How do I motivate my bandmates?

tamadrm said:
Guys...this pup was born in June 1991,so he's closer to 22 actualy,not 15 according to his profile.

How many hits did Michael Jackson have before he was 20.Stevie Wonder was signed to Mowtown by 11,and had a hit at 13.Steve Winwood was not much older when he had a hit with Gimme Some Lovin" at 16 or 17.

Steve B
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I really don't think we're talking about some driven child star with natural ability or a family pushing him into music. Just a regular 15 year old who still has a ways to go in his own musical journey.

I'm an advocate of playing with as many people as you can, whenever you can, so I'm not discouraging anything. Just sayin. Don't ditch your best buds because you guys aren't being a power-house whipping through recording sessions at 15. I still think you have a few years before you really need to try and be "productive". The most pushy I'd be is maybe trying to setup some gigs... Which could lead to writing or learning, which could eventually lead to tightening up and working on this stuff more professionally.
 
To answer the original question....how do I motivate my bandmates.

There are proven motivators of men. These are:

Money.

Sex.

That's pretty much it.

My suggestion is to bring some decent looking girls to the rehearsal as an audience, I'm pretty sure you don't want to pay anyone.
 
larryace said:
To answer the original question....how do I motivate my bandmates.

There are proven motivators of men. These are:

Money.

Sex.

That's pretty much it.

My suggestion is to bring some decent looking girls to the rehearsal as an audience, I'm pretty sure you don't want to pay anyone.
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Beyond the motivators you mention I would add the admiration of peers. parents and people in general.

Way back when I was in high school there wasn't much choice of musicians to get together with. Hard to say if at 15 the OP has a choice.
 
I never understood woodsheders. I was born a guitarist, and switched to drums in 2006 (though my primary band I am still the guitarist). In my travels I've jammed with countless, in every combination of instrument; Me on guitar, them on drums, me on guitar them on guitar etc...etc...etc. The woodsheders could blow my socks off with their technicalities, sweeping, blazing solos, Herman Li-rivaling finger speed, 250 bpm double pedal.

But you try to write a good song with them, and they have no idea what to do. They don't know the first thing about it....so you lay a beat or supply the rhythm guitar and they solo over the entire thing. And I just have to wonder; Why waste your time developing your technical skills if you are terrible at applying them, or have no clue how to? It's like teaching yourself how to saw a perfect piece of wood but never building anything with it.

My technical skill range on Guitar and Drums is around Bullet for My Valentine, which admittedly is not very impressive. But my composition, structuring and song writing skills, if I may say, are some of the best out there. You need to have a good balance. Being a crazy shredder or the worlds fastest double pedal drummer gets you no where if you can write a good song. Writing a good song gets you nowhere if you have absolutely no technical skill. You have to develop both, with composition being more important, IMO, as the skill will follow and develop along the way. But vice-versa? Not quite as well.
 
MutinyWithin said:
I never understood woodsheders. I was born a guitarist, and switched to drums in 2006 (though my primary band I am still the guitarist). In my travels I've jammed with countless, in every combination of instrument; Me on guitar, them on drums, me on guitar them on guitar etc...etc...etc. The woodsheders could blow my socks off with their technicalities, sweeping, blazing solos, Herman Li-rivaling finger speed, 250 bpm double pedal.

But you try to write a good song with them, and they have no idea what to do. They don't know the first thing about it....so you lay a beat or supply the rhythm guitar and they solo over the entire thing. And I just have to wonder; Why waste your time developing your technical skills if you are terrible at applying them, or have no clue how to? It's like teaching yourself how to saw a perfect piece of wood but never building anything with it.

My technical skill range on Guitar and Drums is around Bullet for My Valentine, which admittedly is not very impressive. But my composition, structuring and song writing skills, if I may say, are some of the best out there. You need to have a good balance. Being a crazy shredder or the worlds fastest double pedal drummer gets you no where if you can write a good song. Writing a good song gets you nowhere if you have absolutely no technical skill. You have to develop both, with composition being more important, IMO, as the skill will follow and develop along the way. But vice-versa? Not quite as well.
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Hallelujah, brother - excellent post! I remember Derek Roddy posting something on here regarding playing those insane blast beats up to speed where he explained that he doesn't spend much time working it out slowly as much as he just tries to go for it at the intended speed. I'm not into blast beats myself but thought that was a wonderful way to say that it's the ideas themselves that drive the technical development and not the other way around. I haven't spent nearly as much time shedding on fundamentals as I have trying to sort out how to play the crazy ideas that pop into my head that will fit perfectly into the songs I'm working on.

I hope that's not too much of a tangent ...
 
If they are not self motivated, move on.

Its a real difficult thing to find career minded musicians who want to go to real effort for the whole of their career.
 
Thanks Mike :)

Yeah I have to agree with Derrick. If I want to try to surpass my controlled ceiling (160BPM), I just put the song on and try to go to town. Of course that usually results in me on the floor with butt cramps, but at least it's more fun, ha!

Guitar/composition wise, I know Chromatics, and a few basic scales. But Pentatonics, Lydian mode, circle of 5ths, etc.... I read up on it here and there, understand the concepts, took some classes in college. But ask me to demonstrate them and you'll just get a blank stare, lol. I have found that, if you're a good songwriter, you don't need a lot of theory, you use your ear and your heart, and the song melody will come out right.

My bass player is one of those guys that; When he writes a song, every note has to be in the scale of the key of the song. If I write a song, and a note is not in the scale, he gets upset. And I'm always like, "But dude, it SOUNDS good." "But it doesn't make theoretical sense." "But it doesn't matter, if it sounds good." 99% of the listeners aren't going to listen to the song and say, "Nope, I don't like it because that one note isn't a member of the scale for that key."

Gotta use your heart.
 
Sawing a piece of wood but never building anything with it...Good analogy lol. Technique for techniques sake to me personally, yea, you need to work on it to be fluent, but hopefully there are real musical ideas present that the technique can be applied to. It's not a given. Learning to do 250 BPM with your feet does not necessarily spawn musical ideas. It's the musical ideas that are the real treasure. Technique without good musical ideas....is so lopsided that it's almost laughable.

Like a person with zero musical ideas can still break world records using technique alone. But what's the real point of it all?

Instead of speed competitions, wouldn't it be cool if there were musicality competitions?
Like contestants are all given an identical piece of music, drumless, to make up a drum part to, and are judged by their musical ideas, instead of the mechanics.
 
thank goodness musicality is subjective...for fear of musicality competitions! ; )
 
larryace said:
Instead of speed competitions, wouldn't it be cool if there were musicality competitions?
Like contestants are all given an identical piece of music, drumless, to make up a drum part to, and are judged by their musical ideas, instead of the mechanics.
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Musicality would generally be thought of as too hard to judge like synchronised swimming or gymnastics. You need objective measures or it becomes too easy to rig matches.

So we could have a panel of, say, ten judges wired up with electrodes as musicians played for them. One machine would measure the judges' pupil dilation (or contraction), another the breathing rate, eye moisture, skin moisture, changes in gonad state/size, involuntary gross motor movements, involuntary facial movements ... each attribute is scored until you come up with a grand total.

The match commentary would be interesting, eh?
 
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