Dear 1999
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!
Sincerely,
Dave
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