How to Make It in the Music Industry

Last night I performed at ‘The Honest Cabbage’ in Kingston upon Thames. A friendly, unprecocious open mic on a Thursday eve. Unfortunately, the audience was very small. This has happened to me before, where you are playing to a sort of ‘empty room’, and you can hear a pin drop when you stop. Personally I find this harder than playing to a bigger, roudier audience. Nerves did get the better of me, but I pushed it aside as best I could.

I think the toughest part is ‘going for it’ proper gig-style when you know you’re being closely watched. It takes a lot of courage to stay calm and relaxed when playing in this situation. I think it’s good practice for a perfomer.

Fortunately, I was well received, for which I’m very grateful, and that was nice! I’d say that at every open mic night you get a different audience, and so the challenge is different every time, and doing a lot of these nights gives you experience and knowledge that cannot be gained any other way.

Should you quit your job so you can focus on your music? Well, the answer is probably not, but I have. I kidded myself into starting my own business, but that didn’t work. Really I quit just to work on music. I’ve not seen any tangible results yet (as in million dollar royalties), and nobody’s invited me to any awards shows, but it’s early days.

Quitting Your Job To Work on Music

This, actually, in retrospect, is double ended sword. My reasoning is this:

You get a lot more time to do music stuff. Practice is very time consuming, and it helps greatly to have the time to do it. Few people start an instrument in their 20’s and progress to professional level- society has made it too late for them- they had their chance when they were young.

On the flipside, however, I found because I play guitar and write every single day now, I have far fewer ideas than I did when I had to go to work every day and forget about music. Some days I find myself even needing to take a break from music and do other things (like this blog). I think you can also get stuck in the nitty gritty of song writing when you’re thinking about it continuosly, and not see the bigger picture.

It’s worth pointing out that inspiration does not come out continously during the hours of 9-5, and it’s often that inspiration strikes when you least expect it, or when it’s least convenient (e.g. on the motorway). Consequently, if you intend to spend all day writing songs, this is very unlikely to happen.

Depression

I heard a statistic on the television yesterday that said 50% of long term unemployed people suffer from clinical depression or anxiety. Having been unemployed myself, I can relate to this, and I think others can too, and would say it is a danger of being sat inside after a while. If you do decide to concentrate on music, but end up sat inside watching television/internet/smoking all day, you ought to get some kind of other activity, even volunteering. In my bitter experience, being depressed does not help you write music, it rather hinders it (and anything else you might want to do), and is consequently worth avoiding.

Being Responsible About Money

Everybody needs money. Music doesn’t pay. It might pay, but as a general rule it doesn’t. The smart thing to do is to keep earning, even on a part time basis, and push your music hard until you can start earn something from it. That is, after all, the struggle of this entire blog.

Don’t Listen to Me

I should point out that I hated my previous job anyway, and worked long, stressful hours, so probably would have quit anyway.

This article is unfortunately a little bit ‘preachy’. That’s not my intent. It’s only my intent to share my opinion on the matter. Do let me know though what you get up to!

This is a simple exercise that my friend, and impromtu vocal coach and producer, imparted to me one night while working late in the studio. The purpose is to help improve the natural transitions in a singer’s voice, particularly from chest voice (normal voice) to falcetto (high pitched and less deep), till they are seemless and smooth. The benefits of this to singing in the long term are practically limitless. Crucially, it helps to develop control over one’s voice, so that when you ‘go for it’, notes come out just the way you expect.

The exercise is simple to learn. Sing or hum as low a note as you can manage. Then slowly and continuously slide the note up until you get to the highest note you can realistically manage, and then, once again, slow and controlled, bring the note back down again to where you started from, hence replicating a siren. Make sure you do it slowly- doing it quick defeats the point. Relax and listen carefully as you do it. The goal is to make sure that as the note slides up or down, there are no ‘jumps’ as your voice transitions, and the movement is perfectly smooth and silky.

Once gain, this takes practice but the improved control is well worth it.

This is a method I rarely use, but my friend Bonnie swears by it, so I’ll share it with you. It can be applied to things other than songwriting too.

Songwriting is often 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. The second part is the hard part, taking an idea and making a finished song out of it.

