UNITED STATES - THE TOUR BEGINS !

First off, the aim of this blog is to not only allow fans of my music to follow my activities and have a more indepth view of myself, but also as an informative guide to help other musicans who may wish to do the same as me in the future. I aim to make a post AT LEAST once a week with lots of info about my expericences (Good and bad) and lots of pictures and videos of my adventures to make you all insanely jealous :) if I slack on the posts you have the my permission in advance to give me a good telling off and a kick up the bum!

As a 21 year old female, traveling to the other side of the world to gig for 6 months is always a bit of a daunting prospect, and the United States can be even scarier because it is HUGE and I mean HUGE, as a brit, we are used to being able to drive from one side of the country to another in less than 15 hours. definitely not something that is even plausible in the US. the state of Florida alone (one of the smaller states in America) is larger than the ENTIRE United Kingdom! scary eh ?

As a musician wanting to tour in America there are a number of obstacles that have to be tackled before you even get to the country

1. If you are travelling for more than six months (As I am) you need to acquire an B2 extended visitors visa how do you get this? by paying £100 to stand in line at the American consulate in London (in the 30 degree celsius heat I might add!) for 5 HOURS! in order to be questioned by an extremely tired and bored consulate official who probably isnt getting paid enough to care if you are a terrorist or not. luckily for them, I am harmless :)

​2. How am I funding this? It goes without saying that touring for 6 months is a very expensive past time. Everything you do will cost you money but there are 5 essential areas you have to budget for:

- Food: fairly self explanatory, we are humans and unfortunately are unable to photosynthesise so there fore we must fill our bellies with actual food. unfortunate, I know, but such is life !

- Accommodation: if you are able to stay at a friends house in every state you are going to that is great but there is location to be factored in, you don't want to be staying out in the sticks at your friends house if its gonna cost you a bomb to get in to the city every day.

- Travel (not only internationally & state to state but also within the cities you are touring in. getting from bar to bar without a car like I am doing can create a nasty little hole in your pocket which you hadn't previously considered!) I'm spending a lot of my life on the Greyhound where you can find a cross section of society's oddities all in one station/bus

- Insurance (a secret spend that nobody thinks about until you do your research and find out you are about to spend the best part of £200 insuring your instrument and electronics for travel, and then another £100 for health and emergency insurance. it may never happen, but you know that if you don't do it, it will always be sods law that you will be the one person you know who gets your passport stolen or guitar neck broken in half. better safe than sorry !

- Cd Production: as a touring musician in a foreign country, you have to resign yourself to the fact that it is more than likely that most of the gigs you will play, will be for free. so having CD's to sell is a much needed form of sustaining yourself. realistically , on most tours, (especially first time tours in a country) you are likely to make a loss - that's just the way the cookie crumbles (sorry, had to get a bit of Bruce almighty in there!) but that extra $25 dollars you just made from selling CD's is going to buy you your next weeks food! (see above) but of course, making the CD's in the first place doesn't come cheap! be warned. It will hurt your bank account to start off with, but if you are a decent enough musician, you should be able to sell enough CD's to break even again in no time ! (All fingers crossed)

an awful lot to think about eh ? yeah... that's what I thought. but with a bit of organisation and some help from friends and family and whoever else you can coearce in to helping you, it is do-able

3. Booking gigs.: this is a tricky one, especially if you are a fairly obscure artist from the UK, the first question most music venues ask when you ask them for a gig is "how many people will come to see you" and for a UK artist doing an independent tour, the answer is usually "zero". However, networking and asking around with any American friends or contacts you have is always a good way to start. My goal is to book at least one full set (Half hour set) gig in each city and then play as many open mics, acoustic nights and songwriters circles around that. In some cities it works and some it doesn't. Nashville for example is almost impossible to permeate as a non-local indipendent artist, you have to have been running the music circuit for months before you will be offered a gig, and even then, it is still likely to be un-paid! The one thing I always have in the back of my head is that it really doesn't matter WHERE I play, this is all just about getting my music HEARD. All I need to do is make sure that I take on as many opportunities and network with as many people, as humanly possible.

With all this in mind, if you are able to deal with these obstacles and make the most of your time and skills, touring in America is an amazing experience (as I have already started to understand) even at the very start of my tour I am already concocting plans to return to America to tour again in subsequent years. The USA is an amazing country with limitless opportunities for a determined and persistent musician. Sometimes being in a big country has its benefits. The bigger the country the more opportunities for discovery. I've come to the realisation that the musicians who live in the UK sometimes suffer from over crowding and an audience who have become disillusioned with music for a long time due to the inundation of 'original music' they hear on an almost daily basis. There just isn't enough ears in our tiny country to hear the amazing talent that we produce!

Having now thoroughly bored you with the technicalities and difficulties of organising a tour, I officially announce this tour blog (although a little late in starting) COMMENCED. stay tuned for an update on how the first leg of my tour went in TAMPA & MIAMI

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My new album 'Bethia Mitchell live @ Komedia' is now available at my band camp and on Itunes, Spotify, Amazon Music, Deezer etc (For ful list see my facebook page)