W/ Trenchfoot
Hamtramck, Michigan

Secondly, we are currently moving to a better practice space in Dan's basement. We will be able to set up a recording studio down there along with cameras so we can document everything we do. As soon as we are set up we will be able to pump out a recording every couple of weeks. My goal will be 1 original and 1 cover per month. I'd also like to put out a video blog every week, but we'll concentrate on music first.

We also have merchandise in the works, guitar lessons from Gary, and more guides for bands in the new music industry. Stay tuned!

The Lost Art of the Guitar Solo

Playing a guitar solo is not just showing off, it is an art form unto itself. It is an expression of what you’ve learned over the many years of being a musician and evidence that you truly have honed your craft.

Every guitarist wants to write the best solo in the world or at least be able to play it. But the real guitar solo comes from a place that is lost. Only the 15 year old kid sitting in his basement with the radio on really has a handle on what I’m talking about.

It’s an energy that possesses you at the very moment you hear the greatest influence that you will ever know. Something so powerful that everything you know seems to disappear for a moment and all you can do is find a way. I’m talking about notes and tones that flow together perfectly sending a message to the listener like a lost art handed down in secrecy. This is how music holds itself together through time and how some music can hardly be defined as that.

Every time your finger presses on a string and you pluck it, a sound is made. Every time you repeat this process the sound changes. Eventually you can’t feel your fingers anymore and your mind searches for a replacement sensation. Something to bring balance to this present activity and put your mind at ease.

At a particular point in time, your mind will go blank and your fingers will be numb and you’ll pluck that string and it will answer you. You wouldn’t even have known that you were asking a question the whole time until you hear your inner voice. Suddenly everything that you were thinking and feeling was pushed into a single note. Anyone listening would feel the same sensations as you, and at that moment…..in a sense, you leveled up.

Playing solos takes time. To do it right, you need to know scales and drills and have some sort of guidance. If you’re a good listener you can play the right notes without ever taking the time to learn scales, and you can come up with your own drills to increase your speed and accuracy. But having someone tell you what they did and show you how they did it will increase your potential tenfold.

In the near future, I will have lessons, videos and pictures showing you how to play some of my favorite parts of solos and how to piece together your own. You can also tell me what you would like to learn which will aid in the progress of these lessons. I won’t get to all of your responses (if there are any) but I will pick the best ones to go over in future lessons. So keep reading the blog for your first lesson.

Gary Behling

The New Music Industry pt 2 - Bringing Home the Bacon

So you've taken leap and offered your entire catalog of hits to the public for free. Every song you've ever worked to create is out there circulating the Internet, and the fans who so adore you visit your web site every week to find out what new and exciting things are going on with your music. You get your Google Adsense check in the mail at the end of the month and you've made a whopping 100 dollars.

How is it that you just gave away all your music, and only made one measly Benjamin out of the whole deal? I got a lot of feedback from various readers about this point. Unless somehow your band blog is raking in 10,000 unique hits a day, you just aren't going to make enough money advertising to make it worth your while to give away your music.

A smart musician does not rely on only one source of income to cover expenses. Here are some different ways a musician in the new music economy can bring home the proverbial bacon.

1. Accept Donations – When I was in high school, some friends and I formed a Blues Brothers cover band. We dressed like the blues brothers, we played Blues Brothers tunes from the movie, we had flashy entrances for our own Jake and Elwood. We played almost all of our friends open houses that year, and in order to make a couple extra bucks, during our show we passed around a “tip terrarium”.
   
   There was always at least one person who would drop in a 50 dollar bill. Of coarse most of the people at each show gave nothing and just enjoyed the free show, but there was always one very appreciative and slightly well off person who would enjoy our cover of The Rawhide Theme so much he would feel compelled to give an enormous donation. Like a our “tip terrarium” or a guitar case on the side of the road, a musician needs to have a place for appreciative listeners to drop their spare change.
   
   Just because you are giving your music away for free doesn't mean that people won't want to pay you anyway. Anyone with a Paypal account can set up their account to accept donations.

2. Form a community around your band – Bands that survive the longest are those that form a real relationship with their fans. You can't just entertain them, you have to get them involved in every aspect of your band. The Grateful Dead fostered allegiance by encouraging their fans to record and trade bootlegs of their shows.
   
