In this episode, Jared dives into the world of destination management companies (DMCs) and how they connect musicians to high-end corporate gigs. He shares his experience playing a corporate event in Denver and discusses the power of networking in the events industry. Jared also talks about upgrading his sound equipment to enhance his performances and provides a behind-the-scenes look at how he’s preparing for his biggest gig yet.

"I’ve been playing a lot of gigs lately, and I’m incredibly thankful for the opportunity to make money doing what I love—performing. Each gig is a chance to grow, learn, and connect with others, and I’m constantly reminded how amazing it is to live this musician’s life."

- BookLive: Everything you need to start marketing and booking your act online (without having to hire or rely on a tech team!)​
- Your First Gig: Everything you need to book your first high-paying gig.
- Fulltime Music Masterclass: The Secret To an Unlimited Stream of High-Paying Private Event Gigs …Without Spending a Fortune on Online Advertising or Having Any Connections!
- Fulltime Music Academy (Gig Vault): 24,665 High-End Venues + Event Planners: Use this directory to book your highest-paid gig to-date.
- Breaking Into High-end Gigs Masterclass: How I Went From Broke Musician to Thriving By Breaking Into These Largely Unknown High-Paying Gigs

What's up, renegade musicians? It's Jared Judge. Welcome back to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. It is September 23, I believe.

What's the date? Yep. It is Monday, September 23. For once, I got the date right, and I'm on my way to a corporate gig at a really cool venue in Aurora, Colorado, called Stampede.

Definitely check that one out. I'll try to get some pictures, maybe some videos from it, too, but basically, this gig, I've got a lot to share in this episode. This gig is my first gig with a destination management company, a different one than the one that I mainly play for.

I played a bunch of gigs for this one destination management company called Access DMC, and then this one that I'm playing for today, I believe is called operation Altitude or something. I don't have my name straight right now, and I'm on the. On the highway, so you got to forgive me for that.

But what is a destination management company? A destination management company is kind of like a booking agent. When a company, like a corporation, wants to throw a big old party and they're not located in the city where they're throwing the party.

For example, if, like, Microsoft, which is based in Washington state, decides to throw a big shindig in Denver, they would hire a destination management company that is local to Denver because they know the area, and they can take all of the work off of the company's plate and take care of booking the venue, the photographer, hiring the caterer, and then even hiring the entertainment.

These destination management companies are amazing because, as a musician, the types of gigs that a destination management company has access to are primarily just big corporate events, like big production style corporate events with, you know, hundreds or thousands of attendees. And so the opportunity is huge. The budgets tend to be pretty large, and we like to do those gigs, don't we? Yes, we do.

All right, so I will let you know how that gig goes. A couple other things to update you on is that I'm officially moved into my new house close to old Town Arvada, which is a nice suburb of Denver. And that move took a lot.

I appreciate my wife for kind of holding down the fort during that. She really did amazing with, you know, packing things, unpacking things, putting things where they need to go, because during the move, I. I had a lot of gigs, and I did that because moves are expensive, and this was.

Taking the gigs was a great way to keep funding the moving. And also, I had booked these. A lot of these gigs, like, months prior to us knowing that we would be moving in the first place.

Hang on one sec. Sorry about that. Got a phone call from a musician.

But anyway, what I was saying is, you know, my wife held down the fort and the gigs were great, and they really. Yeah. I'm so thankful.

I get to play gigs and make some money doing what I love. It's really awesome. All right.

On the gear front, I have gotten some new gear, which is really amazing, but I'm still figuring out how to use it. For those of you who play plugged in, which I imagine is like 80 or 90% of my listeners, then you know that you need a mixer.

And, you know, when you get your first mixer, it's probably, you know, a standard mixer that's got all the knobs and faders and everything.

And that was my first mixer. In fact, that was my first and second mixer. The first mixer I got was an old Behringer eight channel mixer.

I don't remember the model of it. And then maybe a year or two after using it, I realized I'm probably going to use mixers more. So then I got a Yamaha Mg ten Xu mixer, which was a ten channel one.

I don't remember why I got that. Probably because, actually, I do remember why. Because the output of the Behringer was only quarter inch cable, which did not work very well.

When I plugged them into my. My speakers, they just didn't sound great. But then, you know, as I've been doing this whole electric violin thing, I've been using the Yamaha thing, which has XLR out.

And it's great. But I want to. I wanted to upgrade my gear because I didn't want to always have to set up a mixer on the ground and, you know, fiddle with the knobs and all that.

