Showing posts with label Brainstorming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brainstorming. Show all posts

The Musician's Most Important Skill

All too often we talk about how to practice and perform. You might think that the most important skill a musician could have is great dexterity or, a great imagination, or maybe even great creativity. Where these are important, that there is one skill that is the foundation of all that a musician must do. It's our memory. Memory isn't just used by musicians to remember tons of songs; it's used in every aspect (improvising, composing, performing). Musicians must remember songs, chord progressions, fingerings, lyrics, scales, idioms (licks), performance notes (dynamics, inflections, phrasing, breathing, etc),  recording techniques, engineering facts, song forms, theory, stage moves, gear settings, recording settings, software applications, etc. And this is just the musical applications! This doesn't include any of the marketing, PR, business activities that we have to do on a daily basis. Memory even comes into play in our ear training because ultimately, the ear is using our memory as reference point for all of those chords, intervals and sounds.

Practicing On Purpose

We seem to set out with the best of intentions. We try and practice everyday. We make sure we're covering the basics. We're trying to improve. Like we've talked about here before, it's important that you set apart some time to try and assess what your goals are. You try to figure out what you want to accomplish on your instrument and what you want to accomplish with music overall. But there's so much to learn. So much to practice. Every new skill seems to take forever to master. How do you know what you're supposed to practice and what not to? Of course having a great teacher is invaluable for this because that should be a prime consideration of theirs every time they see you. But how to do you figure this out on your own? How do you practice with purpose?

Optimizing Your Creativity

Let's face it, when it comes to creativity, inspiration can be fickle. There are times when you're on fire and everything you do seems like a complete gem. Then there are other times when it all seem like complete garbage. The worst seems to be when ideas don't seem to be coming at all. There are things we can do to optimize the time when we're the most creative and what to do when we aren't.

Being On Fire

We all love those times when ideas are just flowing. The ideas are coming from every where and one seems better than the next. We all know though, that these times are fleeting and they seem to leave just as quickly as they arrived. Creativity can be like a little child. They come and go when they please. They're very erratic and can't be depended on. They can last but usually they're quite short...or never long enough. And the worst part is that the harder you try to get them to abide by your will, the harder it is to get them to cooperate. In short, when it comes to inspiration, we're at the whim of the gods.



Perfectionism for Musicians

Something that a lot of musicians and artists often deal with is perfectionism. I know this first hand because it's something that I have to fight everyday. Perfectionism is debilitating in the fact that it can stop you from doing the thing that you love the most. It causes stress and undue friction within your own life. And, can actually cause the opposite effect of it's 'purpose' in the first place. While there is a place for high artistic standards, when your standards become so high that nobody can live up to them, how are you supposed to create your art?

Effective Memorization In Music

One of the most important parts of learning music is memorization. Whether it's a small piece. a couple of licks, scales, chords, or an entire performance, memorization is something that musicians have to deal with on a daily basis. Yet this is rarely mentioned in textbooks and music courses. One thing that should be part of every musical education is how to effectively use your memory. Simply learning a piece isn't enough: memorizing the piece is another process entirely. It must be dealt with accordingly. If you don't believe me, just look at how you would approach trying to remember a phone number. If you had a pen and paper, you would simply write it down and forget about it. But, if you had to memorize it on the spot, you would probably go through a couple of exercises or techniques to help you remember the number. You know that simply repeating it to yourself just once isn't going to work*

Working Solo: R&D


Last time we talked about some of the problems with goals setting and planning when working on your own. When you're a musician most of the time you're going to be on your own which makes it that much harder trying to get it all done.


What to Do…What to Do

Planning is simply figuring out what’s important, what needs to be done, and how it’s going to get done. The problem with the music industry is that there isn't one way to the top. There are as many ways of getting there as there are musicians. So what do you need to do? What's your first step? What's your next step? What needs to be done first? Of course the answer to any of these questions has a lot to do with where you are now and what you want to accomplish. There is no set approach for artists and musicians; more now than ever since the turn in music industry in recent years.


R&D

You are going to have to spend a part of everyday on career development. Most companies spend a good deal of time (and money) in research and development. As a business, you're going to have to do the same. It’s said that in business that you should be reinvesting a certain percentage of your profits back into R&D; otherwise you become obsolete and die. You need to be doing the same. That means spending time everyday doing some research in figuring out what people in your industry are doing to make it. Much like practicing and working at your craft, this is one of the things that you should be thinking about and working on everyday. How do you go about this? What do you do first? If you’re just starting out, you’re going to have to do quite a bit of research and a lot of trial and error.


This process of research and trial and error never actually ends; you just get better at it.


The ‘R’ Part

For a starting musician (or even if you’re not), you will need to do some research first. Go to your library and take out books. There are tons, pick a couple but don’t just read them, make notes and put some of the ideas into action. This will be the beginning of your master plan. Don’t worry if you’re doing the ‘right’ thing yet. It will become apparent what works and what doesn’t soon enough. Do some research online. Don’t spend too much time on this. You could spend years going through all of the stuff online and end up wasting a lot of time. Do the same process as you did with the books. Take some of the good ideas, print them out on a separate sheet so you can access them anytime. This will get rid of any temptation to do any extra surfing while trying to work on your goals. Make a list of some actionable goals from the ideas you got online and then get out there and do them.


