h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hey everybody,

I'm going to be moving soon and will be leaving my old band. Wanting to continue it though I was going to put some ads up in music shops etc offering my services. The only issue being that I'm not entirely sure what I should list as influences. Is is just the music that I listen to the most? Or is it soemthing else? I have a feeling it might be the latter since I listen to an eclectic mix of stuff that would look bizare if I tried to condense it. Is there any shortcut to finding the links between the stuff you write/play and your influences?

Thaum

I think you might be somewhat stumped musically if you can't actually tell what your influences are (as opposed to the entirety of what you've listened to)! If you really can't bring to mind your positive influences, you could try working the other way round instead and eliminate from consideration anything which isn't of a style you've admired and tried to emulate in your own music. Eg suppose you do like Beethoven but you've never done anything even remotely Beethoven-like. Then, when starting from your entire play-list, you could exclude Beethoven from your short-list of genuine influences.

As the music you listen to isn't necessarily the music you're influenced by you should write a bunch of stuff/play stuff you've already written and see what it sounds like. Or, better still, get some other folks to tell you what it sounds like.

That's still not fool-proof because they might accidentally sound like someone they've never heard (or even heard of). It could merely be a coincidence of creativity.

Yeah I tried asking a couple of friends re: music, and I think I managed to double the number of bands I can call influences to two. Don't really want to list bands I've never listened to.

Working list so far is Placebo and NIN.

I think those two will give people a pretty good idea where you're coming from! They certainly won't be expecting John Denver covers.

I'm not quite sure I have the 'drawl' to pull off that kind of country music. Good illustration of the problem though, I quite like country music too lol, been listening to Cash and Bright Eyes recently.

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I agree with cal that everything I listen to influences me, and I listen to a lot of music, so its difficult to pin down.

Having gone through putting up an ad and getting replies and so on I've come to the conclusion that people don't really look at the influences bit. I've been approached by post-rockers, alt rockers, hard metallers, classic punkists and classic rock types. Admittedly I did say that I wasn't too fussy about the influences, but still I think that thats pretty wide from just Placebo and NIN as influences.

You should just say you're not sure what your influences are or what your songs sound like. They're going to sound different with new people playing them anyway, and you'll have more chance of success the more original you sound. Look at the Police: Sting liked jazz, Copeland liked reggae and punk and Andy Summers came from a prog rock background.

I would start by listing the kind of musicians you would want to play with, e.g. if you want to play bluesy rock you're probably not gonna need a bassonist... Or are you?