As many of my readers may know, I’m a member of a band called Twisted Goat. We’ve  officially been around for a little over a year now, and If I were to tell you what it’s like the simple way, I’d say its not all rainbows and cupcakes.

One of the biggest challenges we face as a group is that we all enjoy different kinds of music, and sometimes we see our widespread genre as a good things and sometimes its a negative thing. While we cover all kinds of music from country to pop to rock and roll, it all has to have a certain sound, and that sound has to be the thing that sets you apart from other groups.

Being high school students, we often find our schedules throughout the week to be very packed, so finding time to practice together can be difficult (especially now). Juggling work, school, and all of our other activities, we usually end up in a crunch period about 2-3 weeks before a show, cramming together as much practice time as we can.

But the practices together are what makes a band. If you can sit in a basement for 3 hours with a group of people working out problems and not lose your mind, you’ve got something special there. I can still recall one of our first practices. It was about the middle of May, and as we sat around for a good two hours riffing and telling stories, we got hungry, took a trip to McDonald’s, and went storm chasing. It didn’t end up being the most productive day ever.

We sort of continued on like that, having a practice here or there with a few of us present, where we’d sit around playing our instruments with no real goal in mind, because we had no idea what we were doing, and no time frame to strap ourselves to.

All of that changed when three of our members all were chosen to play in the annual Pops Concert. This show is a big deal. And we knew it. So we bound together in a classroom one afternoon and listened through our three songs over and over, thinking through part assignments and keys and melodies and amp tones, until we scraped together a list of what all needed to happen for this show that was happening in about two weeks.

Along with some individual work and research, it took all of three straight hours of playing and confusion to nail our set list. We were exhausted, so we retired to our homes and waited in anticipation for our day to come. To make a long story short, we nailed it. But this story shouldn’t come across as a how to nail your first gig. It should be a lesson to anyone attempting to try it for themselves, and the only piece of advice I can give you, is to get together with a goal in mind, because if you don’t you’ll be out of touch, and not working will become the new norm.