Putting together a band from scratch is difficult work. If you just recruit your friends, their eventual betrayal will be heartbreaking and leave you in a self-destructive tailspin of drugs and suspected arson. Nothing will ever be the same, even if years later you somehow reforge some fake half-attempt at a relationship. If you interview and recruit strangers, you have to do all number of awkward things, from online ads to building friendships. It’s a torture no one wants to go through.

For years, the only way around this problem was to either find/be found by a visionary manager intent on creating a prefab band, or bucking up. In 2008, Winnipeg based producer and musician Pike Petkau started the ball rolling toward a new method with an idea claimed to have been sitting on for several years. His Record of the Week Club was in many ways little more than the traditional prefab band arrangement, sped-up, with Petkau playing the part of the matchmaker. Every week for 16 weeks he invited three musicians of his choice to his studio and gave them the evening to record a new song together, which he’d record and post on the project’s blog. Where it differed from the standard prefab arrangement was in the matching criteria. Instead of choosing musicians with a shared sound or look, Petkau had put together artists different enough that the selection process seemed random. When the inclusion of a member of the Weakerthans in the project propelled the resulting album to international fame amongst people who don’t hate the Weakerthans, the idea of random selection took off even harder.

People began to realize that if bands are formed by drawing names from a hat, all the pressures of band selection can be sidestepped. No one has to worry about diverging musical tastes meaning an end to friendships, since “hat brought us together,” and there are no forced assumptions about creative compatibility. No one has to worry about following the dictates of a controlling manager, because “hat brought us together,” and hat doesn’t micromanage. No one even has to interview or befriend strangers, because one: hat will bring them together, and two: no one needs friendship to hold them together when the will of hat will do.

Guelph got a taste of the rock lottery game last year with the SHE ROARS: Loud Band-off! Musicians and wannabes were thrown together into new bands after having their names drawn from a hat. After being given a few weeks to practice, the bands came together for a one-day concert that proved so successful that it spawned several ongoing projects.

Guelph’s next shot at the band lottery phenomenon will, like Petkau’s project, focus more on producing surprising combinations of musicians, as members of Guelph’s music community are brought together in a one day rock lottery challenge as part of CFRU’s birthday celebrations.  If Guelph is lucky, this won’t be the last time locals are asked to put their name in a hat.

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