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PODCAST

Gig Gab - The Working Musician"s Podcast

Dave Hamilton & Friends

Welcome to Gig Gab—the podcast sanctuary for working musicians and anyone fascinated by the vibrant, often unseen world behind every note played on stage. Whether you’re a musician, a member of the crew, or just someone who loves peeking behind the curtain to discover the secrets of live performances, you’ve found your tribe.

music music commentary

All Episodes

1:16:27

Instagram Paid Him Tens of Dollars. It Also Got Him...

Gig Gab - The Working Musician"s Podcast ·

2026/10/05

Chris Cron posted what he thought was a one-off video about how to sound like the Beach Boys, set his phone down, and came back to 10,000 views. A few days later it was near a million. A few years later, he’s a touring member of the actual Beach Boys. Chris joins Dave to show you what was underneath that “overnight” success: a full-time session vocalist gig since 2018, years of throwing content at the wall, and the social media lessons that made one video stick: Frame your post as

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1:04:03

How Every Club Sounds Great: Running SXSW Stages &...

Gig Gab - The Working Musician"s Podcast ·

2026/09/28

Every club at SXSW sounds good, every night, all week, and we’ve often wondered how they maintain that consistency. This week Dave finally gets the answer from Nate Cross, SXSW’s Director of Production, who went from intern to Assistant Production Manager to running the whole show. You’ll hear how his team builds out 55 to 60 venues (down from 100+ before the pandemic), why they mic everything even when it looks like overkill, and how 20-minute changeovers actually run on time with

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1:05:02

The Opener Sets the Tone: Set List Strategy, AI vs....

Gig Gab - The Working Musician"s Podcast ·

2026/09/21

Skylar Hamilton is back by popular demand for round two of your questions, recorded across an Airbnb kitchen table in New York City where a roll of paper towels doubles as a mic stand, because it’s the right height and it kills table rumble.Set lists first: your opener sets the tone, and the tone is yours to set. Easing a dining room into rock-band mode calls for something catchy and upper-mid-tempo with room to breathe; a room that came to see a band wants to know right away what kind of

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1:01:16

Play the Fill: Stage Confidence, Filling an Empty...

Gig Gab - The Working Musician"s Podcast ·

2026/09/14

You’ve earned your seat on that drum riser, even when four people in the crowd know the Bonham parts better than you do. Dave Hamilton and guest co-host Skylar Hamilton (his daughter) look back on Dave’s summer of gigs, starting with a Led Zeppelin and Heart tribute for about 600 people. A shaky moment in Heartbreaker turns into a drum solo nobody rehearsed, and a derailed Living Loving Maid turns a careful recital into a real rock show. Less than a week later, a Casual Gravity night in

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1:30:54

Re-Impressing the Room All Night: The Realities of...

Gig Gab - The Working Musician"s Podcast ·

2026/09/07

Nashville’s Lower Broadway isn’t a gig, it’s a gauntlet, and Tyson Hanes and Adam Barber of The Tyson Hanes Band are here to show you how it actually works. You’ll hear why nobody’s from Nashville, why being the small fish in a giant pond forces you to level up fast, and what it takes to play four-hour shifts straight through with a thousand-song list, no set list, and no safety net. The crowd builds the show one tip at a time, so you go from Merle Haggard to Metallica

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1:10:31

Ask for the Gig You Want: Kevin Glendinning on SNL,...

Gig Gab - The Working Musician"s Podcast ·

2026/08/31

Monitor engineer Kevin “KG” Glendinning joins you live from a Roman amphitheater in Pula, Croatia: eight countries in seven days into the Lorde world tour…and he’s got the receipts. You’ll hear how fifteen trips through the SNL stage started with a Carson Daly taping, why the rooms that treat you well are the rooms you remember, and what happens when a 32-year veteran finally plugs in a source expander and realizes the “new guys” were right. That’s the

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1:14:25

From Broadway Swing to Principal: Eight Shows a...

