Transcript Of This Video

(00:06):

Let’s talk about the holy grail of gigs, and that is private parties. All musicians, all entertainers, strive to get booked for private events because the pay scale is double or triple. For instance, a club gig, a restaurant gig, you can expect to average between a hundred and $150 per hour. That’s not for the whole night. You’re not gonna go set up and play four hours for 150 bucks. You may be doing that now, that’s not the way it works. They can pay you a hundred to $150 per hour for those residency gigs. My residency gigs are typically, well, they, they are, they’re not, typically they are three hours. I don’t do four hour residencies, I do three, and they’re 150 bucks an hour. And it ends up being around $200 an hour. With the tips I get really good tips and I’ll show you how to get those in the entertainer’s university, how to set up the tip jar and how to do the whole thing.

(01:14):

But in those restaurant and club gigs, those residency gigs, you get the private parties, the things we’re going to talk about now that are, that pay, um, the cheapest. I’ll go do any kind of private event locally. It’s gonna be a minimum of, I’ll say two hours, and that’s gonna fall in the $800, um, range for the, for the two hours. And it goes up from there. So, and those, those become quite lucrative as you would imagine. If you’ve done residency gigs all week, like I do Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then sometimes Friday. And then on Saturday I’ll do a private gig that will start at 800. The weddings go all the way up to 1600, sometimes $2,000. For me, I’m not paying a band, that’s just me because I have that blended DJ thing I’m telling you about. So it ends up being a very lucrative thing to do.

(02:13):

But let’s talk about the, the private parties now and some different kinds. First of all, the birthday parties. Birthday parties are happening constantly and people have milestone birthdays, like their 40th, their 50th, their 60th, their 70th birthday, their 80th birthday. I’ve played, you know, birthdays for people turning 85 where their family comes together and brings me in because I can play the old music. I know what they like and if I don’t know how to play and sing this specific song, they won’t, they want from 1956, guess what? I can pull it up and play it on the DJ rig and they get their song and they’re happy. They don’t really care if I play it or not, as long as they hear their song. Folks, this is, this is magic. What I’m telling you this, again, I wouldn’t try to be telling you this and, and explaining it all in such detail.

(03:10):

If it, if I didn’t know it worked, I would just do other things. I can just go play if I want to. But I’m at that point in my career where I wanna slow down with all the gigs. I don’t care about going out on the road like I used to and do all the big shows and I mean big shows traveling around, inventing a new thing all the time to do. I don’t care about that. I just want to do my residencies. Stay here and teach, all right, teach you guys. Do the entertainer’s university and give you an opportunity to do what I’ve done and have the great ride doing it and tell you you’re gonna have the time of your life. So the first kind of parties we’ll talk about are birthday parties and those specifically. Couple of tips about this, and again, this, the details of all this, I mean, details are in the entertainer’s university of I just don’t have time to do it all here.

(04:00):

Birthday parties, the whoever the birthday is for, for what I’ll typically do, let’s say it is a 60th birthday party. And let’s say the person was born in 1978. No, it would, whatever, 1970. Let’s just make the math easy so that I don’t have to think. Let’s say they were born in 1970. Here’s how I will calculate it. The most fun years of a person’s life are typically their teenage years. That’s a, that’s a fact. They are the most impressed musically throughout their teenage years. In other words, the music you grew up on listening to is what will imprint you for the rest of your life and what you will always be drawn back to. It will always be your favorite music. Therefore, calculate when the person with the birthday was in that 16 to 18-year-old range when they were a senior in high school.

(05:03):

Take some songs from that year. Know what that year is at the birthday party. I’m giving you some of the techniques now. This is magic. You talk about getting the big a hundred dollars tips. This is how you do it at the party. Let’s say the birthday girl is, is named Tammy. You say, Tammy, I’ll bet, what was your favorite year in high school? What was your favorite year? You don’t want to ask necessarily what year they graduated because some of them may not have graduated high school. They may have gotten a GED. So you don’t say, what year did you graduate? Say, what was your favorite year in high school? Well, guess what? Their favorite year always is their senior year. And it doesn’t matter if it’s their senior year or their junior year or whatever, it’s gonna be that same music from that era.

(05:53):

So you already know by doing 18 years from when their birthday was, you do this calculation beforehand. You know that, that one or two year span, that’s going to be their favorite. You have some songs ready to go from that. I mean, top not album cuts, obscure stuff, stuff that was number top 10 on the radio during those years that, that they would listen to if they come from a country and western music background. Do the country, if they came from a kind of a rock and roll background, have that, that those songs ready to queue up if you can play them. And if they’re in your repertoire, do that. Sing it. If not, DJ it. And I show you how to play along with the DJ music to bring it to life, how to find the key and how to do the chords and all of that inside the entertainers University.

(06:45):

So birthday parties. That’s the first little little thing about doing that. Uh, moving along. ’cause I don’t wanna make these videos too terribly long. The second is graduation parties. Uh, those of course are young people graduating from high school. Sometimes they’re, we have something called quinceaneras. Um, in the Hispanic culture that’s kind of a coming out party. The girls I think are 14, 14 or 15. Those are all available. And these are high paying gigs. You’re gonna do 1400 to, you know, 1800. I I’m, I’m just throwing out numbers there for something like a kin, because you’ll do some work, they’ll have themes, everything will have a theme. And you will have a form, an online form that I show you how to use that. You’ll email to all of these people and they’ll fill out the form online. It comes back to you online.

(07:37):

And then you can craft, that’s what makes you worth the money. That’s what makes you worth more than a $300 solo act. Okay? It’s these things. So birthday parties, graduation parties, class reunions, those are very, very good because it’s a group of people. They get together and they all pitch in to pay you to come and play the music from their high school years. That’s what they want. So the fact that you can be a live guitar dj, you can do all that work, you can do all the graduation parties. It doesn’t matter what year because you’re going to learn how to blend the songs together so that you can seamlessly do a show for them no matter what their high school year was. Anniversary parties, people, again, milestone anniversaries, their 30th anniversary, 35th, 40, 45, 50, same thing. Always revert back to the time around. Do a little preliminary, uh, investigation.

(08:38):

When you send them the information sheet, I’ll show you how to do it online. They’ll tell you when they met, what year they got married, you’ll know all that. And then you can pull from those years. Always pull from the year they got married when they were dating. Take some songs from that time because there’s a high probability that during that year or two they were dancing, they were going out, they were listening to music, they were doing some, you know, going to concerts. And again, all of these things ingratiate you to the person who hired you makes them very happy. And guess what they do? They tell all their friends how great you are. Word of mouth. And before you know it, you go from that $800 birthday party plus tips ends up being about a thousand dollars to another one to their friend down the street that’s having a party.

(09:24):

And then from that two more, and you see how it, it starts to spread and it’ll just keep going. So again, whatever the party is, you wanna find that specific time, date, range of years and then target some music. Now you don’t have to play that all night, but you do a segment about halfway through the show of that, maybe halfway, maybe earlier. Again, pacing the show. It’s all in the entertainers University. And the last thing we’ll talk about are holiday parties. Of course, you know about Christmas parties, very lucrative, all of those. Every Christmas party has a very eclectic company that’s typically hiring you. That means they’re all different musical tastes and ethnicities. And the fact that you can do the live music and DJ and blended together makes you in high demand. And they have budgets. Those companies have nice budgets. So you have Christmas parties, you have 4th of July parties, you have Halloween parties, you know, and any people look for excuses. You have secretary day parties, uh, be kind to your boss parties. All of those things are available for you to play gigs. So these are some of the areas that you can make money and build a consistent career playing your music and entertaining.