   The sense of community surrounding their band was something that transcended the band itself. You should do all you can to foster a community among your fans. Have active bulletin boards on your web site and be the most active poster on them. Update your website with more than just music and show dates. Give incentives and rewards to those who help you foster the community around your band. If you take good care of your fans, they will take good care of you.

3. Share the wealth – Most bands don't make enough money to purchase and repair their own equipment let alone share the profits with fans, but a little bit of generosity can go a long way. Take for instance Threadless t-shirts, a company that sells user submitted t-shirts and gives a cut of the profits to the designer of the t shirt. That is a brilliant idea for a band with a good fan base who wants to maximize the amount of money they make from merchandise sales and get the fans involved.
   
   A band could also sell cds and tshirts to fans in bulk at a heavily discounted rate and allow them to act as a distributer selling merch at regular retail price. If someone is your fan, they want to get the word out about your band anyway. If they can make a couple bucks in the process they will be your fan for life. A band with a fan-powered distribution network would be an unstoppable musical force.

4. Innovate new sources of income – Look for a niche and fill that niche. I know I keep going on about the grateful dead, but if you've seen pictures of their concerts there were huge fields of bootleggers with microphones sticking up into the sky. All the bootleggers wanted to own their own copy of the show they were attending. What if your own band bootlegged all your own shows and sold copies of that show in the parking lot after the show? It would be easy to set up, copies of each show could be burned to a disk with your laptop on demand for a small fee, and the best part is you could offer the service to other bands on the bill for a small cut of the profits. Obviously there are thousands more innovative ideas out there. If you happened to stumble upon one, let me know.

5. Provide a constant stream of quality content – The one thing I hate the most about my favorite bands is that I only get to hear something new from them once every 2-5 years. Bands will put out an album with 10-15 songs, tour for a summer, and go into hiding for another 2-5 years. This seems to be an almost universal law among musicians.
   
   Bands should have a constant stream of content coming forth from their websites at all times. I want to open my Google Reader and have a new item from my favorite band every week. A new article, a guitar lesson, a cover song, a video of a band practice, transcribed lyrics, a brand new song, a personal blog entry, video tour diary, whatever! If I really like a band, I want to know what they are doing. If they are putting out a constant stream of quality content, I'll be hooked like a junkie. Does this mean abandoning the album format altogether? For some musicians I think it should.

If you have any more interesting suggestions for how bands can make money in the new music industry let me know!

Come back for Part 3 – The end of the Album

Another Free Song - In Your Hands

Enjoy another musical offering from the Cobra Punchers, free of charge.

In Your Hands




This
work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Again, this is a demo quality song. We are working to schedule recording time. We are going to re-record all of these songs in much higher quality. If you would like to help us record, please be liberal with the donate button at the top of our page.

Free song - The Sinking Ship

Thanks to all the reddit and digg users out there who read our post. The post in question really set off some debate, and it was really interesting to see all sides of the argument.

Said post also suggested that bands give away their music for free. I wasn't talking about giving away a few songs to entice people into buying your albums, I was talking about giving away your entire catalog. I know, I know, sounds crazy, but read below and you'll see what I'm talking about.

So in the spirit of giving away all of our music for free, here is our first release. The Sinking Ship.

The Sinking Ship - Right click and select "save link as"




This
work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

This is a demo quality release. That means we plan on re-recording this song. If you would like to help us record some of our songs in a real studio in chicago, please donate to our recording fund

Help The Cobra Punchers record!

The Sinking Ship started off as a Diver song (more on Diver in a later post). Diver never recorded the song formally, and the only copies that exist of that old song are floating around somewhere on a live recording. It is pretty interesting to juxtapose the old version and the new one. If I can find it I'll get a copy up for you all to listen too. The main difference is how the vocals mesh with the music. Dan's vocals make it sound like we wrote the song around his vocal lines. Good job Dan!