Gig Gab - The Working Musician"s Podcast ·

2026/08/24

Your voice is the most temperamental instrument you’ll ever own, and this week Victor Carrillo Tracey – original company member of Broadway’s The Outsiders – walks you through what it takes to keep one working eight shows a week. Hydration and sleep swap places at number one, alcohol and caffeine cost more than you think, and inspiration doesn’t get a vote when downbeat is 8pm. You’ll hear how a single college voice lesson with a head cold taught Victor to

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1:13:15

Matt Beck on Matchbox Twenty, The Outsiders, Hot...

Gig Gab - The Working Musician"s Podcast ·

2026/08/17

Matt Beck taught himself guitar strung upside down and backwards and has never once found a reason to stop. He joins you this week from the pit of The Outsiders, where he’s played since opening night three years ago, and from a July that had him running Jon Anderson, the B-52’s, and Matchbox Twenty in the same month: seventies, eighties, and nineties, back to back to back. You’ll hear why a guitar player who can actually read on a staff gets calls other players never see, how

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1:22:22

Hired From an 11-View Video: Sean Mullaney on...

Gig Gab - The Working Musician"s Podcast ·

2026/08/11

Guest co-host Sean Mullaney joins Dave Hamilton to prove that the gig you want is usually hiding inside the gig you almost skipped. A video with eleven views got Sean hired, the same way a YouTube clip landed Alexandra Mullaney in The Book of Mormon, so the lesson is simple: put the work out there, then be ready to say yes when someone finds it. You’ll dig into managing your niche without getting trapped by it, and the bigger question every bandleader eventually faces: who do you want to be as

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1:00:38

Nobody Bought a Ticket to Watch Load-In

Gig Gab - The Working Musician"s Podcast ·

2026/08/04

It’s just you and Dave this week for a full mailbag episode, with road stories up front: Matt Musty behind the kit with Train at Great Woods, three nights of Phish and Rush at MSG, and the Rush policy worth stealing: when a mistake is a one-off, don’t talk about it. Then into your questions. Should the front-of-house feed live in your in-ears? Here’s pre-fader versus post-fader, and why the answer’s usually no unless you’re a drummer. Maybe. Bass distorting in your

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1:27:49

When Your Worlds Collide...and the Drummer Becomes...

Gig Gab - The Working Musician"s Podcast ·

2026/07/27

Daniel East is back for a no-agenda episode that turns into Gig Gab therapy. You’ll hear about Brit Drozda’s fifth record in pre-production, unannounced pop-up gigs built from cajon, guitar, and keys, and the Rayvel grand opening on Florida’s Space Coast, where a rocket went up over the stage during Starman. Then Daniel gets into those moments of bliss you can’t fish for…the ones that arrive because you prepared enough to stop thinking. If you’re feeling it,

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1:09:11

The Wrong Audience Is Still an Audience: Freddy...

Gig Gab - The Working Musician"s Podcast ·

2026/07/20

Episode 543 lands on National Fortune Cookie Day, and guest co-host Freddy Vinehill-Cliffe of NUGEN Audio opens by demystifying how your masters actually translate across streaming. You learn that MasterCheck lets you audition one master against every platform before release day blindsides you, because you should still submit a single master everywhere, not a separate file per service. From there you dig into possible reasons why Spotify felt so flat for so long, the crucial difference between data

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1:08:03

Growing Up Statler: Wilson Fairchild on Harmony,...

Gig Gab - The Working Musician"s Podcast ·

2026/07/13

This week Wil and Langdon Reid of Wilson Fairchild pull up a chair beside Dave to show you what a life in music actually looks like from the inside. These guys grew up on a tour bus in the ’70s and ’80s watching their dads, Don and Harold Reid, play eight years with Johnny Cash before becoming The Statler Brothers, a side-stage masterclass we all wish we had. You’ll hear the advice that shaped them: nobody can put you in the music business and nobody can take you out, so

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1:10:23

Ryan Goldbacher on Touring with Tom Keifer, Mixing...