The coffee cup method is simple. You go to a coffee shop, and you sit down at a table, on your own, and you sit and drink coffee until you finish writing your song. This frees you from distractions and focusses you on the task at hand. You are not permitted to leave until the song is complete, and the more coffee you drink the more you will want to finish it, as I’m sure too much coffee will make you feel ill.

Like I said, I don’t always use this method but I will admit songwriting is often just a matter of ‘turning up’ and putting in the time, and the results come after a hard slog. I’ve used this method before for some tunes, and it can work wonders, usually by ending months of creative procrastination in just a couple of hours that weren’t so hard after all.

Good luck.

I think this article I have found online captures the whole essence of songwriting in a conscise fashion. Of course, nobody can tell you how to write brilliant songs, but advice is helpful. Rather than create an inferior article, you can read it directly from the link below.

The article can be found here:

http://www.wikihow.com/Write-a-Song

Here is a simple trick that you can use in songs to make them sound a lot slicker.  Contra-melody is a term I have made up to describe it, and the principle is very simple.

If you have a descending bass line or descending chords, you have a melody that is ascending, i.e. for each note the bass line goes down, your singing melody takes a higher note, or vice versa.

This tends to create a more epic feel, and it is why you will hear this kind of melody a lot in classical or theatrical music. It has a knack of sounding great to the listener when used right.

I’d say 90% of the people you see at the amateur open mic nights look really happy to be there, and to be playing, doing what they love. 10% of people are tense, distant, antisocial, and knobheads. Those guys are tough to strike a lasting conversation with, and they care intensley about their music, without an objective point of view. Often this will lead to a person with complicated instrument parts, but the songs are ultimately not very entertaining.  Such a person focusses on the details and not on the bigger picture.

So, if you go up on stage, and tense and quiet, you won’t win many hearts. On the contrary, there is nothing more hypnotic than watching someone who adores playing and plays with a wide smile across their face. In other words,

• SMILE and be happy and bubbly, even if your songs are serious in nature.
• Chat with the audience.
• Thank them for clapping and listening.
• Laugh if you can.
• Enjoy yourself as much as you can, with a positive mental attitude, you will electrify an audience, even if the songs are only average.

Remember, nobody likes a miserable git, so be positive, be bold, be brave, and smile.

When showing off your art to family and friends, or even when you play a gig, you will always receive compliments. Very rare is it for somebody to tell you to your face what’s wrong with it. No art is perfect, people will always have opinions about it, good and bad, that they would prefer to keep to themselves. When you play somebody a piece, often they will want to compliment you whether it’s good or bad, because that’s what friends do. It’s being nice, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

The problem is this. Sometimes, it’s possible to fall into a false sense of security that what you are doing is in fact good, at a time when you really must objective about your art. Ask yourself the honest question about how good it is. Is it a good competitor amongst Jeff Buckley, John Lennon or David Bowie? Could you show them up with your tune and performance? The purpose of this question is not to belittle your music or your ego, but rather to continually remind you to keep pushing to the next level of writing and performance, one step further than the last. Do not let this discourage you, quite the opposite, you should be encouraged. And do not let you friends & family lull you into thinking you’re great. You may only be great by their standards, not by the standards of an A&R man at a record label.

So: Good is the friend who tells you the truth.

Being told you’re rubbish

This will probably also happen at some point. I’ve been told I can’t sing, my songwriting is rubbish and I can’t keep time. In retrospect, all of those things were true, though I didn’t see them at the time. I took it all with a pinch of salt (most of the time) and kept pushing harder and harder to improve. I still get negative feedback, but these days less of ‘give up’ and more constructive stuff like ‘don’t strain your voice’. Listen to what people say, and then act on it in a positive manner.

In the last decade technology has become so available that anybody can sit at home and make a top 10 album if they wanted. But very few do, and here’s why.

You will meet a typical unsuccessful unsigned band or who spend their time ‘working on the first album’. This usually means sitting at home, recording tracks on the computer. Normally, they will produce a mediocre track which goes onto MySpace and gets a few dozen hits. Sometimes they might hand this out at the very rare gigs that this kind of artist plays. And that’s about it. Artists who work in this fashion do not produce professional quality music, only mediocre ‘unsigned’ (unsignable) tracks.