Lyrics:

well you take what you can get
and you have no more regrets
and you smile like nothings wrong
and you smile like nothings wrong

so go ahead and take the pills inside your hand
and don't forget to leave a note to tell you mother where you've gone

say your prayers
the ship is sinking
brace yourself
we're going down

you know i breathe for you
bleed for you
i always want to be with you
through the thick and in
and black and white and everything between
but you got older and colder
and things got so much harder
the drives for me got longer
and i could not find a way

and when the darkness called your name
you just walked into the black with your hands behind you back
and the poisons that you found were all you needed to survive
well are you even still alive or are you walking with no soul?

we were young and we we stupid
making all those promises that only fools could keep
and i was insane i was insane to think you'd stay at home and wait
i can see i was to blame
but that dosen't change a thing

life is a hole and we are all just sinking in
and i can't dig you out of it
i can't dig you out of here

so go ahead and take the pills inside your hand
and don't forget to leave a note to tell you mother were you've gone

say your prayers
the ship is sinking
brace yourself
we're going down

An imaginary guitar case opened on a very busy street

I have been thinking a lot about various forms of income a musician could take advantage of. It takes a lot of hard work, creativity and business savvy to make any sort of profit out of being a musician. The overhead is high (recording costs, merchandise production, equipment, touring costs etc) and the payout, especially at first, is very low.

The biggest hurdle I think any band can run into is the cost of getting started. Even after you have equipment, a practice space, a few songs under your belt and a solid lineup of musicians you have to contend with so many other financial hurdles that even the greatest new bands could be stifled to a halt. It is a vicious circle. You need money to make a good sounding CD; a good sounding CD to get good gigs; good gigs to get fans; fans to purchase your merchandise; merch sales to get money.

In any closed system, you need an outside source of energy to prevent entropy. For many bands the outside source is their day jobs; for the more privileged and quite often younger bands this outside source is the parents. For us, I hope that this outside source will be you.

We've recorded a couple of rough Demo songs in our practice space with the limited equipment we have in order to give people an idea of what kind of songs you could be listening to. All we ask is that you help us fund a quality recording of some of our songs. Visit our Myspace site in order to get an idea of what you are investing in. Keep in mind this was recorded on a little bit less than a shoestring.

Now visit fundable.org and see what you can do to help.

Think of this as a guitar case open on the side of the street. If you like what you hear, drop in a few dollars and there will be a lot more good music where that came from.

The New Music Industry

It's no secret that the record industry is in trouble. They have moved from selling music as their main source of income to creating revenue through lawsuits against their customers. Anyone can see that this is a piss-poor business model. Yet the people who should be the most learned about the sinking ship that is the record industry as we know it are completely ignoring every sign and hopping aboard the Titanic with reckless abandon.

I'm talking about bands; the poor naive bands who somehow still think that signing a record contract is synonymous with crossing a finish line in first place and being handed your dreams on a silver platter. The poor naive bands who don't read the fine print, and don't keep up on the business end of the industry they so sorely wish to be a part of. The bands who sell 2 million albums and end up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to the company who they thought were fulfilling all their wildest dreams.

These are the folks who should know the new first law of the music industry. Do not sign to a large record label. I would go as far as to say not to sign with any record label at all. I don't think I need one, but I certainly can see where many bands could benefit from being with a smaller independent label. Not every musician can be a business man and vice versa, but i think we are entering an era of music where the power will be placed solely in the hands of the musicians who can think differently about what their music is and how to make money doing what they love.

Here are a few concepts every musician today should understand.

1. People will share your music with one another - Don't think of file sharing as stealing. Most people who download music for free don't think of themselves as thieves, they don't think of themselves as pirates, they just want to listen to your music. The whole goal in the music industry is to get as many people as possible to listen to your music. When people share music with one another, they are doing that musician a favor by increasing that bands listener base. It is hard to think of file sharing as a benefit to musicians since most musicians see their music as a product to be sold in album form. If people are sharing your music with one another for free, how can a musician make money?

2. Music is not a product anymore, it is Content - When music was tied to the media it was played on, it was a product in the same way a dishwasher or vacuum cleaner is a product. You buy a vacuum because it is a product that cleans your floor. You used to buy a CD because it was a product that makes pleasing sounds.

Now we have separated the content from the product. You no longer need the CD to hear the pleasing sounds. With the music removed from the product, music only exists as content. The dilemma of how to make money off of making music becomes a lot easier to solve when you think of music as content and not as a product. Many different kinds of media have used content to make money. The best example is the television industry, which has used free, quality content to make money for years.

3. Be the provider of your own content - There are hundreds of torrent download sites making a fortune from providing free content. They advertise to the thousands of people who visit their sites. They get thousands of people to visit by providing free content. Content created by other people.

