The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #113970   Message #2447152
Posted By: treewind
22-Sep-08 - 07:59 AM
Thread Name: Running a session, advice please
Subject: RE: Running a session, advice please
First, find a pub or other place to hold your session.
First equal, find some people you'd like to be in your session. If you don't know anyone, go to other sessions to recruit, and to find sessions in Norfolk or anywhere in East Anglia look in Mardles for session listings.

As for advertising "Beginners welcome" - decide what you want. There are my different types of session. There's nothing wrong with a beginners session if that's what you want, but if you encourage that, beginners is all you'll get and if your pub landlord thought you might be providing some entertainment for his other customers he might be disappointed.

We run a session once a month. It's mostly tunes and mostly English because that's what we like doing. We don't turn anyone away, but we don't advertise it either, and keep an email list to remind people about it, and we're careful about who we invite. It's not elitist -
if somebody wants to run a session along different lines, they can, and in fact in this case they do, in the same pub on a different date.

Payment?
You shouldn't need to pay for a room, even to run a folk club with people paying to come in.
Pubs paying musicians is a very different scene from informal sessions and the two shouldn't really be mixed. I play lots of music for payment but I go to sessions for my own enjoyment and education, though the odd plate of sandwiches or chips or free drink won't be turned away of course...

Anahata