This tends to be because recording is too easy, so recordings are made too early, before enough practice/songwriting has taken place. Recording takes ages and ages to do at home, time which would be better spent practicing, writing, gigging and generally improving.

Let’s look at the ideal artist now. The ideal artist knows nothing about recording, nothing about MySpace, but focusses on practicing and playing. This person is a much tighter musician and much more interested in the songwriting craft than the previous artist described. When making a recording, this person has somebody experienced do the recording work, and may use a pro recording studio. By contrast, this artist or band sees the studio day more like an impotant gig date where the playing must be exceptional and all the writing and practicing is complete and there are no loose ends.

This second kind of artist is far more likely to:

a) Be successful, because they are playing more often.
b) Be better musicians, because they are focussing on the performacne, and leaving the recording to someone else.

So the lesson to learn is, if you are an aspiring musician, focus on your performance and nothing else, and try and delegate tasks like recording and promotion to other people. Ensure that you are absolutely exceptional, so that even if you have to go up and play your song on your own, people will be blown away.

Here are some do’s and don’ts:

Do:

• Practice, practice and practice. This does in fact make perfect. If you want to be as good as Jeff Buckley, practice, practice, practice. It will come. Your goal is to blow people away.
• Delegate non-music tasks such as recording, mixing, promotion or management to other people, people who are better than you, so you can focus on the important stuff. Don’t worry about splitting potential revenues in the future; you will make more money with the help of other people, and remember that 10% of nothing is still nothing.
• Treat any recording days like gigs of the highest importance.
• Buy your recording buddy a bottle vodka before he starts to let him know how much you appreciate his help (and don’t let him drink it before the session!). This makes them more committed to helping you and it’s amazing how much better the results come out!
• Use somebody who can show you work done before and see if you would be happy to have your recording be of this quality. If it’s not someone you know, be aware of sharks who over compliment you on how amazing your music is. They just want your money.

Don’t:

• Get distracted with the details of recording.
• Shell out thousands of pounds on recording equipment. The adverts all say that you can get pro studio recording at home for nothing; but why are good studios still full of clients? They aren’t stupid.
• Use recording as an excuse to not gig. If you make a recording, it might get played to a few dozen people. Every time you play a gig, you are likely to have more people listen to you play than listen to the recording. Ultimately record labels will sign artists who already have built an audience they can sell to. They don’t sign bands with only a dozen fans.

Remember, focus on the performance. Recordings are just performances. The most successful artists have been successful without computers and without crap recordings, so don’t waste your time. If you spend hours every day on the computer, and less time really playing, you will probably stay that way forever, and this will suck.

Learning to play new instrument or a very technical line on an instrument you know well can be fraught with frustration. Both complicated instruments and complicated parts have steep learning curves, otherwise they would not be complicated. Many people take up an instrument but give up too early: if they’d committed themselves enough just to learn the basics, they might very well have progressed further.

The reason I write this article is because I am learning to play piano.  I am already an accomplished guitarist, but this is entirely new to me. I am a poor reader of music, and can only read it very slowly. Nevertheless, I practice continuously and to a metronome. My progress so far has been quite astonishing considering my lack of experience, but ‘raw talent’ is something I am having to do without.

One finds frustration in learning many new things, but the difference between success and failure often comes in preventing the frustration from building a barrier. For an instrument, it is usually the feeling that your fingers do not do what you ask of them, or it seems impossible or just sounds terrible. One can tell if they are becoming frustrated if:

• They stop breathing, or breath becomes quite shallow.
• They repeat the bit they’re working on endlessly but while staring into space.
• They feel like they’re getting annoyed or not getting anywhere.

There is nothing wrong with a little frustration. Most new things can lead to a little resistance as we learn them. It’s only important to control it and this is done by not letting it build up. The answer is to stop, periodically, and check one’s breathing. If breathing is shallow, relax and let breathing become normal, and then resume. If it seems like too much effort, have a break of just a few minutes, and then get back to it. Don’t give up or try and put it off, doing so will only make the miserableness last longer!

But remember, practice makes perfect!