And then I seen people using mixers where they use their iPad to actually mix things. And I was like, oh, that's pretty cool. How do I get access to something like that? I would love to do that.

And so then recently, I found out that Behringer, which made my first mixer, makes a small version of a wireless system. Typically, you know, I've always seen things about the Behringer X 32, which is one of those mixers where there's no knobs, there's just a lot of inputs, a lot of xl and quarter inch inputs.

But it has 32 channels, which is overkill for an electric violinist who only uses three channels, typically one for my violin and then two for the backing tracks, you know, left and right.

Each of those are their own channel. So I didn't need 32 channels. And then I discovered Behringer makes a miniature model of it called the Behringer X Air twelve, which only has twelve channels, as you might imagine, but it still provides the whole wireless mixing paradigm, which was really appealing to me.

And then the other problem that I had been facing recently is that I had bought a wireless instrument system, basically a wireless guitar system made by a brand called Likato Lekato.

And what it does is it replaces your quarter inch cable for your guitar or electric violin or whatever you need to plug in. And it has a transmitter that you plug into your instrument and a receiver that you plugged into your mixer or your speaker, whatever you're going into.

And that works at like 80% of my gigs, which is fine, but it's not ideal, right. I've been playing a lot of larger gigs where like the minimum that they're spending on me is at least a. So I want to give them a high quality experience.

And when the lakato doesn't work, you know, sometimes the sound will be fuzzy. And that's because of radio frequency interference, rf interference.

But this became very apparent to me because when I played that Jefferson county or Adams County Fair, August 1, I started playing, and then there was another band on a different stage that started playing.

And when they turned on their wireless system, all of a sudden I got that warble sound in my instrument and I was like, oh crap. And I had to switch on the fly to a quarter inch cable.

And that's what I typically do, is when it doesn't work, I just switch to a quarter inch cable plugged directly from the instrument into the mixer.

But I don't really want to have to do that. So I wound up investing into the Shure BLX four, I think is the name of the system. It's basically like a wireless instrument system made by shure that uses a whole different set of frequencies, and it's much more powerful than the Lakato 5.8

GHz thing. And so I went ahead and bought that. And you'll notice if you look at these things, both of them rack mountable, you can mount the mixer into a rack, and then you can mount the shure receiver into a rack.

This is appealing to me because a long time ago, like five years ago, I had bought a portable rack case by Gator. And I bought that because I was djing five weddings and I wanted to make life easy for me. But I actually wound up not really using the rack system more.

So as I've just been throwing cables and the other mixer into that rack case, which would have been kind of silly. And so what I wound up doing was I mounted both the new Behringer mixer and the Shure BLX system into this rack case.

And that is my setup, which is awesome because, like, the cables are pretty much all ready to go, and I can store a couple power cables and XLR cables in the case itself.

And when I set up for a gig, I just set that rack case on the ground or on a table nearby, and then plug in my speakers, plug the Behringer, plug the Shure BLX system into the Behringer, and then use my mixer, the app on my iPad, to go ahead and mix and do sound check and all that.

And the cool part is it has auxiliary outs, which, if you're an audiophile, well, probably if you listen this far into the episode, you care a lot about audio, or you're interested at least.

So the mixer has some auxiliary outputs, which means that I can have a different in ear monitor mix than what the actual speakers are.

So say I want my violin to be a little bit louder than the backing track, but I don't want the audience to hear the violin louder. I can do that. And then I just plug the in ear monitors into the aux out instead of the headphones out, which is pretty awesome.

So, yeah, I've been trying that at a bunch of my gigs of the. It sounds good in the front of house thing, but at one of my gigs, The Babes Tea Room gig, I think there's a lot of Wi Fi networks around and. Give me one sec.

Another musician is calling. I'm a popular guy today. All right, I'm so sorry about that.

But, yeah, phone calls went great. I am just arriving at my corporate gig, and that is my sign to wrap up this podcast. So some big updates that we've done.

I am now moved in, been playing lots of gigs, got a new mixer, and I'm on the five yard line of booking probably the biggest paid gig of my life, which I will have to share and save that for another episode. That's all I got for y'all today, by the way. This episode was sponsored by BookLive.

If you want to access The Gig Vault and get your high end venue and event planner contacts, go to BookLive.com, get your free 30 day trial, and see if it's a good fit for you. All right, remember, "Your music will not market itself!".

Bye, everybody. See.