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Dirty-South Blues Harp forum: wail on! >
Tips for starting a local harmonica meet up
Tips for starting a local harmonica meet up
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Adam Pritchard
129 posts
May 12, 2018
3:15 PM
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I'm starting a local harmonica meet up in Gloucestershire, England, the first meeting for which is at the end of this month. Has anyone got any tips for running these sort of things? I expect everyone will be at different levels of ability. What works, what doesn't? Any help greatly appreciated.
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nacoran
9848 posts
May 12, 2018
5:26 PM
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I haven't run a harmonica meetup, but I did run a songwriter's workshop for a while and attended another one and a lot of open mics and a couple multi-instrument jams. There are a lot of different things you can try. It depends a lot what exactly you are trying to do at the group. Some of it is logistics. We used a facebook group so people could talk together in a closed setting. I think it works better than using FB Events (although you can do both), since everyone in the group gets the messages, assuming FB hasn't changed the algorithm again.
The venue is important. When we started the songwriter's workshop we were at a local ice cream shop, but then that shop closed and we had to move to another branch. That branch was half and hour away and didn't have as good parking, and wasn't as big, so if there were a bunch of people in there the noise was too much for good conversation. We started having problems with not enough people showing up. Not everyone played an instrument, so it was important to have accompaniment for the pure vocalists. I think the harp equivalent might be to figure out which players are good at comping and encourage them to help out the less experienced players with supporting rhythms. Maybe, starting out, have people jot down a few songs they know and see what sort of overlap there are on the lists. Ask people who want to introduce new songs to jot down the tab and key for people who can't do it by ear. It might not be a bad idea to have some way to play recordings, so if someone says, 'hey, I could use help with this song...' they can play it.
Let people figure out how comfortable they are playing in front of other people. We had some shy people who were really uncomfortable playing when the place was crowded with other activities but would open up when the crowd started to thin out.
We had couple amps we brought for people to play through, but mostly we just played unamplified. (The venue was fine with us plugging in though.)
Have a rough idea of what you want to get through. You may say, 'hey everyone, at the next meeting, we want to play a couple songs... here is a list and tabs and links'. If multiple people are playing at once, particularly if some of them are less skilled, you may want a conductor to help people keep on time. Ask people what they liked and what they didn't. Make sure people are being polite... I've got one friend who would be playing his guitar while other people were playing their song (and not playing what they are playing.) We had to address that. He had some real ADHD sort of problems, so we'd make sure whoever was performing showed him the chords. (It was doubly tough since he was also in my band... nice guy, but we had to figure out strategies to make it work.)
Leave time for pure socializing, but make sure that it's mostly at the end or at a scheduled time at the beginning with a 'start' time for actual music so we didn't waste all the time. Usually, just introducing the next song in a timely fashion and letting people know what is going on can keep things moving.
And be great to the venue. Buy stuff, tip the staff... I usually liked to throw an extra $5 in their tip jar at the end of the night just to let them know they were appreciated.
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Nate
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First Post- May 8, 2009
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indigo
508 posts
May 12, 2018
9:14 PM
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If you tipped a barman in the UK he'd probably faint^
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