Kerouac

 

 We are organizing an album fundraiser for the JPKALLIO.COM's first album, so we can go back to the studio. The night will take place in the Thomas House, this Friday the 4th of May 2012. Doors 8pm and Adm €5. On the night obviously JPKALLIO.COM will do a set, but also we got few bands to help us out:-). On the bill we have our drummer Sebastians another band Down the river, who are going to kick off the night, also we have Kerouac, who have been making noise in the Irish underground lately. I sat down for a chat with Kerouac's bass player Keith O'Neill, who also takes care most of the promotion duties in the band and I realized we had more in common than we thought, when it comes to the music business.

  J.P. First of all big thank you Keith for taking the time to talk to us. Could you tell me a bit about your background in music?

Keith Back ground in music... I started playing guitar when I was twelve. Guitar is my main instrument.
I wen't to Ballyfermot college studying guitar in the music course. That's where I met the lads. So went in as a guitar player and came out as a bass player! Amazing stuff. But guitar is still my main instrument. I do lot of acoustic instrumental music. So that would be me in music, between that and metal. I play bit of drums as well. One of the first bands I was in was a Nirvana covers band where I played drums when I was fifteen.


J.P. So let's talk about Kerouac a bit. I've seen the band live few times now and I was delighted that you agreed to play with us in the Thomas house this Friday. How did the band get started?

Keith No worries, we were delighted to be asked. We met up in the college in 2002. There was another bass player in the band before I started. He left the college after the first year, so they were looking for a bass player for the second year. So I said I'll play bass. I was playing guitar with lot of other people in the college, but the D C D chord thing just does not do it for me. I am delighted I came out of college with Richie ( Mason, drums) and Aaron (Gaffey, vox and guitar). When we left the college we did not do much for few years. We were occasionally jamming in Kilkenny where I am from, Richie was in Cork and Aaron in Dublin. So we rehearsed in a mate of mines house in Kilkenny. We did about six gigs in four years. That's the way it went until about two years a go when Richie moved back to Dublin and we've gone full belt at it since then.


J.P. You've done some quite big gigs in the past and seem to be gigging a lot. Any highlights you'd like to mention?

Keith Germany obviously. That was brilliant. We entered the Emergenza battle of the bands that goes on in eighteen different countries. We entered 2004 and didn't get out of the first round and then entered again last year and ended up winning it! So they flew us out to Germany for five days to play at a three day festival. It was nice as there were only two stages, the main stage and the second stage and we were on on the second stage on Saturday. It was really good, some amazing bands, as I said it went on in eighteen countries so we got to see lot of bands. It was 35000 people at the festival. Iggy Pop was on on the first night. Some energy for his age! It was cool, we did the gig and then we could just sit in the back stage and drink free beer. Yeah, we'll remember that one for a while.
  We are doing the Ballymurphy fringe festival this summer. It is kind of the only festival in Ireland we could get in to. We seem to be too heavy for lot of the festivals, but then not heavy enough for the Metal festivals. But sure, what can you do?




J.P. Yeah, it's tough. It seems so many bands put so much effort in trying to get to play at festivals, makes me wonder if they could use that energy on something else.

Keith Yeah, the usual answer you are going to get, even though there are over 200 festivals in Ireland, is thanks but no thanks. It still seems to be all Indie stuff they are looking for.

J.P. I think that is a bubble that is about to burst.

Keith Yeah, me too. Somethings got to give, it's gone stale...

J.P. Tell me about it... But as always, it takes time before the mainstream catches on to whats brewing in the underground.

Keith That's it. Some amazing bands out there around Ireland!


J.P. One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you was because I know you do most of the booking and promotional work for the band. What advice would you have for any new bands on how to get out gigging?

Keith Unfortunately I have to say that Facebook is a handy tool to have in your artillery. I do lot of bookings through Facebook. I have all the pubs we play in added up on my Facebook. So anytime a gig comes up the venue post it up and it says support to be established. So I'll email them and ask if there is any chance on getting in that. There are lot of gigs going on around Dublin and you can get in on support. Which is good. You get to meet other people, meet other bands, get to know them and maybe get to play with them later. And when you do put on your own gig, you'll actually get in couple people. I Kind of approach it like that.

J.P. What's your take on the battle of the bands?

