Adam Rafferty

Financial Tip for Touring Musicians – The Numbers Don’t Lie!

Years ago when I started touring Europe I was not too financially organized. Primarily because I didn’t and still don’t “do it for the money” – I do it for the love of music and travel. However, deriving “feelings” from looking at your wallet at the end of a tour is a very inaccurate way to do this.

Whether you feel “good” or “bad” you really have no idea what went down financially unless you do the math. You could feel very rich (or extremely poor) looking at the money in your pocket at the end of a tour. What about all the money and credit card bills for the travel, hotels, food? Those expenses may have happened months before – so you cannot tell by looking in your wallet at the end of a tour!

On my first few tours back in the late 1990’s, I’d front the money for the band’s plane tickets, train tickets, food, hotels on nights off for the band, and of course – their pay was guaranteed. It was then up to me to sell CD’s and collect gig income and “pray for the best”.

I can remember feeling as though I was on an emotional roller coaster when I spent money, or when I felt I made some, and in the end – no idea whether I made or lost money because I had no system for tracking the income / expenses.

One year I decided to start keeping track of my income and expenses using a simple excel spreadsheet. If you are touring, and own a laptop this is actually kind of a fun little morning activity – assuming you didn’t party too hard the night before. Any spreadsheet program should be fine – Excel, Apple Works, Open Office – are a few available.

In just about any spreadsheet program, you can set up a whole region of several rows and columns to sum the numbers so your totals of income and expenses. I simply enter expenses as a negative number, and income as a positive number. I even got geeky and have columns for US dollars as well as Euros so that I can translate it all into dollars at the end.

The result? Well you start to see some very interesting things like:

– How much it costs to go on tour
– How much each gig “costs” so you get an idea of what fee you need to ask for
– Where you can cut expenses
– Did you break even and cover costs, and if so, when?
– Most importantly you can come home feeling good when you do earn money, it is inspiration and motivation for the next tour!

Note – even if you don’t earn money a tour can be successful, because the benefit can come from the relationships and fan base you are establishing. Think of that kind of scenario as an investment.

If you are paying band mates as you go rather than in a lump at the end, you can enter that as an expense on a given day – so that the 50 bucks here and there can all be accounted for in case of misunderstandings.

The numbers do not lie. It is totally enlightening to see the numbers added up, and if the spreadsheet does it properly, there is little room for error, as long as it’s set up right.

As musicians we think like artists and not accountants, so this activity may not come naturally. However as we move into the 21st century, we have to be responsible in new ways. By taking care of ourselves financially we end up taking care of ourselves emotionally and that becomes our physical and musical well being too!

These all are in support of the music, even though they may seem like distractions. So – fire up your spreadheet software (excel, apple works, open office – whatever) and start fooling around with this idea. You’ll be glad you did, and this will help your musical life too!

Greets from The Road – Voelklingen, Germany

By Adam Rafferty 6 Comments

(this post was written March 8, 2010)

Greets friends. I am writing to you as I sit on the train to Frankfurt for a solo concert this evening.

A few days ago, I was in Linz, Austria and fell into some delightful, deep contemplation while taking a nice stroll on the Hauptplatz (main square). Linz was one of the first places I ever played on a Europe tour with a jazz trio, and I returned to precisely the same venue and stage, 10 years later for two sold out solo concerts.

Returning to a place I rarely come to after all this time put me in a time warp of sorts! Allow me to digress…

I am fascinated by the idea of what’s “out there” in the world we see vs. what’s “in here” in our minds and bodies.

The more that we look at our own minds and bodies, we see that everything we experience is inside and it is in fact impossible to experience anything outside ourselves.

When you see a bird, what’s actually happening? Actually, light waves zap into your eyes and your brain puts a picture of the bird together. Like it or not, your brain sees the bird. You “see” the image in your brain. You never experience the actual bird.

The same for sounds, smells, tastes, colors, emotions, touch and so on. Our sense organs pick up frequencies and it is our brain that registers them, interprets and assembles them. Past that, the brain can choose to add meaning – but that’s a whole other topic! 🙂

There is a famous story about two Zen monks. One monk looks at a flag waving in the wind one sunny day, and the other monk says “is it the flag that is moving, or is it your mind that is moving?”

