Shivarage said:
any advice on what to look for in a musical partner or what to look out for?
A musical partner doesn't have to be a perfect musician. What they need to do is fill whatever area you might be lacking in. Good at writing songs but terrible at executing them, get someone who can play better than you. Good at operating a mixing desk but half-deaf, get an "ideas" kind of person. Good at creating concepts but shitty at image and self-promotion, get someone with a big style and big personality who isn't afraid to push the product a little. Whoever you get though, absolute #1 priority is that you can get along on a personal level. And under no circumstances start a musical project with someone who you'd like to fuck, if you're looking at a long-term career - "don't shit where you eat", in other words.
What to look out for - well, at the risk of sounding like your Mum, extremely heavy drug or alcohol use is a red flag. I know what you're thinking - "but... half of the people in my MP3 collection were ripped off their tits when they recorded that stuff!". True, but those people generally all started the downward spiral
after they established the foundation of a career, thanks to industry-savvy drug dealers who cling to the music business like moths to a flame. Amateurs think they need to be as drunk and wasted as their idols and "fake it till they make it", so they'll think nothing of excess substance use, in the meantime ignoring the fact that there is actually a lot of unglamourous
work involved in getting anywhere, not just parties, rocking out and fun times. There's a slim change that they'll OD and end up as a cripple or a vegetable in a hospital ward somewhere (I've seen both) but it's far more likely that they'll just become a self-centred asshole.
The main other category to avoid is people with unrealistic expectations and no ability to be self-critical or step back from their own work and eat a bit of humble pie. These people
absolutely fucking abound in the music industry, and they are dangerous primarily to themselves, but also to anyone they work with musically. They are dangerous because their ability to lose all sense of perspective and thus waste inordinate amounts of money on unnecessary things because "fame is just around the corner" is staggering, but not quite as staggering as their refusal to then learn from their mistakes, instead putting their failure down to simply bad luck. They're also prime targets for scam operators, such as "band competitions" etc. You absolutely
must go and see a film called "Bigger Than Tina" if you haven't already. It's very hard to find so good luck tracking it down, but it's worth it because it's the
perfect portrait of what I'm talking about: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0240377/