My biggest complaint of SXSW Music is that it starts right after Interactive ends! For the second year in a row, I could have used a two-day break from the madness before diving into music. My focus leading up to SXSW is on what to do and see during Interactive, and this year pimping my Core Conversation on the LA Tech Community, that I miss many party invites and RSVP forwards because in the days leading up to music, I’m not at a computer all day exchanging emails.

Then again, one of the best days is what us interactive geeks call the “transition day.” The day music people roll in and interactive folks start to roll out. The conference center becomes this strange hodge-podge of music hipster meets geek-utantes and no one quite knows what to do with the other. Twitter is awash in blasting the music folks and complaints against them (mostly because geeks get all, uh, geeky around the music kids.) Then suddenly, Tuesday is over and by the time Wednesday night rolls around, 6th Street in Austin is closed and has this crazy, hyper energy that can only be created from the knowledge that 1,900 (a record this year) bands are converging on SXSW to perform sets every hour on the hour for four days straight at over 50 venues around town.

When Sunday morning rolled around, I made a list of all the bands I had seen since Wednesday and was amazed that the total was 48 bands in 4 days. Wowzers, right? Making that list was arduous, I should have done it every day I was there. A bunch of my friends asked me the “method to my madness” and how in the world I made it to so many bands and how I knew what to see. I wanted to share those insight here:

1) PACE YOURSELF

I paced myself slightly better from Interactive to Music this year, last year when music hit I was fried to the point of not coming back and couldn’t put together any schedule instead wandering the streets and popping into random places. This worked, kind of, but I missed a lot of things I would have really liked to see.

I didn’t do as many day parties as I would have liked. Then again that is what saved me. It would have been hard to do after four days of already being in Austin (and out until crazy hours) and then expect myself to stay through night with the kind of schedule I roll with. I know there is sched.org and I use it, but during music (vs. film or interactive where I rely on my phone) I like to go analog. I write out what I’m interested in by time slot with sometimes up to 4 picks for every hour. Most days I started at 6pm and saw bands every hour until 1AM and then after-party somewhere resulting in an average of 12 bands per day.

I try to drink water between most alcoholic drinks. This doesn’t last all night, but I try. I even took one night off from drinking entirely but this was more because of the sheer pain from the night before and not as much a personal choice.

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