In looking at the Linz “Hauptplatz”, seeing in my mind’s eye the memories of years past, remembering the feelings, dreams, loves, ups and downs I saw something that the Zen monk saw. Did I experience Linz? No I experienced my own mind and inner workings.

Sure I experienced events there, but they were the simply the out picturing of precisely what I was looking for due to the Law of Attraction. This experience this time was completely different, because I am looking for new things in music and in life.

The feeling was Merlin-esque. My whole sense of past, present and future somehow felt like it was collapsing on itself. Side note: I also saw that without a doubt any picture I hold in mind comes to fruition. Take time out of the equation and it is as if you can snap your fingers and have anything.

Even when I sit on the meditation cushion and the mind starts to wander, I laugh at myself….in a 20 minute session I can feel the feelings, sight sand sounds of Bangkok, my apartment in NYC, people in my life, my cat, life as a school kid…and physically I am in one place. It’s so easy to see in that setting that it is the “mind moving” and not “the flag”.

The holograph in my mind of course is “inside”, but what must be realized is even when you are “there” and “seeing things for real” the holograph is still an inner experience. So, really no difference between being in Bangkok and seeing things vs seeing the memories in my mind. Why? All I ever saw was my mind anyway…

What’s even more interesting is when two or more people experience something allegedly tangible – for example, attending a concert. For each listener, there is a brain assembling music and meaning and an experience. The music is not an outer experience, even at a concert…it’s an inner experience for each person there.

I dance around this topic without a real conclusion for you in mind. To see that it is all inside me, the entire cosmos, everyone I know, everything I have seen or heard is in me, fills me with wonder.

What, if anything is “out there” past my consciousness? This may be something we’re not allowed to know on this plane of existence. However, knowing that everything is inside is a level of taking responsibility for ones thoughts and life.

You may think that even this blog entry is outside you, but guess what? Everything you are reading and seeing is an inner experience, being put together by your brain. It’s in you.

Cool, huh? Until next time, feel good, love those around you, love yourself and keep swingin’!

Practicing “The Gig” vs. Practicing “Guitar”

By Adam Rafferty 26 Comments

In Jack Canfield’s “The Success Principles” he describes two olympic athletes who at each training session would do a “mock olympics”. The coach would call out their names exactly in the format that would go down in the real olympic competition, score them perfectly and award them the gold medal.

Of course the reason it appeared in Canfield’s book was that they did win the gold medal in the real competition. When they were in the competition they felt like they were back at their gym with their trainer.

This is a very deep lesson actually. It’s about bringing yourself through sensations – auditory, visual, and kinesthetic – into the feeling of the ACTUAL moment that you’ll be in. It’s a fast forwarding of sorts, and actually you can take yourself from the 4th dimension (time) somewhere else in the 5th dimension (all possibilities starting from now). By living in the end result, you find your way to get there….auto-magically!

I didn’t readily see how I could use this concept with music performance until last week.

Today is Feb 6, 2010. In about 3 weeks I start an 8 week tour through Germany, Austria the UK and I finish off in Belgrade, Serbia. That’s my “olympics”. I gotta kick butt, but practicing at home is so different from being on a concert stage. (Or is it?)

At home, I can just sling the guitar on and walk around in my pajamas and play a tune 100 times until it feels good. I can have a coffee, chat with a friend on a break, and go back to play some more.

The concert stage is totally different. (Or is it?) In concert…

I need to entertain for 90-120 minutes.There’s no going back to fix mistakes and no playing the same tunes 3,4,5 times.There are lights shining brightly in my eyes so I sometimes can’t see the frets.Playing through a PA presents a new sound problem – all of a sudden I need to adjust to a new sound.Jacket buttons hit the guitar unexpectedly.I get thirsty, I sweat and I gotta make people happy!I have to get the vocal mic (for beatbox) and the guitar to behave together sonically.I have to play a tune or two that may be a bit rusty, and play it like I mean it.It’s a jungle out there!

Doing the first few concerts is disconcerting if I have been off the road for a month or two, to say the least.

