the two issues you raise are two MASSIVE ones – scalability is a big issue. The simple answer is you start to limit access to you to those who choose to engage on a certain level – you shut down the more general channel in favour of those that are more managable. So instead of leaving your email address on the site, you use twitter or a forum, where others can answer general questions for you, and where answering those things is a reward of sorts.

There are specific tools that do this better than others, and it’s also possible to tie it in with the idea of Street Teams, where that kind of 1st person contact is reserved for those who are active in the street team.

Your second point about gregariousness is another really big one – the key here is to make sure that your presentation is honest to who you are. Copying my approach if you’re not that kind of person would end up being a massive headache. But finding the space where you can be you and still tell your own story is a really important part of the process, and one that may involve a little discomfort as you adjust to putting something of yourself out there for others to read/watch/listen to… there’s a degree to which it’s part of the job of promotion (which ties in with the ‘employ yourself’ post that I wrote for Creative Choices a few months back…

It’s also why getting some outside help is often a good way to go for a musician – sitting down to plan a specific strategy and find a tailored set of tools for what you are good at is a really useful thing to do. Tomorrow I’m spending the day with a French bassist called Albin Suffys – http://www.myspace.com/albinsuffys – working on his web presence and a way for him to build an audience and tell his story. His music is great, I’ve got to help him get it out there

::haha:: this made me laugh – what a great way of putting it! and certainly a gig ambiance I aspire to emulate

On the online stuff etc, my no.1 concern about this area is not one I recall seeing you talk about yet. It’s about the scalability of it – like how to keep up with the emails etc. as you get more successful. Because the more attention you get, the more emails and blog comments you’re gonna get, aren’t you – and you’ve got to manage and channel that responsibility so it doesn’t get in the way of making the music.

(of course in one way that would be one of those “nice problems to have” )

Part of why I’m saying this is that I have a sense of you as pretty gregarious and sociable in life in general, and therefore naturally well suited to the path you’re pioneering here. I suspect I’m not as far as you in that sociable direction. I like gigging, but I also like to hibernate and ignore the world sometimes. I feel very cautious about promoting expectations that I’m gonna answer people’s emails day in day out.

I do have some ideas about how to adapt the principles of your methods into different practical expressions that might suit me better, but would be interested in your take on that dynamic as well.

Any thoughts on it? & any points so far where you’ve found you were actually getting too much attention & conversation, and had to fall back and regroup?

Steve, I think this is one of the most insightful things I’ve heard recently. I’ve been wrestling with the problem of “I sound too much like X” or “it’s not up to the standards of X,” and it got to the point that my writing had slowed to a trickle. My mentor and I had a conversation about this today, and some very famous guitarists he’s had dinner with that have had the exact same fears.

I’ve seen a lot of musicians that are like this, and I think it’s the ones that just so blatantly AREN’T that succeed. Conforming to someone else’s standards – “selling out,” as most garage bands see it – compromises the artist’s vision. And we are indeed artists at the core. We’re in this business because we hear -something- that no one else does in quite the same way. Setting this against other people’s music or [negative] criticism will twist and warp it. I used to use the music of Michael Hedges as the bar for my own compositions to shoot for, and I was never satisfied, for obvious reasons. The less I worry about other people’s music (and the more I listen to singers and other instrumentalists as opposed to guitarists), the easier it is for me to connect the sound in my head with the fretboard and the ears.

I may have to blog about this soon.