I’ve had some actor and singer friends ask me lately about vocal coaching.
Yes! I do coachings. I have a great little set up at my studio apartment in uptown Manhattan. We can also meet at any of the studios in midtown – no problem – but if you come visit me, I have:
Over 900 PDF scores to help you fill your book. We can dig through and print out anything you need.
17 days worth of cast recordings. According to iTunes, I have nearly 8,000 musical theatre recordings. Maybe there’s something in there that you need? (Or want?)
A full, weighted keyboard, a guitar, a harmonica, a shaker, spoons, knives, forks… We’ll have plenty of gear to make some noise with.
Recording equipment. If you want to record anything for demos or your website or anything, we can do that! There’s a little bird next door that sometimes squeaks too much (so you might have to record in the kitchen), but I can definitely help you with basic recording.
Piano accompaniment recordings. In the same way, I can make your piano accompaniment recordings for you to practice to.
Transpositions & transcriptions. You probably don’t want to sit around and watch me do this – but send me the music you need fixed and I’ll do it. Then come up for a coaching and I’ll help you learn it. I use Finale 2010 for notation and in the end you get a nice, clean PDF of your score. Transpositions and transcriptions start at $35 and go up depending on complexity and length.
I charge $60/hr for coachings at my place, or $60/hr + the studio fee for coachings at other studios. My apartment is a block from the 190 stop of the A train, and 3 blocks from the 191 stop of the 1 train. Email me and I’ll send you the address.
There’s also a great little Dominican restaurant/bar in my building, Fort Tryon Park and the Cloisters nearby, and I’ve got a sweet record player I’m dying to show somebody.
Please use the contact page and set up a coaching today.
Having no natural skill myself with building things, I have wondered now and then how brass instruments were made. The thing they use to make the bell is rad. That looks like a ton of fun.
I have a few writing projects coming up. I think I’ll be able to put them together in the coming weeks. February is traditionally a slow month in the NYC theatre world (although I think we’re all hoping that audition accompanying gigs pick up this year).
Tips for Piano Conductors – This is the first MusicianWages.com article I need to put together. I came up with the idea months and months ago, and even took some interviews for it. I just need to pull it all together. Update: article posted 2/1/2010
Town Musicians – I’ve been slowly getting into a series on MusicianWages.com about the history of the musician career. My idea is that our industry has just come out of a long financial bubble that was created by recorded music. Now that the bubble has popped, we need to re-learn how musicians made a living before the recording industry, and how we can integrate that into our modern careers. I’ve written 2 articles on the topic, and the next one needs to be about the Town Musician career, which existed between the middle ages and early 1800s in Europe.
A History of the Lincoln Center Buildings – This is an article for another musician publication. They asked me if I’d be interested in covering this topic. I should be able to knock this out with a few visits to the Lincoln Center Library.
Those are the articles in the works. I have a few other ideas that would take a lot more writing:
One Year in NYC: What Worked, What Didn’t – Another thing I write a lot about at MusicianWages.com is moving to NYC, which I did over a year and a half ago. In that first year I made some good progress and learned a lot of things. It’d be great to bundle it up into a series of articles for the musicians that come after me.
# of Musician Jobs on Broadway – When the recession hit last fall I counted all of the available musician chairs on Broadway. I wonder how that number has changed in a year? Update: article posted 1/28/2010
I also have some recordings I need to make and post. I have a new arrangement of my song One Day (Argentina) that I put together last week. I have to actually work on the of the runs (!) before I can record it, but I’ll put that up as soon as that’s ready. I have a few other songs rattling around that I’ll record when I have the time.
The musicians’ union paper in Los Angeles published one of my articles this month. This article is on healthcare reform, my experience with cancer, and why I feel insurance reform is essential to working musicians in the United States.
The article was originally posted on MusicianWages.com, and you can read it at this link.
I keep a list of my published articles at this link.
I’m writing drum parts for an upcoming gig and watching a Jackson Browne SoundStage concert on PBS. Band sounds incredible, with Mark Goldenberg on guitar and Jeff Young on keyboards. I don’t know these guys, so I checked them out on the all-knowing eye (YouTube). Here’s a really nice interview with Jeff Young. Seems like a great hang, and I dig the song he’s playing.
Fade up on a dude sitting in his jeans on a long beach. Early morning. Seems like it was a bad night. What happened? Cue this song:
Dude stands up, dusts the sand off, starts walking. Keeps walking. Walks faster. Starts running. Now he’s sprinting. Run, man, run! What’s he going to do? He tears off his shirt. Long strides kicking up the sand – go, man, go!
Now he’s running down a pier, past all the tourists. The sun is up now, the place is crowded. He’s been running for so long. He gets up on the rail. Takes off his shoes, throws them aside. Stop the music.
He looks out. Smiles. And jumps!
He hits the water – cue the music again. Play that drum Kenneth!
He swims around, playing in the waves. Dude feels so much better.
This post is part of a group blog event organized by MusicianWages.com. The topic is: “If you could go back to 1999 and give yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?”
Dear 1999 Dave,
Hey man. It’s 2009 Dave. I want to give you some advice.
Right now you’ve just finished your first semester of college. Congrats, but I know that you’re totally miserable. Music school isn’t what you thought it would be, and it seems like you’re behind everyone else in the program.