This is money that should be going directly into a musicians pocketbook. Musicians should be less angry that there are people hearing their songs for free and more angry that the web traffic is going to a torrent site instead of their own web site.

The best way to capture those advertising dollars is to directly compete by providing your own content for free. If someone has two options, sift through a sea of unscrupulous torrent sites for your new single, or download it directly from the artist for free, the customer will download the content from your web site every time.

4. Content is no longer limited by the product itself – A CD holds 70 minutes of music. Most CD's released by musicians go to about 45 minutes and have between 10 and 15 tracks. Every CD has packaged art, track lists, band photos, and lyrics printed on them. This is the format almost every band has followed for as long as I could reach the play button on my Dads stereo.

Since the content of the CD is no longer tied to that 70 minute shiny disk, the way in which music is marketed and sold is now free of that tired old format. I believe that itunes has begun to pave the way for the return of the single. Bands can now release content at a more fevered and consistent pace, churning out a song every couple of months from the privacy of their own homes.

No longer will the artist need to write “filler” in order to artificially elongate their album. No longer will fans be forced to purchase 9 songs they don't like in order to have 3 songs they love. No longer will fans have to wait years between albums. Fans will get a new dose of the band they love every time they write a new song.

Early adopters of this idea will benefit greatly by keeping their band in the media more often. Bands will have more chances to promote themselves with a new release coming out every month. The single format would also benefit musicians who generate their income from ad revenue. More releases yearly means more consistent web traffic to your site.

Many musicians and record labels will cringe at the thought of giving away music for free, but it cannot be avoided. The Internet has made sharing the music you love easier than going to the store and purchasing it. The next step for bands is to make downloading their music even easier for the fans so they can control the content they create and make a dollar in the process.

music link dump

Kids who listen to metal music = brilliant geniuses - Finally! Proof of what you knew all along.

The 20 worst lyrics of all time - I don't agree with putting 50 cent on that list. Fat kids really do love cake

Music sales plummet; again - I, for one, don't feel bad about this at all. The music industry is looking for sympathy but they won't get it from me.

Do we really need record labels? - 2 case studies of bands who have found success without the help of a label.

Kate Walsh's homemade album.

Kate Walsh and her Homemade Album

Kate Walsh is a shining example of how the music industry will work in the future; without record labels! Kate Walsh is outselling big bad major label artists with her basement-produced guitar folk songs, and now the record labels are lining up outside of her door waving contracts in the air.

If she is smart she'll forget about those guys and use this success to keep her own record label going, get on a soundtrack or two, release another album and keep all her success to herself.

We're all rooting for Kate Walsh.

April 14th - Our first show

I can't even tell you all how exited I am about playing tomorrow night. It has been over a year since I last played a rock show with my old band. Click on the sweet show poster above for more info.

We are playing the first slot, something that also hasn't happened in a long time, but we're cool with it. Paying our dues again is a humbling experience, but don't expect me to relinquish the title of "best band in existence" just because the booking guy hasn't seen us play yet.

We'll be sure to take a lot of pictures, and possibly videos for those of you who can't make it because you are viewing this post from the future. We don't discriminate against internet time travelers. Linear time is a obstacle we shall overcome together.

The King of Surf Guitar - and sticking it to the man!

Watch as Dick Dale schools all musicians on the finer points of rock and roll. Watch as his common sense shreds through the BS of the RIAA like his sweet licks through the grooves of a record album.

Sit, Watch, Listen. You may learn something. I sure did.

Welcome!

Hello. We are the Cobra Punchers. We are a 5 piece rock and roll band from Flint Michigan. Featuring ex - members of The Skyline Obscura & Diver, The Cobra Punchers are rock and roll in the purest sense of the word.

We are not some ironic tongue-in-cheek mockery of the glory of past rock bands. We aren't anything with the word "core" on the end of it. We aren't in it for the chicks, the "kids", or to be cool (most of us already have chicks, have kids, and are cooler than most of you). In fact, we aren't in it for anyone but ourselves and the crowd of people in the front row pumping their fists.

We remember what rock and roll can do for a piece of shit nerdy teenager who can't stick up for himself; or the lonely kid in the basement with only a guitar. Rock and roll changes lives. It changed ours once and now...

...We are rock and fucking roll.