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[Graham Knight]

Originally Posted by Brother Elwood

I need some advice from bands/sound guys etc. or even gig-goers who know a bit about music. I have a conundrum.

...Recently it's occured to me to maybe bite the bullet and record them and pass a few copies out to see what people of think of them, and possibly put a band together to play a few of them if the feedback is good.

BUT

The problem is that they are all completely different styles. There's a couple of sort of slow, haunting acoustic numbers, a couple of heavy, rock/grungey kind of songs, a couple of stupidly cheerful folk numbers, and even one tribal sounding instrumental thing....... I've sort of tried making them all a bit more uniform to sit in together, but it just doesn't work - they lose their edge. Thus my question really is, does a band or artist need to have a "Sound"? If you go to see a rock band you hear rock, if you go to see a folk singer, you hear folk - I'm going from Nirvana to Cat Stevens in one move! So what do I do? Record them all, see which ones come out best and drop the others and go for a specific trademark sound? Or do I go from heavy palm muting in one song to major jazz chords in the next and just confuse everybody? I didn't intentionally go out to be eclectic or offbeat, the songs just generally reflect the mood I was in when I was writing them, and I have a huge array of influences that all seem to have got muddled in with each other.

Any advice?

Hi Elwood,

You have already had excellent advice from members in reply to your query but here is some more:

Be super-critical with yourself and pick the five best compositions. Forget the rest and work up that five along with some colleagues - no doubt their musical input will spark your creativity further.

Book a short amount of studio time and get the five recorded - you don't need much time as you will already be fully rehearsed.

Forget "giving them to friends".
Concentrate on getting your recordings up on YouTube as soon as possible together with some interesting and not too zany facts about the musicians.

Give copies to people who will play your music on the radio or people who may book you.

Make your friends pay for their copies and aim to recover your recording costs quickly. Offer them a "buy one - get one free deal" and that way your music will spread quicker. Tell them you will personally autograph them and they will soon be worth a fortune on e-bay.

I was trying to think of a possible name for the band and have read and re-read your original post. It is a short story and there is not much to go on.

Perhaps the Short Stories especially if you are tall.

The word eclectic glares out at me from your post but when I check there is already an Eclectic Voices group registered to say nothing of Eclectic Records who are also based in Scotland - so no Eclectic suggestions.

Gnomes Of Zurich also springs to mind but there is already a group using that name.

Your post mentions a connection with Switzerland and say your music is multi-faceted so how about Swiss Army Knive?

The three words are instantly recognised as running together and the name is associated with a product that combines many different things - like your music.

Short Stories, or Swiss Army Knife each has the advantage of being names that the public already know and are therefore easily remembered. Both names should easily inspire you to think creatively about posters.

Think about incorporating your chosen name into a title for your instrumental.

For example:

Short Stories Stomp
or
Sharp as a Swiss Army Knife.

Enough advice from me - hope this helps. Go for it!
PS "Different Cuts from Swiss Army Knife" wouldn't be a bad title either.