Keith We have entered couple of them, but I kind of do it to get the name out there. When you go to play at these things, there is a mixture of lot of people there. So you have lot of people seeing you play. We did the Hard rock rising one. That was to support Bruce Springsteen. We got to the final on it. And they had some influential people in the jury. It could have taken us long time to get these guys to come see us play live. And even we did not win it, which we knew we would not as Kerouac would be just too heavy to support Bruce Springsteen, we got lot of good contacts out of it. Take it as a gig. And if you do well, you get through the first, second or even third round, that's three gigs in few months. You are going to end up meeting promoters, sound engineers, the bar staff, the people that book the gigs. I think its a great way to get the name out there.


J.P. You guys have very professional live show. While playing at many band nights you get to see many bands at all levels. Would you have any tips for young bands on how to improve their live show, or is there any mistakes you see bands do regularly?

Keith I think being very well practiced is one. For band to come across professional you need to be well rehearsed, you can't keep making mistakes. It kind of puts the audience off a bit. Your songs need to be tight and structured well. So I would say practice! If we were practicing new song, we could end up jamming the same riff for a half an hour, taking it to different places and seeing what happens. So I would say be well practiced and have fun with it. Go mad on stage! After doing lot of live shows, you do get comfortable in your spot and you start putting across a good confident live show.


J.P. We all know this is expensive business to be in, no getting away from that. If you wan't to take the music seriously, you need to invest in to it as well. What is your take on this and how would you prioritize it?

Keith Get a CD with three songs sounding very good and get a website. You need a website! We have played with lots of bands and if you would put a list of 20 bands on front of me, I'd say maybe three of them would have website. I am the administrator of our website. We got a friend in IT to set it up for us for few hundred instead of eight hundred by a professional web designer. We use Wordpress on our site. It's amazing! It took me three weeks to figure it all out, but once you have it done it looks well and come across professionally.


J.P. Hallelujah! I'm glad I am not the only one saying that :-D. It seems to be a big step for any Dublin based band to get to play outside Dublin. How important do you think this is and how do you guys go about it?

Keith Find out the venues that play your kind of music. There are some cracking venues up and down the country that are looking your kind of music. We've done Waterford, Wexford, Cork, Kilkenny, Galway. Some great venues out there. It is always good to play to new audience. And it is good idea to play with maybe two local bands. For the music we do, there is only few bars in Dublin, so it is nice to get out and play somewhere else once and a while.


J.P. It still seems to be most bands dream getting signed. Do you think up and coming band should still try to get signed, or should they work on making their own record?

Keith I'd say work on making your own record. Send it off by all means, but concentrate on building a bit of a fan base, so if the record company comes along you can show you have something to offer. But you need a good sounding recording. There is so many people out there who want to do it, so you need to stand out. It needs to be done right!


J.P. I like to put lot of emphasis on playing a live show when it comes to our band. Would you have any other promotional tips or recommendations?

Keith CD, Website, Facebook and a video. People like to see what they are listening to, even if it's a collage of pictures put together in Movie maker. Videos are great promotional tools.


J.P. So what are the future plans for Kerouac

Keith The plans are to get the E.P. finished in the next few weeks, then get it mastered. Book lot more gigs, even though we have had a busy year so far. we did about 30 gigs last year, and we have already booked 30 gigs this year and its only May! So get out and play lots of gigs and promote the E.P.


J.P. Once again, big thanks for your time and just to wrap up, what should people expect from Kerouac this Friday night?

Keith To get your ass kicked! Expect loud, heavy, smelly, riff based, energetic madness. Any time we go to do a gig, it's 110%. I'm really looking forward to it  now. It's been a while we played in the Thomas House and its a good spot! So see you on Friday night!

www.kerouac.ie
www.facebook.com/kerouacmusic

Rock n' Roll road house show
JPKALLIO.COM
Kerouac
Down the river
In the basement of the Thomas house this Friday the 4th of May 2012.
Doors 8pm  Adm €5

Make your own band website part 3

Part 59

  Winter is really staring to push its way in to Dublin. Friday night was great :-) Thanks to every one who came in and big thanks to Taran for a kick ass sound!. Now well be back in the Rocktober semi-finals in the Fibbers on the 19th of November, but before that we’ll be in Sweeney’s on the 19th of October. I really enjoy when we meat new similar minded bands during these band nights. Check out Pimps and Gimps http://www.facebook.com/pages/Pimps-and-Gimps-Fanpage/134404993273734 Great punk band that we'll most certainly will be organizing a show with sooner or later :-)
Also last weeks blog got exceptionally good response, so inspired by this we are scheduling new interviews as I write. I'd really like to get as much inside on the music business here as possible, so watch this space.

