Getting Gigs

Gigging experience is invaluable, and the more you play live, the more confident your playing will become and the better your performances will be.

While you can hold rehearsals in gig-like conditions - not stopping playing if someone messes up for instance – it still can’t fully prepare you for looking up from your instrument and seeing a roomful of people staring back at you, wanting to be entertained.

Aside from bringing in money and increasing your fanbase, playing gigs gives you a chance to see which of your songs work best in a live setting. You may have a song that's a personal favourite, but if the bar suddenly becomes very busy whenever you play it live it might be time to take another look at it. Similarly, when preparing for a gig, it’s not uncommon for band members to squabble over what gets included in the setlist. You may be happy to play certain songs in practice, but if you don’t want to play them live there’s probably a very good reason. Even established bands banish songs from their setlist because they don’t work in a live environment.

It’s easy to get stuck in a rut and lose drive when you’re making music, so booking a gig can breathe new life into the band – forcing you to polish off any rough edges in your material before you unleash your tracks in a live setting. It can be just the thing to make you nail that hard to play riff or key change - nothing gets a band playing tightly like the fear of performing in front of a room of people they don't know.

Originally from the BBC website

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/introducing/advice/playinglive/gettinggigs/

 

 

If the king loves music, there is little wrong in the land- Mencius

How much is music valued in your land? Is it looked upon as an extra expensive something that little Jonny does as a hobby or is it looked upon as the life affirming healer that creates bonds through sound?

Music expands the right side of the brain that the formal education system seems to miss and in this age of the religion of science it also gives us a doorway into the creative world of the unconscious and the dreamtime which is the territory of the genius.

I value music highly because I do not think there is much to be gained by being boring and limited by the belief systems of the rational. The rational do not stretch themselves to create a better world that is done by the dreamers, the rational edit those dreams and then hopefully find a way of these things happening.

At the moment there seems to be resurgence in the arts but not through government funding but through people trying to enrich their lives.

Make sure that you ride that wave and make your teaching and playing relevant. We are moving in ‘interesting times’ and that as in the Chinese curse can mean all sorts of things both good and bad. We all need music to raise our spirits and even in this day and age of the religion of science and rationality we still need to realise that the unconscious works in a non rational way and it is the powerhouse of our mind.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk for three days of creating and playing music in a band

 

  

 

That Special Ingredient for Success

I am sure that it takes a special ingredient to make someone successful; that ingredient is naivety.

To achieve you have to believe that you can, against all the odds, beating off the competition to make it to the top. As you get older however the more you see the truth that statistically you do not stand a hope in Hell of achieving anything and therefore you need to be either young or naïve to succeed.

So this may go a way to the understanding of how we get young people achieving their dreams, just because they believe, however that naivety can also mean they believe they are indestructible and not prone to failure, leading some to join the 27 club.

As we get older it does seem that we become more risk averse and because of this one has a tendency to play it safe. This may be partly due to responsibilities that begin to pile up as we stumble through life. I know that I have turned down exciting projects because of mortgages and children have got in the way.

What I am proposing is that we use moments in life where we turn on the naivety programme in NLP fashion by just thinking back to events earlier in life and then immerse ourselves in that, seeing , hearing and feeling as we did, then make your decisions through the prism of that mind-set.   

This could give us a valuable tool to take on new challenges but with the added advantage of the experience of life which can militate against the downside risk of youth.

Vic

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Make Money Teaching Music Lessons

One of the most common questions that people will ask is, “How much can you actually make teaching music lessons?”. According to the article, How to Make Money at Home – Teach Music Lessons, private music teachers charge between $50 and $100 per lesson. If you do the math (which we’ll do in a moment), it quickly adds up.

In my experience, I’ve met people who have made hardly any money teaching lessons. I’ve also met quite a few that are making more than school music teachers. New York City drum teacher John Riley, is in the low six figures. The private music teachers with the higher incomes all have one thing in common: they are entrepreneurs. By working on their businesses, in addition to teaching and growing their own music skills, they were able to leverage their talents.

Here’s a formula to figure it out how you make money teaching music.

1. What’s Your Current Rate?

Let’s say my current rate is $80 an hour.

2. Can I Raise My Rate?

I think so…maybe in a few months I’ll raise it to $100 an hour.

3. How Many Lessons Per Week?

The key here is to figure out the average number of lessons you teach per week. Factor in potential cancellations, sick days, and holidays. Your percentage of cancellations will vary. To be conservative, I would estimate a general cancellation rate to be 25 percent.

I have 20 students, so my average is 15 lessons per week.

