Welcome to the GMiV Blog!
You’d think there wasn’t enough to keep track of between setting up rehearsals and preparing charts and booking dates (and figuring out what to do when one of your musicians tests positive for COVID). Running a band can easily become a full time job. But I love what this tribute project has grown into. And I’m honored by the feedback we get from the music fans who come to our shows. So I started thinking about all the things that need to get done to keep our musical engine purring along, and I decided that one way to make what we do run more smoothly…is to simplify.
When GMiV has a show coming up, I feel the pressure to put something out there every single day. Upload a post to Facebook. Come up with something short and sweet for Instagram. And oh, yeah! What about the website?
Sad to say, with the shifting sands our lives are built on these days, I often don’t even make it as far at the Facebook post. (And to be honest, I’m not all that big a fan of Facebook anymore, so maybe that influencing me more than I realize.)
But I can tell you that I’ve long fantasized about moving my regular (well, semi-regular) Facebook posts about the band over to the GMiV website. Unfortunately, there have always been so many other band projects to work on (not to mention the demands of the day job) that I couldn’t figure out how to make that happen.
Push finally came to shove last Friday night at our Rolling Stones tribute at the Joliet Area Historical Museum when one of the familiar faces there asked me how come the website wasn’t updating with more frequency. He said he was missing shows because the info on upcoming dates wasn’t appearing far enough in advance. And when I mentioned that I try to keep Facebook up to date, and Instagram, too, he went on to explain that he preferred to stay away from social media.
OMG! A fan after my own heart!
It was clear what I needed to do. I needed to figure out how to make the GMiV website a solid resource about our shows in the same way I wanted Facebook and Instagram to be. I fired up my Squarespace website maintenance page, investigated the possible options, and decided that the way forward was simple. Instead of getting overwhelmed by the need to post to three separate locations every time I had some news to publish about Great Moments in Vinyl, I’ll consolidate the information into a form that could live on the website and Facebook easily and be condensed or excerpted for Instagram.
Win/win!
So welcome to the Great Moments in Vinyl blog. Something new to offer on our website thanks to a request from one of our fervent fans.
And stay tuned. I’ll be sorting out one of his other suggestions soon: a concert calendar.