Building your team as a musician: the list method

You don’t have four arms and you will never have every skill. At some point you will need a sound engineer, a deputy drummer, someone for communications, someone who can edit video. The question is not whether you will hire, but with what information. Here is a method that costs nothing and changes everything: keep a list of the people you come across.

The real problem with hiring as a musician

When a need appears — you need a sound engineer for the tour, you need someone to replace the keyboard player — you are in the worst possible position to choose: under time pressure, with poor information, and often on the recommendation of a third party whose standards are not yours.

The outcome is familiar: you take the first person available, you discover after three weeks what you could have known in three minutes, and you start again.

Yet you hold information nobody else has. Across gigs, sessions, rehearsals and festivals, you watch dozens of people work. Not introduce themselves: work. You see who keeps their head when the soundcheck goes sideways, who turns up prepared, who listens, who plays in tune without being asked.

The problem is that this information evaporates. Six months later you are left with a first name and a vague impression.

The method: one line per person

The principle fits in one sentence: every time someone catches your attention, you add a line, immediately. Not the next day. That same evening, on the train or in the dressing room.

There is nothing original about the practice — plenty of company directors have kept one forever, under more solemn names. Its strength comes from three properties:

• The observation is made outside a hiring context. The person was not trying to impress you, so what you saw is reliable.
• It is dated and situated. Later you will know under what conditions you saw them work — a badly run festival is not a calm session.
• It accumulates. After two years you have a pool nobody can copy from you.

What a line should contain

Four fields are enough, and you have to resist the urge to add more.

The medium hardly matters: a shared file, a note on your phone, a notebook. What counts is that adding an entry takes under a minute — otherwise you won’t do it.

The criterion nobody dares write down

You are going to spend a lot of time with your team: journeys, waiting around, tired evenings, disagreements. It may as well be bearable. This criterion looks trivial next to technical ability; it isn’t. A brilliant skill that is impossible to live with costs more than a very good level paired with pleasant company.

So write it down, frankly. You are the only reader of this list.

That said, don’t confuse likeability with competence. The symmetrical trap is surrounding yourself with pleasant people and discovering on tour that nobody can solve a problem. The list exists precisely to separate the two judgements, because it forces you to write down what you observed.

Frequently asked questions

What if I haven’t come across anyone yet?

Then the priority is not the list, it is going where people are: sessions, stages, residencies, festivals, even as an audience member or as an extra pair of hands. Playing on other people’s projects remains the best accelerator, as Matthieu Chedid’s path shows.

Should I tell people I’m making notes about them?

This is not an intelligence file but an annotated address book. Stick to professional observations you could say to their face without embarrassment, and the question stops arising.

How many names should I aim for?

No numerical target. A list of twenty genuinely observed lines beats two hundred collected contacts. The day a role opens up, you only need two or three credible candidates.

How do I get back in touch with someone I saw two years ago?

Exactly as you met them: by recalling the context. « We crossed paths at festival X in 2024, you were on front of house » is enough. That is precisely why the « context » field is not optional.