Ari Herstand

As much time as you spend in your rehearsal space perfecting your sound, it won't mean anything if it's botched coming out of the PA. All the money you spent on new pedals, amps, guitars and strings doesn't matter if the mix is off in the club.The sound guy (or gal) is the most i...

I (digitally) sat down with Kyle Weber, one half of the brother-Weber founders of Indie On The Move, to discuss their excellent booking resource for DIY musicians. As I wrote in Booking Your Own Tour: A How-To Guide, I used their site when booking recent tours and found it to be...

The hardest thing for musicians to hear and the reason so many are held back for so long lies in a simple, nauseating realization: your music doesn't matter.Of course I think the music matters. All musicians are passionately, desperately and hopelessly in love with music. It's wh...

Last year I went on two national tours covering 40 states and played over 100 shows. I booked nearly every show. It was my first time visiting about 30 of the cities and many of the other cities' venues I had never played before. Both tours were financially successful. Let me sa...

I hope you have heard by now that Facebook has changed the way that users see Page posts in their newsfeed. Before this move, Facebook's algorithm to display Page posts in users' newsfeed was mostly based on how many users initially interacted with the post organically (liked, co...

Anyone who has seen my solo live show knows that I have a lot going on on stage. I run multiple instruments and microphones through a mixer into my loop station and out to the house. I have quite a bit of gear setup on stage for a solo artist. I've played over 500 shows and just...

CDs are nearly extinct. I, for one, still enjoy getting a physical disc, browsing the liner notes, reading the credits of the string players on track 8 (who aren't credited on iTunes downloads) and using one more of my senses (well two if you count the smell of paper and plastic)...

Building a fan base is a daunting task. Just reading that sentence your blood pressure probably rose a couple points. Everyone talks about how it's so important to 'build a fan base,' but no one really gives a simple way how or what that even really means.You should not look at t...

You may have heard the Amanda Palmer story on how she made $19,000 in 10 hours (3 years before her $1.2 million Kickstarter) on Twitter. Or maybe you haven't, but it's quite impressive. But the thing that always bugs me about these stories - especially when they're titled 'Indie...

When I was 14 and wanted to learn guitar my mom took me to a pawn shop to get my first guitar. I knew absolutely nothing about guitars and picked the one in our price range that looked cool. It was an electric so we also got a small practice amp. I couldn't tell you what the guit...