by Braden Dupuis
Even if you have all the talent in the world, starting a band can be a difficult process.
“When you’re in a band, it’s like family,” said Regina musician Brendan Leary on a Saturday afternoon in his basement recording studio/jam space.
“It’s drama and everything, and you’ve got to try and commit and arrange. When you include all that it makes it difficult.”
Finding someone with musical chops comparable to your own is hard enough, Leary said.
Finding someone who you can stand to be around is even harder.
Thankfully for modern musicians, there’s the internet.
Leary and his younger brother Kyle Reid have been looking to form a band since moving to Regina a year and a half ago.
To help find suitable jamming partners, the brothers recently posted an ad to www.kijiji.com with links to some of their music.
“What we’re looking for now is just a bassist and a vocalist,” Leary said.
So far the ad has generated some responses, leading to jamming opportunities and critiques of their sound from fellow musicians.
“It’s kinda cool to let people listen and then let them judge what they hear in the music, rather than us trying to tell people what we sound like,” Leary said.
It’s a far cry from the early days of rock, when the only way to connect with other musicians was to physically seek them out in record shops and mosh pits.
And even then, the prospects of finding a suitable jamming partner were slim.
“You might take a full day going out, travelling, commuting … only to find out that they weren’t as they self promoted themselves,” said Toronto-based musician Troy Fullerton.
Fullerton is a co-founder of www.downtojam.com, a social media website designed specifically for helping musicians connect with each other.
His inspiration stemmed from his own experiences trying to find people to jam with.
The site mimics the matching capabilities used by online dating sites — a feature that seemed like a natural fit.
“(Starting a band) is, in a weird way, like dating,” Fullerton said.
“You don’t always connect with the people you jam with … even people who are into a similar style of music as you who are at the similar skill level sometimes just don’t mesh in other ways, so that’s where we’re going with the matching.”
And judging by its ever-expanding user base, the website might be onto something.
“I think it’s effective. We’ve been getting great feedback from our users so far,” Fullerton said.
“We’ve also heard from people who have met people on the site, who have had great jams and who are starting up a band and playing shows already, so it’s been good.”
With any luck, sites like downtojam.com will cut down on bad first-jam-experiences, like one instance involving Leary and one of his first bands in the Regina area.
“The second time we jammed, (the singer) got really drunk.” Leary said.
“I drove his car back from Moose Jaw and he tried to kick out his windshield. He freaked right out, and then him and his girlfriend were fighting. It was an interesting experience,” he said.
“It never actually worked out.”
