Musician's Birthdays

I’m not quite sure when in 2023 I decided, but in 2024, I’m aiming to put up an instagram story/Youtube Short of me playing something related to a musician/person who has a birthday that day. 366 wee snippets of me playing. The main reason is it’s a bit of fun…

Social media is a burden and a boon, not only do you have to do it, you also have to do it properly and the powers that be are forever moving the goalposts. It sometimes feels like a lot of work when you could be doing actual work. I’ve been around long enough that I know that chasing likes and followers doesn’t easily transfer to cash.

I’ve went through various phases of trying to bother and not bothering. As age, fatherhood and a cost of living crisis reduce how much I’m out and about in music venues when I’m not playing, social media is starting to account for about 60% of my new clients. On top of that YouTube pays me a wee wedge of advertising revenue every month, so while I don’t think I’ll ever pay my (post-Truss) mortgage from it, it’s in my interest to throw some content at it every now and again.

anyway…. before that turns into a social media rant…

I was sitting plucking away on a guitar as I do. Playing a riff for no other reason than my own enjoyment and I thought… I’m not arrogant enough to make a reel of me playing this just for the sake of it. I don’t even really sell my performance abilities beyond my trumpet playing, but at the same time, I’ll sit and learn to play something and then forget it and the effort feels pointless, so the medium of “30 second story” seemed to be the perfect ephemeris that gave me the output without enough pressure to actually be any good at anything.

Enter the spreadsheet… the most important part of every creative endeavour.

I started to make a list musicians for each day of 2024. It was quite the challenge. Josh Homme and Trent Reznor share a birthday for instance. I quite like choosing obscure bands and musicians that are influential to me, but there’s a quandary at choosing their hit or something more obscure. It turned into a fun pursuit that played well to my strengths.

John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page being born in the first week of January was wonderful encouragement to get it started, but you have to take the rough with the smooth, cos the best I could do for January 1st and 2nd were Country Joe McDonald and Roger Miller. Nothing against them, but they were pretty off the beaten track for my tastes, and people must have wondered what on earth I was doing by starting there.

I started to tick a few things off during the hour I had between the toddler going to sleep and me having to get to bed. Those hours that are a false economy to do real work in.

I started to really enjoy it. Teaching myself a piano riff or a guitar part of an evening with a glass of something or a mug of sleepy tea. A great excuse to pick up instruments more regularly than I do. The ropier the results are the harder I probably found it and the more I probably enjoyed it.

For the video - I rely heavily on a couple of GoPros. I have better cameras and I have managed to do a few with my phone, but in terms of versatility and just hitting play, they are a multiple take musicians best friend, and you can control and monitor them all on your phone. With 5 mins snatched here and there to get something down, it’s the ideal:

Mostly filmed in sunny Greenock with a huge window looking out to mountains, seas and dolphins behind me, it’s an ongoing battle not to be backlit. I could close the blinds, but the view is lovely. This isn’t aided by GoPro’s propensity to reset the filming parameters when you turn them on and off.

I peppered it with a few live videos that were kicking around and relevant. There’s a few of the Dughoose Ska Band in there. Chasing the originals of many of the Ska hits is a musicologists pleasure in it’s own right. It’s a reminder for bands to get Live videos while they are match fit, cos I’ve played 1000 Otis Redding songs on the trumpet, but the bands never bothered creating content, so they are lost to history. Sadly there is also no evidence of my career as a 90’s botherer of guitars in grunge cover bands touring the old men pubs of Ayrshire….

So the idea became a reality and now I’ve completed January.

It’s a great wee thing to put out there when I’m busy. It can get scheduled in advance, which is yet more productive activity I can do on my downtime. In an ideal world, I would match the ‘musician of the day’ with a screen print poster and a vinyl on the vinyl shelf, but that proved to be a bit too much organisation. I kept on hitting record in case I managed a riff and before I knew it I had recorded about 7 and forgot to change the vinyl. Or I would put up the vinyl and it wouldn't be in shot. A great lesson in not biting off more than I can chew :)

I also finally have something to play at soundcheck. Gone are the days where I toot the trumpet and feel that I should have ‘prepared’ something. Now I can tick off a musicians birthday.

I know that people will balk at my audacity to be playing any of these instruments when I’m not Angie Mallstone*, but ripping the knitting of haters is at least 72% of why the internet is fun. Wait till they look past my awful playing and notice that I chose Andy Wood of Mother Love Bone above Elvis and Bowie!!!

I work with bands and artists all the time, and it’s also good to remind yourself of what is involved in putting yourself out there, so I like to be active, even if my money is all coming from video editing that month.

Anyway…. here’s a compilation of January. Follow all our socials for the rest:

Youtube channel Instagram Facebook

How many will I get wrong?

Who will be the first Birthday wish recipient to like my story?

Which short will be the first Youtube one to get 1000 views? ✅

Zack De La Rocha got 2.3k views on the first day before I even published this. Not one of my best - he’s not even the guitarist, but you really don’t want to hear me rap…. So…

Which short will be the first Youtube one to get 5000 views?

What do I do in 2025?

*Autocorrected versions of Yngwie Malmsteen have always amused me and always will