Well, listen, first off, that’s completely normal for a first year music student. If you knew everything already, you wouldn’t need to go to school, right? Believe it or not, there are probably a lot of other people there that feel that same way.
Second, (and in another 6 months you’ll understand this yourself) the program you are in is just not the right fit for you at all. Get out of there. The problem is that your program is just not emphasizing the skills that you will need to make a living as a working musician in the real world.
Ok, here’s my advice. I’m going to save you a lot of time and tell you which of your skills will make you the majority of your income for the next ten years. Then you can focus on those and we’ll both be better off.
Sight-reading
Dave, you are already really good at this, and you’ve already been doing it for years. I’m tempted to say that this is because you never practiced for your lessons as a kid and ended up sight-reading on demand from age 12 on, but I guess some good came of it.
Sight-reading is a really, really marketable skill. You are going to be asked to do it all the time – for theatre auditions, for your own auditions, for cruise ships, for Broadway tours, in Chicago, in New York, in Florida, in Arizona, in Hawaii – man, shed those sight-reading chops!
(And if you need some advice on how to practice sight-reading, here it is: just do it.)
Do you remember the first time you were hired to sight-read? That’s right, you were about 13 and the local community theatre company needed someone to play for auditions. And there you were. Well, that brings me to my next item…
Musical Theatre
Dave, I know that you are practicing to be the next Wynton Kelly. I’m going to tell you the truth – you are a fine jazz pianist, but you and I know that there is something missing in it for you. You dig it, sure, and you’ve figured out the idiom pretty well as a player, but it’s not your whole LIFE like it is for some musicians.
That’s no way to go into a jazz piano career. You’re jazz training is going to be very helpful to you over the next 10 years, but you should stop stressing about it. While you may be a decent jazz pianist, you’re not really going to make much money on it in the next ten years, and there is going to be a never ending stream of better jazz pianists coming out of schools like North Texas, Manhattan School of Music, the New School, Indiana…and many more. Stop competing with them, it’s not your bag.
I’ll tell you what your bag is, even though you already know. I know it doesn’t have the reputation for being the hippest genre, and I know you try not to talk about it around your jazzer friends, but hey man, you GREW UP in musical theatre! Don’t deny it.
The single most successful part of your career is going to be musical theatre, and that’s what I want you to focus on. And you dig it, man! Listening to Gershwin and Cole Porter shows is what got you into jazz in the first place. You’ve always liked musical theatre.
The good news is that the next decade will see a strong blending of modern rock/jazz/funk into musical theatre. You’ll really like it, and the innovative stuff that comes out will even make your jazzer friends start re-thinking their distrust of musical theatre, even if they won’t admit it. So chin up, Mr. Musical Theatre, the sun will come out tomorrow.
Piano Technique
Clean up that sloppy technique, son. Being a jazzer is no excuse for crappy technique (there’s another thing they aren’t teaching you at that school). You get along fine right now, but when you start competing with more experienced players in Chicago and New York you’re going to have to step it up. In 6 years I’m going to need to take a whole checkbook full of Bach lessons to clean up the mess you’re making, so help me out.
What you’re learning to be now is a creative player, and that’s useful. What you need to learn next is to be a precision player. That’s what’s going to get you called back for gigs in the next 10 years. Play it right, and play it right every time. You need to rid yourself of this idea that playing it the same way twice isn’t artistic enough. That might work for some players, but for you, precision playing is what you’ll be best at, and what will bring you the most success. Start working on it.
Conducting
You haven’t even touched this yet, but you should start thinking about it. In the next ten years the pits of musical theatre shows will continue to shrink, especially in the places you’ll be starting off in, and it’ll become increasingly important to have a piano-conductor in the pit, not just a pianist.
In fact, most of your jobs in 10 years include some kind of conducting. You’ll like it, too. So start trying it out. Take some lessons now and you’ll help us out.
Singing
I know it’s not your thing, but the musician business is changing and in the future you’re going to need to know something about just about everything. Singing is a universal skill that anyone can do, and maybe because of that you’ll be expected to know something about it.
Actually, for you, since you’ll be working a lot as a music director in musical theatre – you’ll need to know a lot about it. It took me a few years to catch up to my colleagues in this area, so you’ll do me a favor if you can start learning about it now. To start, look up “vocal pedagogy” and read some of the books you find.
And no, you are not a bad singer. You just never do it. Try practicing singing for a few months and you’ll see what I mean.
Writing
Here’s a funny quirk about you, Dave. While your friends are feverishly writing songs and recording albums – you’re keeping journals, agonizing over word choices in long emails and seeking out great books to read. Writing seems to be your creative outlet, although that seems strange given that you are, even at your age, a professional musician.
You are a writer, my friend. You’ll be surprised to see what a positive impact this has on your music career. So write!
That’s about it. I suppose while I’ve got you, I might as well tell you a few other things. Switch to Mac, it’s way better. You’ll lose your hair, but it’s cool because no one really cares. Campaign for Al Gore next year because if George Bush gets in he’ll make a mess of things. Invest in Google. Don’t invest in Enron.
Have some fun, too. You’re going to do some really cool things in the next 10 years!
This post is part of a group blog event organized by 
Songs
Subscribe to RSS