St. Joseph, MI

While spending hours of preparation loading up the car with gear and diapers for a concert with a family of four inspires excitement and adventure, it's not the easiest and most stress-free way to tour. As I recently found myself rearranging car seats and wedging strollers between my road cases in the back of our SUV I remembered traveling with all dudes in a tour bus with a massive trailer packed with merchandise, gear and often a massive sound system. While I miss playing with a band of fantastic musicians, I prefer the small SUV with my cute little family.

Even better are the dates close to home. Several weeks ago I spent an early afternoon playing Tetris at the back of our MDX. Poor Gabby had to share her seat with a piano. Every time I have to move a keyboard I ask myself why I didn't choose to play the violin or guitar?



Even though the rain made the load in slightly obnoxious, we found ourselves ready for a great night with good friends. What better way to spend a rainy evening than with a group of friends at a concert?



Other advantages of having a show close to home is the ability to invite a network of cool friends. Always thankful for my friend and creative counter part Kyle Pierpont. Having a good photographer in one's inner-circle is always a good idea.









A one man show is tough and not my preference by any means. Toby Mac is probably the best example of this philosophy of business and has been very successful at it. He's the first to admit that he's not the most talented guy on the bus and purposefully surrounds him self with people who are better than him to make his concerts what they are. Any one who's seen Toby and the Diverse City band would see that. A band compensates for a player's weaknesses and potential lack of preparation. When you're by yourself, there's nobody to hide your mistakes behind. You also never get a break. There isn't a guitar solo that allows a few seconds to step back and drink some water and catch your breath, or a trash can ending to to give a few minutes to think of your next joke. It's also tough to remain entertaining for 80 minutes. When I'm hiding behind a keyboard, it's tough to visually stimulate an audience. I try to come out from around the keyboard a few times a night, but I always feel the pull hurry back behind my shield.




A band will come, but this has been a tremendously rewarding and challenging way to travel and play concerts. God has been so gracious to us in this, we've helped facilitate over 60 children sponsored this year. Considering the size of my typical audiences, this is a tremendous blessing.
If you've come to my shows, thank you. If you're thinking of having me to one, pull the trigger. Do it. Do it now. I can't wait and look forward to seeing you soon. Christmas is around the corner and I can't wait to share some Christmas music with you.

Collin

The Other Side of the Table

I've been trying to find a quote I'm not ashamed to admit I read on Pinterest. It said something like, "Someday I'll write a book after I read a whole one." I laughed when I read it then quickly returned to FaceBook when I realized it was talking about me. Seriously, though, the book I'm writing in my mind is called "The Other Side of the Table: a glimpse into the Contemporary Christian Music Industry." (The tag line isn't perfected yet, but I'm digging "The Other Side of the Table," sounds like a contemporary version of "The Prince and the Pauper.") By the way this blog serves as the proof of my intellectual property. Don't steal it.

Anyway, being on staff at Grace has given me so many awesome opportunities to develop numerous ministries and try new things. One big project of this fall was hosting an inaugural concert and we brought in For King and Country and Future of Forestry. After much deliberation we named our fall concert series, "Shaken" which is Hebrew for, to rest or dwell. I designed this series of concert posters.

I printed a 5'x8' poster of this this on our printer in the office in series of 12"x18" glossy paper and it turned out really well. For any future events that I need signage for in Michiana, I'll use PAC BannerWorks. They will print a vinyl poster like this for $65 which I thought was a great price.

I did a FaceBook promotion where people could turn their profile pic to this icon for their chance to win two free tickets.

On the recommendation of a good friend I used iTickets.com for my online ticket sales and ticket printing. For $75 I had 400 physical tickets printed and they had excellent customer service. I would highly recommend them, too.

When these showed up in the mail I realized there was no going back - we were locked in.

I was so impressed with the response I got with this add I ran in our service pre-roll announcements. I speculated that I'd need 30 volunteers for various positions and within a week I was turning volunteers away. Just so you know, in a church like ours this is very rare. In my one year tenure in church ministry I'm realizing this is something people don't line up to do: sign up to help with stuff.

I wanted our concert staff to feel official and have matching staff T's so I did mock of this:

It would have cost me $5/shirt from WalMart and then I would have had to iron on logos which did not sound fun...so even after calling all of my merch providers I used when in 33Miles I went with a company out of Ohio named Blu Dot that was recommended by a friend. Evidently "special location" on shirts costs extras, so they printed these for $8/shirt. Worth it to me!

There is so much that goes into concert promotion - I now have so much more respect for concert promoters that I worked with from an artist side in my previous life. The artists we hosted were happy. I covered my bases and took good care of them. While administrating and organizing and putting together all of the details was time consuming it wasn't impossible and it showed me that promoters can do a great job and knock a concert out of the park if they want to, they just need to try!

More on concert riders next time.