  And now back to our band website project. How are you getting on? This week I'll show you how to add more pages. So let’s log in to our site again, if you still don't know how to do this, I'd recommend you’re read through the parts one and two of this build. Once you are logged in, in the side bar on your dashboard you'll have a Pages button, just click on it. Now on the next page there is Add new button almost on the top of the page, beside the title. Click on this. Now the next page is really as simple as it seems. Let’s say we want to do a Biography page, your band do have biography? If you don't, then you are skipping over things here. I'll assume here that you do have one. But if you don't, let me know, as if there are many bands without biographies, maybe the subject would be a worth a blog. Anyway you can copy and paste your Biography, or type it in the text box on the page. And above the text box and below the Add new page title you have the title box, where you can type the title of the page. This is how it will show up on your web pages navigation bar as well, so for example “Biography”, “Bio” or maybe just “Band”. You can also add a picture on the page if you want. For example if you have text already on the page and you want to add a picture of the band above it, place your cursor here and then above the text box you have upload/insert followed by four small icons. The first one of the icons is for adding an image, second for video, third for audio and last for other media. Click on the add image icon and an upload window opens up. Click on the select a file and choose a file from your computer, up to 2MB. Once you have done this, the WordPress uploads the photo and once it is uploaded you will get a window where you can add info on the photo. I would recommend you to change the title of the photo to something short and relevant. Also add an alternative text. This means if some one has a computer that would not be able to open the picture; there will be an alternative text instead. You can also ad an caption on the photo, this will appear under it. Below this you have the description part. It would be good manners to add here the photographers details, after all they are artists as well and need any promotion they can get. Below this you have alignment and size options. Once you have selected them, you can press the Insert into post button and you should have a picture on your page. So that's the Basics. Now that you have image and text on your page, you can press the blue publish button on the right side of the screen and your page is live. There are few self explanatory text editing options on the page, similar to the once you'd have on your Email or word processor. With these you can ling the text, Make bullet points, Bold Italic, check spelling or insert a link. Once your page is up, you can repeat the process and make more pages. For example, if you want to make separate page for individual band members, booking and contact information...

  The two pages I'd like to take a quick look at are the live concert list and gallery page. For the concert list you can either write all your gig dates on a page with times, locations etc. Or you can use an external widget. For example ReverbNation has nice ready made widgets. I personally like to use artistdata.com. I have it linked to many of my social media sites, so I can just post the dates in one place and this posts them for me in to many of my social media sites. Both websites provide a html code that you can copy, and then just return to your add new page. On the top right corner of your text box you have option for visual or HTML, click the HTML. Now you can paste the gig list code here: after this click on save draft on right hand side of the page. Then you can click back to the visual and add additional text if required. As to the gallery you can start a new page, title it as “Gallery, “Photos”, “Images” etc. Upload images to your gallery as on the biography page. You can do this one by one or several at a time. To do several at same time, just select more images by holding down Ctrl and select with your mouse (this is for PCs, not an expert on macs...). Once the photos are uploaded, at the top of the upload window you have gallery tab, and at the bottom of this page you have insert gallery button. This places the Gallery on your page.

  So that is the basics of our band website. Now if you want me to cover more detailed info on the WordPress subject, let me know. I do know not all of my readers are musicians so I don't want this project to take over the blog. But we’ll add more to it as questions arise.

  Now just a quick note on bit of a reflection of the past blogs, as you know we had Darragh from Invivctus, and four weeks before we had Michael from Trackmix studios. The beauties of these interviews are that JPKALLIO.COM has gained lot of valuable information from these interviews, as I hope you have as well. And it just goes to show. If you ask for information the right way, people are willing to give it to you. We learned that it would be possible for us to find an underground label that specializes to our kind of music, so now we have endless hours to be spent researching labels on internet. We also have much clearer view of the budgets required, the pros and cons making the CD by our selves, or with record label. But at the same time, we have only scraped the surface, and we'll be looking in to much more information before we make any decisions. But we have been working on new songs, and they are sounding better every day. So the next step will be starting to make some demos. These are exiting times :-)

That’s all for this week, we'll be back for more next week.

