The Numbers Are In!

Thanks to those of you who took the time to complete my little survey, 37 as of my writing this.  A results overview can be viewed here.  This survey asked a few questions about your age, gigs, gear, and level of satisfaction; what I was trying to determine is if there was a trend as far as who was satisfied and who was not; armed with this knowledge, we could all become a little more of the former, and less of the latter!  So what did we discover?  Well, READ ON!

Okay, so if you really want the nitty-gritty, check out the detailed response data HERE.  I was expecting to find patterns like, for instance, that most 20-somthings were playing a lot, while 50-somthings were not.  Or that folks who played more or bigger gigs were more satisfied than those who did not.  Did I actually see any real trends, not really!  Not as much as I expected, anyway.  Here are a few little nuggets to take away (I’m saving the best one for last):

Weather young or old, most of us admit to having a lot of gear!  I was really expecting older folks to admit to having Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS) more than younger folks; shoot, older folks just have more stuff in general.  It takes a long time to accumulate a really obnoxious collection of guitars and gear.  So, go figure.  None of you said that your gear was of little importance.  Cool.  We are a bunch of gear-heads, after all.

Over half of you responded that you mostly played at home, and were not getting paid to play; so it’s no surprise that over half of you also wished you had more gigs!  We’ll address this issue in my last point.

The age breakdown graph looks about like stair steps, moving up as you get older, and peaking at 50-something.  This is important, and again, I will address this in my last point.

And that brings me to my last point, the only one that carries any weight, really.  Only three of you said that you are playing in church.  Dude, get a clue, that’s where the gigs are these days!  And they are nice, clean early gigs thst pay, too!  Personally, I make a nice chunk of change playing on Sunday’s.  Like most of you, I’m well into adulthood (I’m in the 40-something category).  I have a house, a wife, and two daughters (one in college and one in diapers) ... that means that I need to make a little coinage from my guitar playing, and that I don’t want to be out of town a lot or out super late at night all the time.  Sound like any of you?  I thought so!  I know the church thing ain’t for everybody, but like I said in my last blog, there is a church gig for almost every player.  I played at Northeast church for many years where we played regular old pop/rock/country hits (see pic at the top of this blog).  They play stuff like Avril Lavigne, Garth Brooks, Greenday, Stones, Cheryl Crow, even Hendrix!  It was a blast, and really stretched and improved my chops and my ear .  In my current church gig, I’m the "contemporary" music guy at a mainline denomination.  It doesn’t hurt one bit that I have long hair and rock out with my own band from time to time; that actually helps prove that I am in fact "contemporary".

Okay, so that’s all I’ve got for now.  Just do yourself a favor and check into the church-gig thing ... you'll thank me later.  Next week I hope to be back to doing some speaker shoot-out comparison videos.  I’ve been promising many of you to do some WGS to WGS comparisons, and again I promise it’ll be soon ... and it’ll be awesome! 

See ya next week!

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