Riptide Site
The Riptide site is now live at https://riptidetheband.com
For those that don’t know, I play in a blues/rock cover band that I started with my friends my sophomore year of high school (Winter 2009). Since then we have gone through a few different formations but the latest (and now longest) form of Riptide is our current lineup. Kyle Niedermaier on guitar, Mike Dyrdal on bass guitar, and myself on drums and lead vocals.
Even after being a band for quite a while in the new lineup, lately we haven’t played a whole lot. Mainly because I live in the Minneapolis area, Mike lives in Albert Lea, and Kyle lives in Ames, IA. Over the last year or so we have gotten together a bunch and practiced again but really nothing for new shows. We decided that it was time to “Reboot” and start to get some shows again. We were all busy for the last few years but now we are all settled enough to get back out there!
For me being a massive fan of technology, this is a new opportunity. First, I set up a website. It’s always a good idea to have an online presence. For the most part we have always relied on Facebook and Twitter for our web presence but always wanted to spin up a website to handle things like links to music, contact form, and even a song request form. I wrote the site with Hugo so that it would be nice and easy to maintain for the other guys that aren’t as experienced in writing code.
The second thing I did was create a shared Google Drive folder. This allows us to save anything we need in terms of PDFs, spreadsheets, lyrics, pictures, and and any other files we might want to hang on to. In addition to this new folder I created a Riptide Master Spreadsheet. This contains all of the songs we currently know, all of the songs that we plan to learn (as well as other information about them like who sings, notes, etc.). It also contains things like sets, how much we’ve been paid, etc. Mainly to keep us organized in a bookkeeping sense.
I also wrote a spreadsheet updater using a lyrics API as well as google APIs to get lyrics for our songs, paste them in a google doc, and link back to our master song list so they are available offline. This utility also maintains a “Riptide Master Song List” Spotify Playlist.
For example, we have a new show coming up. I can simply duplicate my template Gig sheet, Add the song titles (lookups take care of pulling in notes, song metadata, lyrics, etc.) and I can then filter on which set of the night it is so I always have my notes and lyrics, available offline, wherever I go!
Overall, these improvements will greatly help us stay organized as a band. Staying organized will help us be productive and perform to the best of our abilities since we don’t need to worry so much about all of the small details.
Visit https://riptidetheband.com to see some upcoming shows (Going to get something going in the Albert Lea area April 2019). Feel free to contact us to book your event! Also, feel free to check out the site and suggest a song for us to learn and play at a show you plan on coming to!