Then I realized the meaning of this story about the athletes. As well, after listening to videos and audio programs of great speakers like Jack Canfield, Brian Tracy, Esther & Jerry Hicks, and others – I realized that a SERIOUS amount of prep work goes into what they do. It’s no accident that they pull off their seminars and workshops with total finesse.

I had my AHA! moment. I decided I’d “do a concert” here at home by myself instead of my usual “practice routine”. Of course I’ve done many concerts before but I saw a new opportunity to improve my show and up my game! I could do exactly what the athletes did. For many this would be a “nice idea” but I decided to follow through and really do it, so that I could report back to you.

I set up my PA system here at home (my neighbors got a concert I think…) and wrote out my concert program. I got dressed up in my suit, and even shone my desk lamp in my eyes to simulate stage lights. I set up my mic, set a glass of water nearby, and everything. I put cologne on, and set up the video camera. I tuned up in the bathroom (my dressing room) and came out, announced myself the way most emcees do, and tore up 2 hours worth of music.

Unfortunately the only groupie in sight was my cat, Brina. 🙂

All I can say is WOW. I actually got so many of the “head trips” of playing a concert I saw that this is truly great performance practice technique. Duh, some people call it a dress rehearsal, but once again – this is something not generally “taught” to solitary musicians.

Solo musicians run their “pieces” but rarely “run their show” I didn’t think that it was possible in this habitat (my studio apartment) to access the difficulties of the concert environment, but it actually was!

My biggest goal now is to forgive myself for mistakes on stage and continue with the music, and to be more and more “in the moment” while playing. Great performers “flow” and it can only get better and better. I’m curious to report back from the road and say if this practice technique was in fact helpful.

It’s also interesting to feel the pacing of songs as they fall between other songs. I’ve done this now 2 days in a row, and the “flow” of the set felt much more natural today. Damn, I wonder where this will get to after a week, 2 weeks, etc.

In watching the video (I only caught the first hour, my flip cam hard drive got filled up) I was surprised, as I suspected I’d be. Songs I thought were “B” level were “A” level, and vice versa. I also caught some serious flaws in my presentation, realized I need a wardrobe and especially need hairdo upgrade. 🙂

I am sure my mind will churn for days on this, but heck I’d rather start this thought process now than after the first few gigs! Seeing one’s performance as an outsider is totally different than the inner experience of doing it.

Yes, it’s important to be a great musician, and a great guitarist or instrumentalist – but performance “chops” are a whole other set of skills. If you are performing anywhere as a public speaker, reader, comedian, magician or musician – set up a performance environment for yourself and try this NOW.

“Great musicians can be sucky performers and great performers can be sucky musicians.” That’s my quotable quote of the day. And, guess who gets the bigger money at gigs? 🙂

If you are a performer of any sort, do try this at home! You’ll be amazed at what you experience.

Meditation, Affirmation, Vibration and Groove

By Adam Rafferty 3 Comments

In quantum physics, the very very – teeny weeny (the scientific term) small stuff is examined. When we see how the very small behaves – we discover new ideas about how the big stuff behaves. When we see that a photon behaves according to the “observer” we then see that life around us does too, and so on.

Many quantum physicists turn to meditation. Through the study of physics, they actually arrive at similar conclusions that eastern religions, particularly Buddhism, have.

Since I was as young as I can recall I always saw the “time” problem – that clocks do not measure time and that we are in a constant “now”. The idea of time being a string or thread belongs to one mode of our thought. I can recall seeing a second hand move and just thinking “now, now, now” and that the clock was not saying anything real at all.

Imagine if we looked at units of time the way we look at the big and small of the universe and quantum physics. What happens in the smallest moments happens in the biggest moments too, and vice versa. What can we observe?

Did it ever occur to you that if you clap your hands, that sound itself is thousands of moments in time? Don’t believe me? Record it and look at the sound. You can chop it up a million times! Think on this and you’ll see that our notion of what a “moment” in time is is really impossible to measure and is totally relative to our minds.

Did it ever occur to you that you can look back at years and years of time in a single moment? Thousands of people reporting near death experiences indicate that they reviewed their entire lives in a single brief moment.