J.P.

Make your own band website part 1

  The regular readers of this blog know I have gone on about how you should not just rely on Social media as your web presence, but as a band or an artist you need to have a website! So I have been working and testing few ways of making a band website the way that any one with basic computer knowledge could make one. This is little bit larger task to take on, but once you do this yourself, you will be in control of your own band website. I will provide you here with all the basic info you will need to do this and some extra customizing ideas. We will separate this in to few blogs over the next few weeks. I am hoping you could build your bands website with me as we go through this and during the next few weeks I will do my best to help you in any problems you might have with the build. Also if we get some cool band sites done, I would like to feature them here on the blog as well. During the build you can Email me at jpkallio@hotmail.com and please write Web build in the subject line, so I will get back to you as fast as possible. There are loads of guides on the net on similar subject, but I'll try to keep mine simple. So let’s get straight to it:

   First of all, there are few things you will need for this: a computer and an internet connection, a credit card for registering domain name and server space, little bit of imagination (optional), coffee (not optional) and time. Making a website can make you loose the track of time completely, so don’t start this on a busy day.

   After lots of research and years of experience in running band websites, I decided to use the absolutely wonderful Wordpress platform. As you might know Wordpress is a blogging website, but also at www.wordpress.org you can download the Wordpress site and software to your computer and then install it to your websites server. The absolute beauty of this system is that once you have uploaded the system to your site, you can edit the site on line. You don't need any web design programs and once the site is up, you don't even need FTP programs (FTP is used to upload material to your website). As a musician on the move all the time, I find this system absolutely brilliant.

   So let’s head over to www.wordpress.org. The current version is WordPress 3.2.1, you can find a Blue download button on just right from the centre of the page - click on this. On the next page the WordPress has a link to their web hosting partners. These are really handy as they have automated Wordpress installation. If you decide to go this rout, just follow the provider’s instructions and once your site is installed just come back here and skip to the design part. But as not all provide this option, I will walk you through the manual installation. I've decided to change JPKALLIO.COM over to Wordpress site in the next few months, so you can follow this process with me and at the same time build your own website. So next we click the Blue “Download WordPress 3.2.1” button on right hand side of the screen. It will download the zip file in to your computers download folder (on PC, on Mac I would assume it would do something similar, but I haven't tested this on Mac). Now go to your download folder and locate the wordpress-3.2.1.zip folder - click on this. It will open in its own window, and on the top of the window there is a “Extract all files” button.

 Once you click on this button, new window will appear where you can choose a location in your computer to store your website. It looks like this:

 Click on the Browse button. Go to your documents and create a folder for your WordPress site. Once you have created new folder, click extract. Now the files are in your folder.

   The next step is to acquire a domain name and some web space. I know many of you might think at this stage, that spending money on this can be a big commitment, so did I while back, but you need to start from somewhere, so why not make it today? The domain name is the name of your website, for example ours is www.jpkallio.com. I would recommend you to go for .com as it is reasonably priced and recognised world wide. Good company I use and can recommend for registering a domain name is www.godaddy.com. Registering a name should cost you less than €10 a year. Their set up is well explained step by step, just search and choose your domain. They also offer specialised hosting package for WordPress websites between €50 and €60 a year. These tend to be the price you will be paying for web hosting anyway. You can make the payment once a year or separate it to several smaller payments. Also if you buy both services from Godaddy, they set the name and the server space for you, so just to make this as easy as possible, I will recommend you do this. They also have the free one click setup for word press.

   But once again, let's just assume you already have hosting provider that does not offer the one click setup. This is where it gets bit complicated (and that's why I recommend the above one click option for people who have not worked with websites before). You need to create a database in your web server and a MySQL that has all privileges accessing and modifying it. This is basically where you give the WordPress permission to edit the site. Log in to your web providers site and in your website management section, or control panel. Good web provider will have help page that will tell you how to create a Database and MySQL, but basically it goes along these lines: in your site tools and settings you should have a MySQL database button or icon, click this. This should give you an option to create a new database and name it. Once you have named it, you choose a username and password. Write the database name, username and password down on a piece of paper, as you will need these shortly. Click submit (or save) your MySQL username. I did check the above information in several hosting providers, but I'm sure there are some where the process is more complicated. In this case you need to contact your host provider on advice how this is done. Once the database is created click on it, or if there is edit database option click on it. This will give you further option to add a user. Username and password are required, then click add user or save. That should be it.

