Coming Up With A Band Name

Coming up with a good name for your band may seem like a daunting task but I'm here to tell you that it really isn't as bad as you think. There are many ways to come up with names for your band and I'm going to help you figure out which one works best for you!

I am in two bands, one is called Guarding The Sky and the other is called Batavia. I came up with the names for both. I based the name of Batavia off of a book I own called Batavia's Graveyard. I came up with the name for Guarding The Sky by just brainstorming names I thought would go well with the style of music the band is making.

The first method I use to name my bands is to look at books, movies and video games that I like and think of characters, towns, events or even the titles and use the ones that I like best as a name, Batavia being an example of that. Batavia's Graveyard is a book about a ship, called Batavia, that got shipwrecked off the coast of Australia. Batavia's Graveyard is one of my favourite books so I used the name of the ship as my band name. My buddy Noah and his bandmates really like Lord Of The Rings so they called their band Ringwraith.

The second method I use is to just brainstorm. Grab a piece of paper and just start writing things down, they don't even have to make sense. Once you run out of ideas to write down, pick the ones that you like the best and send them in an alphabetized list to your band members. Then have a vote on which ones you like best and narrow it down. Keep going until you have one left. Or just vote on the one that you all like the most. Voila! You've named your band! That process is how I named Guarding The Sky; we chose from over 15 band names.

A third way to name your band is after a street that you live or have lived on. A couple examples of that are Ottawa bands Castlefield and Lees Avenue. Both bands are named after streets that had some significance to the band. Whitechapel also used this method for naming their band. A fourth way to come up with a band name is to think of an event that is significant to you or your band. Franz Ferdinand used this method by thinking of the Assassination of The Archduke Franz Ferdinand as a reference for their name.

You can also pick a theme, then go to Google and look up lists of things significant to that theme. Since I didn't want to just use Batavia as the only option for the band name, I looked up famous shipwrecks and wrote down some that I thought would make good names for a band.

REM supposedly got their name by opening a dictionary to a random page, the top word on the page was REM or Rapid Eye Movement, and that is how they got their name. You can also name your band after historical figures, Jethro Tull and Franz Ferdinand are two major bands that used this method.


I could go on and on forever about methods to use but the ones I have listed are very popular and easy to use. I hope they help you out!
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