The measurement of time is strictly part of our apparatus as humans, and has no real absolute value. 15 minutes seems like a lifetime at the post office. A fun activity makes time vanish! And so on.

I am practicing meditation, use affirmations and I set goals. Suddenly I have “peeped” or noticed a thread which binds them together, beautifully. They are the same, when the measurement of time is eliminated!

Meditation as I am practicing it now is a “coming back to the breath”. When the mind wanders and I notice it, I come back. Eventually I hit a flow state, outside time. The main thing to note is the focus of the mind.

Affirmations are something I do daily. Yet the idea is the same, is it not? No matter where my mind is, I am bringing it back to a single point of focus just as I did in meditation – only on a daily basis as opposed to a moment by moment basis. The allowed interval of “non concious focus” is 12 hours (if I say them 2x a day) Isn’t this a sort of meditation on a spread out scale? A regular rhythm and coming back to a mental focus.

Someone once pointed out to me that a musical tone, when slowed down starts to sound like a pulse. When you start a lawn mower you hear the pulse, and as it speeds up we hear the tone. We call these 2 sounds something different, but they are not really different. A high frequency on down to a cycle of thousands of years can still be a groove. “Frequency” is a term relative to our human experience and apparatus but there are high and low frequencies out of the range of our perception. Hearing someone sing an in tune “pitch” is in fact – perfect rhythm.

This is all just food for thought. Just as the quantum physics point to a new idea of behavior of the very large things, maybe we can look at short, fast vibrations of time to understand longer cycles in time, and vice versa.

Maybe in fact meditation, affirmation, vibration, rhythm and groove are different words for ultimately the same thing – just with different frequencies and intervals of time. Even in our regular waking state we often talk about “staying focused” to accomplish things. We set goals and come back to the vision of completed goals to choose our actions of the month, week, day – and down to the moment.

Meditiation is a focus in the moment. Affirmations, going to the gym, practicing an instrument etc are a daily focus. Church, laundry and other things of that nature are a weekly focus. Holidays are a yearly focus. Take time out of the picture and you have focused activity on a regular basis.

Until next time….

Love, Eternity and Watching Life Flow By

By Adam Rafferty 2 Comments

Greets Friends.

Just yesterday I got word that my beloved little cat Brina, is diabetic. Ok, no sobbing out there, stop it! I had a cat years ago who was diabetic and yep, it sucks and eventually they die. Most importantly, I’m gonna make sure this little critter gets a lot of love and comfort for her remaining days here which could be weeks, maybe months.

This brings up a lot of feelings of course, and I start to know what I am made of spiritually. It’s easy to say the words “we are all one, we never die, time does not exist, there’s no real losing or winning in life” and so on. But when things do in fact happen in life, the “rubber hits the road” and then we know what we are made of. Words go out the window, and it is time to “walk the walk”.

And now, I am standing on another peak of my spiritual landscape.

I look back and see that a woman with whom I was very serious for 3 years (we’ve been apart for sometime, no worries) is leaving NYC in a few days. My God – my marriage to my ex seems like a lifetime ago. My little kitty will leave soon, as my others have. Goals which were wild dreams but a year ago have been accomplished and are yesterday’s news. Where did it all go? 🙂

But….

I look ahead and of course there are new things coming, new relationships, new music, new experiences as well. Vibrant relationships, joys, music and more experience awaits.

What’s constant is the eternal “flow of life”. The flow never stops. There is this process of watching it all flow by, and as I watch I know this – when the “stuff” of life appears and dissapears, the only real thing left is love. That which remains after all the “Broadway Show” of life is simply love itself – a colorless, invisible essence that is a delicious, essential vibration and the basis of all that we do and strive for.

By seeing what changes, you then can see what doesn’t change and what is eternal. It then becomes clear that Love and Eternity are intertwined, and maybe even perhaps 2 ways to describe the same thing. Maybe they are other ways of describing and/or knowing God. They are certainly closer to knowing the Essence or Source of life than words or imaginings could be because they are an experience – not an idea.

When everything rises and falls, we see that Love alone is real.

Until next time…