   Now open the folder in your computer where you unzipped the word press files. Here you have a file called wp-config-sample, or wp-config-sample.php. Right click on it and rename it to wp-config.php . Then open this file in basic text editor, like word pad. Find the following section in the code:

 // ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'putyourdbnamehere');

 /** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'usernamehere');

 /** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'yourpasswordhere');

 /** MySQL hostname */ define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');

  You need to edit the bold sections (they won’t be bold in word pad; I’ve just made them bold here to make things easier). Here is where you need the Database information I asked you to write down earlier. The name of your database you created, replace the putyourdbnamehere with the database name, replace the usernamehere with your username, and for the yourpasswordhere, yep you guessed, the password you gave for your database :-). As to the localhost, there is a big chance you don't need to change this, but this depends on your hosting provider. To save time, I would Email them and ask. I had a small trouble with this with Gate.com, and they actually had few variations, that I could not have figured out by myself. There is an article in the WordPress database on the subject for further help at: http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php Save the document and you are done with this step. If you are doing this web set up with me and you have trouble with it, contact me at jpkallio@hotmail.com during the week, and I can try to help you before we start the actual design in next weeks blog.

   Now for the upload of the WordPress to your server you need FTP software. There are loads of free ones on the net, I use WinFtp, and lots of people prefer File Zilla, but just Google FTP and see what you like. Your FTP program should come with instructions how to connect to your server, but as a rough guide, when you acquired your web hosting they would asked you to choose a user name and password. Also your FTP address is as your website address, except you replace the www with ftp, for example ours would be ftp.jpkallio.com. The FTP software will ask you for the FTP address, user name and password. Once you are connected, on most FTP programs you will have two folders open, one on your computer and one on your web server. Go to the main body folder in your server, usually this is called “web”. And on your computer locate the WordPress folder we downloaded earlier. Now you can usually just drag and drop, so drag the WordPress folder to your web server. It usually asks you if you want to copy the file to the location, just click YES. The actual upload can take some time depending on your internet connection, so here is a good opportunity to go make a sandwich and fresh pot of coffee when the computer do all the upload.

   So now, provided your MySQL database was set up correctly, your upload was successful (no interruptions in the connection) and the changes to wp-config.php are correct, you should be good to go. The next step is to log on to an address on your website, so replase “Yourwebsite” in the following address with whatever your domain name is, followed by the name of the folder where the WordPress files are in your server. For example if your folder in your computer was called WordPress and you transferred the folder to your server, the address would be: http://www.Yourwebsite.com/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php This will run the WordPress installation script. From here on, it is like installing any social media site, but with lot more flexibility and design options. If for some reason you get an error message of some sort, then there has been an error somewhere in the steps above. So carefully check your MySQL database details, and make sure they match your details in your wp-config.php. If you still have trouble, then contact your web host and ask them to check your database info and let them know you are trying to set up WordPress site. As I mentioned above I had problem with Gate.com with the set up, and the database info ended up being completely random address, so I could not have figure it out without their customer services help. But if you still have trouble, you can Email me and I can try to help you as well. However if all is going well, you should have the following screen on your site:

 So just fill in the site title, for example your bands name, your username, password twice and your email. Also do tick the box for your site to appear in search engines.

   So that's it, you have installed WordPress. Don't mind at this point that the address is at the moment is www.Yourwebsite.com/wordpress we will fix this later when your site is ready to go live.

   This is all we are going to do this week. Next week we'll get in to the fun stuff that is designing your site and adding content to it.

   This Friday the 23rd of September JPKALLIO.COM will be rocking the Purpleroom in Drogheda. It’s a late gig, doors at 11pm and the 24 Broken Amps will be with us as well! It sure will be a great night :-)”
   So that's all for now, next week we'll continue with the website project, so be sure to check back.
  J.P.