I don't consider your example as a real life context, I consider it a curated youtube promo.
For true real life context with a Behringer UB-Xa, here you go, the UB-Xa is the top keyboard:
Guys, don't map notes to keys. Learn to be a musician, learn your scales, your keys, your chords. Learn about harmony. Learn how to play your instrument like a pianist.
"I yearn to be part of a group that plays to larger crowds"
Get yourself into a cover band with an engaging front person. My band plays every weekend, normally in bars with 60-150 people, sometimes private parties, and occasionally at outdoor festivals with up to 3,000 people. If you feel the need to do originals you can always sneak in a couple originals into your set.
"I had never played in a band before joining them [2.5 years ago], ... I now recognise that I am a damn good bassist ... perhaps play as a session musician for popular bands"
These ^^^ are contradictory statements.
"What are some good methods of finding other bands near me?"
Go to bars where bands play, talk to them, hang out where other musicians hang out, introduce yourself to them, start making friends, tell them you're looking to join a band, tell them you're available to sub in whenever they need, go to the practice studios, hang out start getting to know other musicians.
"have a dream of playing in front of larger crowds. Is there any way to find something like this without starting completely from scratch with a new band?"
You need to learn a lot (300+) cover songs. That's the only way you can drop in as a sub on an already-established band. Another way to put it is that you need to be able pick up songs very quickly by ear and "fake them" on stage at gigs well enough to where the audience doesn't know you're faking it. To get to that point you have to play in cover bands regularly for several years.
This is a forum I started for practical advice for gigging rock musicians: https://www.reddit.com/r/giggingrockmusicians/
We've all been there where we were broke and didn't know if we could pay the rent. I think this is fine when you're young.
Thanks. Join my forum if you like https://www.reddit.com/r/giggingrockmusicians/ where we can discuss practical things like this.
Awesome. If you don't mind posting again in a few weeks/month or two, the status of how it's going using the app, I'd be curious because we might need to use it down the line.
They're the ones who don't last.
totally true. it's impossible to search back through group texts and distill the important stuff out of it.
I said we used band.us, but I was wrong, it was a phone app called "Band" and it seemed pretty good, so you might want to look at that
Get yourself a Boss Space Echo pedal. And if you also really need chorus, then get yourself the Boss CE-W2 Waza Craft chorus pedal.
Might be useful to find out where to submit applications to play, and to know what the logistics are.
You should try it for sure, la vida es una sola. "Pro" means you are earning enough money to live, so you'll have to: give music lessons, plays gigs in bands, and try to get paid studio session work wherever you can. For playing gigs in bands you'll have to take work playing stuff that's not your first choice, rock bands, pop bands, cover bands, and of course your jazz bands. Latin salsa, bachata, cumbia, that sort of thing if you know how to play it.
It's not hard to earn money with music, but the amount of money is going to be around poverty-level. Meaning you can survive on it, but barely. Earning any more than this through music is tough unless you get a lot of music students and you're giving lessons every day all day long.
NYC is a tough town. I've heard Nashville is where things are happening nowadays, a lot of demand for live music, a lot of recording. Just never do anything for free. Don't play for free. Don't do session work for free. Make sure you get paid for everything.
For $1000, you'll want a used, older workstation type synth like the FA-07. You'll want the 73 keys.
What I use personally is two keyboards: a Nord Stage-3 on the bottom tier, and a 61-key vintage 80s synth (D-50, JX-8P) or vintage clone (Behringer UB-Xa) on the top tier.
With my 80s band we tried using band.us, but nobody was really paying attention to it.
In my current cover band we just use group texts plus Google Calendar, although nobody really pays much attention to the Google Calendar. I suspect everybody maintains their own personal calendar.
Yeah group texts are unwieldy. But we make it work as follows:
someone has a gig offer, they ask the group "is everyone available on this date and time?" Each person responds yes or no. Then the original person says the gig is confirmed and everyone marks it on their calendars.
Well, regarding changing keys to accomodate vocals, you pretty much have to do this when they ask for it, so get used to it. Vocalists are real picky and a lot of them don't have a great range so the only way to make it work is to transpose. Plus sometimes you have females singing songs originally sung by males, and vice versa.
When you transpose you are going to have to voice chords differently so that still sounds good. If you're transposing down you don't want to muddy up the lower end, so you'll have to spread out the voicings, use inversions and eliminate the closer-together notes at the bottom.
As a cover band artist, you ought to be able to play any song in any of the twelve keys without using the transpose button, so this means you need to have enough mastery of the instrument to make the song sound good in any of the keys.
If you are a real good musician - like, performance wise and technically - then you can make about twice the money being part of a touring band compared to what you earn playing in bars.
But as far as making it with original music, mostly you need a lot of luck, and a healthy dose of people skills. It's much easier to make a living through giving music lessons and playing covers, than it is through originals.
The singer in my band makes her living from singing. She's been doing it for 10+ years. In addition to my band, she's in two or three other bands, all cover bands, playing the bars in our local community. It's not a good living, but it's a living, she keeps busy doing 3 to 4 gigs a week.
I've got the UB-Xa, you can definitely create dark and brooding sounds on it. It's cheaper than the other two, has 61 keys (the TEO-5 only has 44) and will do what you need.
20 pounds is the standard weight for any synth worth taking on the road. Get yourself a Gator GK-61 semi-rigid keyboard case:
https://www.reddit.com/r/giggingrockmusicians/comments/1cfp06k/transporting_gear/
Buy yourself the Radial Pro DI passive DI box, one XLR cable, and one 1/4" TS cable. Plug the TS cable from the synthesizer to the DI box. Plug the XLR cable from the DI box to the monitor.
Every musician enjoys playing for a lot of people. The more the better. We are performers in our nature. The most people I've played for at a gig is about 3,000. I would love the opportunity to play for 10,000 or 15,000 some day, I think it would be cool. Maybe it'll happen, maybe it won't.
One thing is clear, though - if you focus on making your art as good as you can make it, things will happen for you. You won't have to look far. Focus on your craft, on your skills, on being genuine, on being yourself.
Most musicians I have been involved with over the years (decades) are not like this. I grew up in a place where art was done for art's sake, not for fame or fortune.
There's positives and negatives to chasing "fame" and "success". The positives are it's a good motivator; it pushes you to practice and improve your skills; it puts a clear goal in your path. Many people go through life without any goals so having clear and strong goals is admirable.
They've got their priorities wrong.
Not the Behringer UB-Xa. Lol ... Not most synths, either, from my experience.
But there's a big difference between what patches sounds like in a bar gig context (what I do) versus what they sound like through headphones in your home studio. The former not only is much more forgiving but in fact many factory presets sound fine and in some cases are preferable to more complex patches whose nuances will not be heard.
But for studio work, yeah, factory presets generally suck.
Hardware synths with great presets?
synthesizers