Thanks to all of your opinions and replies - everything is taken into consideration, but I would now like to provide some background that may provide some explanation of why things were done the way they were.
Overall Length - When I was putting this together, it felt like "Name that Tune" if the tracks were too short. To me it felt like it took the 45-60 seconds for the songs to settle in to my ear and I wanted to share more than just a verse or chorus or lead. I'll do some pondering on this and see if I can't find a compromise. I do get the response though.
But, I really don't see the harm in it being longer than necessary - the viewer can stop watching when they want. I am taking to heart the comments about grabbing their attention earlier though and I agree that "Jail Break" is the weakest song on this video (it does go over well live though.)
Song Selection - These 5 songs are a good sampling of what we do. I guess the one responder didn't listen very long, because there are actually two country based songs in the mix. We don't do ballads per se - probably the closest thing to a ballad that we do is "Never Been To Spain", but even that gets rocky at the end. We do have few tunes that are a little less intense ("Pink Houses", "Alabama Getaway" for example), but frankly, they're not our best stuff - the band (and this I not necessarily my preference) likes to just get crunchy. The tag line on our business card is "Classic/Country Rock + Outlaw Country with High Energy and Attitude". We do crunchy well, so that's what we do. "Good Time Bad Times" is easily our best song.
Images - I completely agree that it would be great to have images with a ton of screaming, moving, drinking people. But we just don't have the videos (or pictures) to do that. To me it's bad enough that we're using "studio" tracks to represent live music - I'm not going to go and grab phony picture of crowds. We're a fairly new band (first gig was last May) and we only played 4 or 5 gigs last year. None of which were particularly packed. The only images I have of "crowds" are the still taken from videos. We got a lot of great band pictures from a friends and family event we did last fall, but he didn't grab any crowd shots (not that there were swarms of dancers or anything) and any pics we get from wives tend to be pictures of their men - they have no interest in trying to capture the energy or atmosphere. I'm not quite ready to pull out of pocket to invest in professional video work - we're just a freaking, fun rock band.
The thing that I really disagreed with my band about was using the short video clips that weren't in sync with the music. I find it distracting. We have a few videos samplers from gigs with live audio. Most of them are not great because they are just from a single still camera at the back of the room, which really demonstrates the lack of crowds. The audio in these isn't great (not awful), but to me having the music sync with the videos and seeing at least a little crowd moving would have been a better choice. (Maybe not, based on the criticism of our mixed recording!) I tried to sync some of the recording with the videos, but it got off track within seconds.
I agree the length of the images are still a little long (I did cut them down by two thirds from my first pass), but again our photo pool is pretty shallow. Shortening the video will help with this, so maybe I can kill a couple of birds with one stone.
Target Audience - Big picture, long term goal is to get in with biker club events. We did one last fall that we hoped would get us in front of a few other clubs, but their turnout was pretty weak (we are booking for their event again this year though). That's one of the reasons for the high energy approach to our song selection.
In the meantime, we're pretty much taking any paying gig we can get hoping to get into the local dive bar circuit and in front of as many people as possible. We don't have a huge following, but we are surprisingly well received for a bunch of older guys. We had a very busy (for us) month scheduled for March and kind of felt we were hitting our stride - until, well you know....
Video Production - This is all me, working on specs form the band. It's my first time doing anything like this and honestly couldn't find many examples of other press kits, so just did the best I could with what I had to work with. I'm surprised about the negative comments on the transitions - feels very harsh to not have them
Audio Production - Again, all me. And again first time recording this type of music. I'm sure somebody elase could have done a better overall job, but I'm proud of my work. This was also the first time our LS has done recording and he was quite nervous and uncomfortable. And yes, he is our weakest link. He is improving, but unless he wants to walk, he's it. The three who are the core of this band (includes the two weakest links) are long time friends and it's as much about the hang as it is the music, so it is what it is. (I'd love to take the drummer (he is pretty solid despite some of your comments) and the LG and find a real vocalist, but I don't see that happening.
Not having an actual studio forced us to do most of the recording individually to avoid bleed over. We laid down a scratch track at rehearsal to have something to follow, and then came in mostly one at a time to record the tracks. I think this has something to do with the "lack of energy" that some people expressed. Unless there was something brutally wrong, I based the final cuts on their opinion - from that perspective for sure, a real studio may be the way to go - ability to record as a band and having an neutral critic.
I am a little baffled that some expressed concerns about the quality though. Yeah, there's a few performance clams from each of us, but we're all happy with the final recordings. These songs have been reviewed on the "studio monitors", headphones, home stereo systems and cars. I don't know any other way to review from different listening perspectives than that. I may have been a tiny bit light on the bass in the mix just to avoid it seeming like I was trying to promote myself, but it's not that bad, IMO.
And yes, overall, vocals is our weak link. I did post a rant about this recording session's vocals. We're slowly working on it, but they won't make a priority of it ("we gotta learn more new songs" seems to be the mantra anytime we're not focusing on an upcoming gig).
Product Placement - Facebook has been our primary marketing tool so far. We just set up the YouTube thing this week (why I shared this now), and we're also establishing Instagram and some other social media thing. (Just not my world.) We also have our stuff on a Google drive which our BL can share a link to when soliciting for gigs.
Again, thanks to everyone for your critiques and opinions!
