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Hi there,

I know it's a bit late in the season to be looking for Christmas gigs, but I was wondering if anybody had any advice or experience on getting gigs for a "non-tradition" chamber group like a tuba-euphonium quartet. (It's been though trying to compete with "traditional" brass quintets for gigs.... )

Also, a little off topic, but does anybody know if there is any arrangement of the Westside Story out there for tuba-euphonium quartet?

Thanks in advance!

What you need to do is:
- book a venue for a particular day... probably the best times are Friday night, Saturday afternoon/night or Sunday afternoon.
- put together about 50 minutes worth of much and develop a program.
- promote the concert. Use flyers, worth-of-mouth, any free advertising you can: some radio stations and newspapers offer free "community service announcements."
- be careful when setting ticket prices. If they're too low people may think low quality... too high and people won't be able to afford it. Since it's a tuba-euph quartet, you probably can't go too low... I might suggest "donations accepted."

* if you can do some sort of joint concert with a choir and/or organist, even better. They will help you bring in an audience.

Very important:
- do not use this as a money making experience, use this as an audience building experience. Hopefully you can break even.
- by the time you have the concert, you need to have booked and have a decent outline for a SPRING SHOW which you will plug like mad at the Christmas show.
- you should also have some sort of website up by the time the Christmas concert happens, and you should include the address in the program. Use a free service like freewebs.

You should try to keep your concerts comedic. It's a tuba-euph quartet, not a string quartet. People like to go to concerts because they like to talk about it. They go to orchestra and string quartet concerts because that makes them look "classy." Unfortunately, there's nothing classy about a tuba-euph quartet, so you need to do something unusual to get people talking. If you can get people talking, you will develop a good audience.

You won't find anyone willing to pay you guys money to come and perform at this point. This may happen after a bunch of shows and you start to get some buzz. For now, you'll need to create your own work.

Thanks, that helps a lot!

I just want our quartet to have something to rehearse for and look forward to

quinterbourne wrote:Unfortunately, there's nothing classy about a tuba-euph quartet, so you need to do something unusual to get people talking.

Not classy??? Omigosh! And I thought I played an instrument with real class.