15 Lessons Per Week x $100 = $1,500 Per Week

4. How Many Weeks to Do You Take Off?

I take off about 4 weeks a year.

48 Weeks x $1,500 = $72,000 Per Year

It’s important to keep in mind that this is a conservative estimate. Also remember that I’m figuring 15 hours of actual lesson time per week as an example. So if I add a few more students to my schedule each week, I could be making over $100,000 a year teaching private lessons and not working 40 hours a week.

This sounds like an awesome part-time job for me!

Originally article

http://www.musiclessonbusiness.com/make-money-teaching-music-lessons.html

 

 

 

 

First give the people what they want in the hope that eventually they will want what they need- B.K. Frantzis

 

A new year and more of the same economically I guess, however it is ‘the people’ who decide whether we get moving financially or not. Remember that if you put all the economists in the world end to end they would not reach a consensus so your guess is as good as any and I think that maybe our attitude to the way things will develop is down to us. I am sure that your customers want to do something to make a change in their mundane life and as for the children most parents want to do the best for their offspring, so hang on in there.

What people want and what they need are VERY different so aim for what they want first and then see where it goes from there.

Vic

 

www.vichyland.com

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

 

 

Brighton the place of creative thinkers?

A friend of mine visited Brighton the other Sunday and while his wife was attending a course he spent some time sitting on the beach and then wondering the lanes.

In the park near the Dome he found some buskers one of which was a young guy playing saxophone. My friend sat and listened for a while and then struck up a conversation with the guy, what interested him was this young musician apart from being a proficient player was from the ranks of what we might loosely term 'the counter culture' of which there are many members in the Brighton area.

I find that element makes this part of Sussex an interesting place to live because in the past few years I have moved a number of times and I have been very surprised that the social zeitgeist can be so different.

One of these places was Canterbury which I thought would be arty and open to lots of interesting types of thinking but it was actually still smothered with the stuffy Anglican high church thinking, a sort of middle class, middle of the road type of people and rather dull from an artistic point of view. There seemed to be no element of danger, they had a number of old rockers down there still doing their thing; I won’t mention names but if you live in the area you would know of whom I speak but Brighton is rather different with lots of creative types bending styles and doing new things.

The is an element of subversion here, if you wonder out from the lanes you will find yourself in the seedier parts beloved of Graham Greene. Even surrounding towns like the genteel looking Lewes can be deceiving. Lewes whose karma seems to be of social reform and upheaval (Simon de Montfort, Tom Payne et al) has one of the most wild bonfire ceremonies I have ever seen. Health and safety is kicked into touch for the night with people rolling and carrying flaming tar barrels around the street. The area of Brighton makes a great place for new bands, writers comedians, film makers and home to many alternative thinkers, gay activists, and political thinkers there is obviously something in the water.          

Vic

 

pass your RGT grade grade http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn4pI_fsHMs

 

 

 

 

Don’t die with the music in you

Don’t die with the music in you

 

I came across this quote by Wayne Dyer and it got me thinking.

I was pondering the reasons why some people make a success of music and others do not and I thought the quote the about quote somehow suggested an answer to this.

The point which was raised was that Hendrix was the greatest guitarist of his time now I am a fan if the man and I am quite happy to state that he was a genius of the highest order, however what I do not subscribe to is that technically he was the best of his day because he was not.

The jazz guitarists and classical players around at the time were technically far better than Hendrix. The likes of Tal Farlow, Barney Kessel and Kenny Burrell to name just three could run rings around him.

The thing that Hendrix did have was an extraordinary ability to internalise music and then re frame it and then reproduce what he was hearing with the emotional charge that comes with great art; that was his great genius.

The idea of the internalised music is a common factor amongst the great artists for instance Louis Armstrong stated that he would listen to the rhythm section in his head UNLESS the guys outside were better, this gave him a consistency of performance almost unparalleled amongst musicians.

So the other point here is the interpretation of the music into something fresh. For those of you who listen to Jimi you will know that he was able to play a riff that he had stolen from say John Lee Hooker or Muddy Waters and make it sound like himself the classic example of this is Voodoo Chile which is a series of riffs by the above that sounds like Hendrix not Waters or Hooker.

Often you will meet people who seem to have something special about there playing, not in the speed or the knowledge but their ability to transfer a feeling through what they do; these are the movers and shakers the people who can make changes. Then by giving these people the knowledge so that can short circuit and understand what they do, they can create more. That I believe is the real and possible only use of the theory and the technique in that it can create a vehicle for the emotion and message of the music and without that emotion and message there is no music just sound and maybe just noise.

So get the music in you out and then help others to do the same.

 

Vic 

  

www.bluescampuk.co.uk