Gig Gab - The Working Musician"s Podcast ·

2026/07/06

This week front-of-house engineer Ryan Goldbacher calls in from the road with Tom Keifer, and you’ll quickly learn that landing the next gig comes down to two things: competence, and not being miserable to be around. Word of mouth is the real currency of touring life, so Always Be Performing applies long after you step off stage: when the tour bus is smaller than your bedroom and there are twelve people on it, how you treat the room matters. You’ll pick up honest strategies for

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52:44

Patrice Peris on Sync, Survival, and Why You Don't...

Gig Gab - The Working Musician"s Podcast ·

2026/06/29

This week singer-songwriter Patrice Peris joins Dave to flip the script on building a music career. That question musicians always get – what’s your backup plan? – is a terrible one, because Plan A was never required to land where you first mapped it. Through COVID, a cancer diagnosis, and a bone-marrow transplant she now calls a rebirth, Patrice kept asking what each detour was teaching her and never stopped writing, landing sync placements on Netflix, HBO Max, and The Voice along the

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1:38:47

Sub Gigs, Mic Mutes & the Art of Mixing Live with...

Gig Gab - The Working Musician"s Podcast ·

2026/06/22

This week you start things off digging into the craft that separates good gigs from great ones. You’ll get the playbook for prepping and surviving sub gigs, learn (again!) why a splitter snake earns its place in your rig, and sort through the real options when you need a mic mute switch that actually works. Then you wrestle with a question every working band faces today: are fan-posted videos helping your brand or hurting it? It’s the kind of practical, in-the-trenches breakdown that

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1:04:45

Three Rush Fans and Rush's 2026 Comeback Tour: From...

Gig Gab - The Working Musician"s Podcast ·

2026/06/13

Three Rush fans — a father, a son, and Spartacus — walk into a podcast. There’s no punchline, just the tape rolling on a conversation that was going to happen anyway, and you get to be the fly on the wall. Two of them just flew home from LA, where they stood in the room and watched Rush kick off the tour nobody was sure would ever come. The third has been taking it all in from a distance, which is its own peculiar thing when you once mixed front of house for the band for years. You’ll

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1:16:35

Road Stories, Recording Secrets, and the Perfect Pop...

Gig Gab - The Working Musician"s Podcast ·

2026/06/08

This week on Gig Gab, Dave Hamilton sits down with guest co-host Rand Lempert of the Broken Rings, a two-piece recording project built on 15 years of musical kinship between Rand and guitarist Gio da Silva. You’ll hear how these two have crafted an intentional, travel-fueled recording process across cities, cutting live instruments and vocals together, passing files between New Orleans, Tampa, and now Denver, and why that friction and urgency is exactly the point. Rand makes a compelling case

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1:21:20

AI and Music for Working Musicians: Tool, Threat, or...

Gig Gab - The Working Musician"s Podcast ·

2026/06/01

This week Stu Dias joins Dave from a slightly different corner of Durham, New Hampshire, and after a quick detour through barefoot drumming, sweaty-hand fixes, and oversized triangle guitar picks, the conversation locks onto the question every working musician is wrestling with right now: what does AI mean for music? You’ll hear why Dave reframes it as Assistive Intelligence (and the best procrastination-killer and writer’s-block-buster going) even as you stare down the harder stuff:

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32:40

Loaded Out, Rolling Home, Rolling Tape

Gig Gab - The Working Musician"s Podcast ·

2026/05/25

Ride shotgun with Dave as he records GigGab on the drive home from a Casual Gravity gig, finally living out the show’s original mission. You’ll hear why packing your own mixer saves the night when the venue only wants a single feed from the band, what it’s like when an in-ear band plays its first fully sober gig, and why counting songs in to a click track changes everything once adrenaline stops driving your tempo.Then dig into relearning vocal harmonies for the Underground Band:

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554 results

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