FBO: 'A Helping Hand to the Non-Failed'

TIPS FROM THE SEASONED AND SCARRED

FBO Admin has received countless calls for tips that new bands, aka to-be-failed bands, can refer to. Here's five:

1. Hail to 1:51. All songs, no matter how bad, earn a song length of 1:51. No one can complain that it's 'sucky' or 'drifts without direction' if it's 1:51 or less. At 1:52 a song must earn every second. Consider this before repeating your first verse again just to get the obligatory verse after solo after second-chorus arrangment.
2. Don't talk about yourself, yet. 'Singer-songwriters' -- apparently different than people who write and sing songs -- talk about their problems with mics. Others yell at their parents thru distortion pedals. We don't care. We have problems too. You have to earn your stripes before you can complain about your life. Start complaining about ours, for example. Or sing about crickets attacking three-legged animals.
3. Don't laugh at your own jokes. They're not funny. If Steve misses the bass note AGAIN, who cares? If a lyric has a hidden reference we don't know, don't think it's funny. It's not. And you're pissing us off thinking it is funny. Know those mirrors where things are closer than they appear? It's like that for jokes on stage, but worse.. It seems a lot funnier when you're on stage than to the bored audience watching it.
4. Don't focus on the constructs of your songs. Audiences don't care if you started with a bridge, then went to pre-chorus THEN to verse, then chorus, then did a solo, before going through it in the right order. We couldn't give frack all. Audiences only care if it rocks.
5. Don't put Velvet or any gun part in your band name.


FBO Admin
Mobile HQ: Istanbul, Turkey