Rooooooooooooooooad trip!

FBi’s monthly Music Open Day is packing it’s bags, making a mix tape and hitting the highway. On Saturday 12 November she’ll pull in to the Youth Arts Warehouse in Gosford with windswept hair, a tangled scarf and crumpled-up McDonalds bags up to her knees. (Terrible dietary habits, but this radio station’s figure just won’t quit.)

Since 2003, we’ve thrown open our doors for our monthly Music Open Days. The FBi elders wanted a way to keep the station accessible to local musicians, and the casual open days are an easy breezy way to show your wares and meet like-minded music fans. We normally meet around 30 bands and solo artists each month, which means we’ve welcomed almost 3000 musicians to open days so far.

This week, we want all you cool kids from the Central Coast. Come along and listen in to our Music Industry 101 panel – that’s where you can learn up on everything music business, from booking shows and getting publicity, to scoring airtime and getting paid. Music NSW and FBi reps will be hanging out afterwards, so eat, be merry and bring your questions and demos.

There’ll also be some musical show-and-tell courtesy of The Paper Scissors, three strapping young lads specialising in a sexy brand of yearning, angly rock. They all hail from small towns (Goulburn, Byron Bay and the Blue Mountains represent) and singer Jai Pyne reckons he drew inspiration from the isolation. “It definitely helped,” he says. “For me personally, I was way into basketball and hip hop and I moved near Byron and I was in the middle of nowhere and I had nothing to do. I'd stopped playing music after having played drums for most of my childhood, and there was a nylon string, so I started to learn the guitar.”

He’s sympathetic to small-town musical struggles, but realistic as well. “I think in terms of playing live it's a bit harder in the country, sometimes there are a lack of venues and it is a bit of a struggle,” he says. “But good bands always work their arses off and get noticed and then start to use their home town as just a base.”

And his advice for Central Coast kids banging drums and jangling guitars is refreshingly constructive. “I think I’d recommend autonomy,” he says. “Learn how to do things yourself, and particularly learn how to record and produce your own music. It will be such an advantage in the long run; it helps you work things out and makes you a better songwriter. And I think learn how to get your music out there. There are so many ways of doing it now, and it means as young or up-and-coming musos you can take advantage of these things and completely control your trajectory and do things on your own terms.”

The Paper Scissors got their first on-air love right here at FBi, and Jai enthusiastically admits to being pretty sweet on community radio. He even drew this here pretty picture to illustrate how he dreamt of his music making it.