People, Places

Get out there and talk with musicians. This may be your greatest resource. Even if they aren’t ‘rockstars’ yet, that doesn’t matter. Every musician has stories and lessons learned. Remember to take it all with a grain of salt. See what ideas you like and try them out. If you hear one piece of advice over and over; memorize it and learn from it. It may save you a lot of pain later. There is no substitute for real experience but with a little research there won’t be as many surprises. Make no mistake though, there will be surprises!


Always have research and development as part of your to do list. No matter where you are in your path, this always needs to be on your list. This must be an ongoing thing.


The ‘D’ Part

The development part has a couple of areas that needs to be considered. Just putting your research into action is part of your development. Tweaking that research and you master plan is another. Remember we’re talking about career development here and not about your art; development of your art goes is another article entirely. Development in your career also involves networking, administration and of course finances. If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent years working on your craft, leaving the business largely alone. There is no place for this anymore. Just as you work on songwriting everyday, you must work on the development of your career. This means that once the research has been done and you’ve written down some goals, it’s time to see what’s working. Most businesses have a method of measuring if something is successful or not. They measure if it was worth their while and check to see if they can replicate that process. If you can do this, it’s a good idea but a lot of the things that you do in your development wouldn’t be so clear-cut. Sometimes the most unexpected things happen as a result of something that seemed arbitrary at the time. Sometimes upon closer inspection, there things don’t turn out to be as arbitrary as you think. It’s all part of the process.


Anything Happening Yet?

There will be times that you can see a direct result of something that you had done as part of your R&D. This may be getting contacts at a networking event, meeting other musicians at a jam night or simply getting sales from a local gig. When you achieve some success, it’s important to take a second and figure out why. If you can trace your steps back and see what you did and how it resulted in that particular success, you’re more likely to do that again in the future. It simply means that this process or goal works for you and it’s always a good idea to build on successes. A lot of very famous musicians have built a career on making the most out of one or two ‘small’ successes.


Your Career Workbook

One of things that you may want to do right from the outset is put together a career workbook. I have one of these for my practice sessions as well but having one solely for your business, planning, career and PR is a good idea. Once you’ve made a list, put it in there. Any marketing ideas? Put it in there. CD release checklists, networking events, etc. Put it all in there. Some people like to have their workbook on their computer. I personally find a binder much better. I carry it anywhere, doesn’t need any batteries or back up, and I have a hard copy of all of the most important items. This workbook should be opened at least once a day and checked. It’s important that this is a vehicle for action and results; not another system that you spend all of your time on tweaking and updating. It’s a WORK book.


Try and Try Again

If you’re just starting out don’t worry too much about getting it perfect. Check out some of ideas that you’ve found in your research and get started. Keep a list of what you want to do and what you’ve done. If something works, make a note of it. Rework the research and the plan. It’s a work in process.

Outline Your Music Career

Diagram of a brainstorming sessionImage via Wikipedia

It seems like a lot of musicians out there, I've gotten into the habit of doing a lot of writing. These days it seems writing is becoming more and more useful and used in everyday living and especially online. This includes not only of the emails and correspondence that I have on a daily basis but also all of my online activities that includes blogs, commenting on other sites and reviews. Whenever I had something to write I would generally just start and see where it would lead. This would be fine for most activities but whenever I had to write something that was more than a couple of lines long, or had a specific point to make, I found I would spend a lot of time rewriting and trying to get the article to have some sort of consistency and cohesion. After struggling with this for a while I learned about the value of starting with an outline.

The Outline in Writing

An outline can do a couple of things that can help your writing immensely. First of all, it's a great way to get all of your ideas down in a hurry, just making points on all of the different things that you want to cover. It's basically brainstorming. You think of all of the topics that you want to cover in your article and make some points on each of the ideas. It also helps you to organize those ideas. You start just writing out ideas and soon enough you start to see some connections between some of your ideas. You may also come up with new ideas based on the ones you've already put down. It helps in organizing your thoughts. It may help streamline the article too by seeing which ideas don't fit the topic and may be useful in another article. You may find that after brainstorming, you have enough for a couple of articles. Lastly, it helps you keep your focus by looking at all of the points available and making sure that you stick to the topic and don't veer off course half way through the article.

Writing out an outline really helps your writing. It helps you effectively communicate with your fans and create interesting content for your sites. Second, it helps with your correspondence with others. Email is still the reigning king of communication and being able to articulate your ideas and thoughts well is a great skill to have. Lastly, and this is the point of this article, it can help in deciding what you're going to do with your music career and can help in making decisions and sticking with a desired plan.

Brainstorming

We're going to use the same process to outline how you want your music career to go as the process in creating a great piece of writing. It involves 3 basic steps: brainstorming, planning and action. The first two steps are the same processes that I talked about earlier in preparing to write. Basically it's just sitting down and writing down all of the ideas that come to you on a particular subject. I've mentioned it as part of the outline process because I generally will do both in one sitting: brainstorm and then create my outline on the same piece of paper. You may want to do this in a couple of steps but I find that it's better to complete as much as you can in one sitting. The reason for this is that sometimes when you sit and think about something for a period of time you may have a hard time starting but once you're in the middle of it, the ideas may start flying and it's usually a good idea to just let them fly and worry about limits or problems at a later date. We're not concerned with details yet, we're just focusing on ideas and at this point; none are bad.

Priorities

Once you've got all of your ideas written down. It's time to set about figuring out which ones you are going to pursue and make a reality, which ones you'll be tackling at a later date, and ones which will be have to be put on the back burner or completely eliminate. If you're worried about missing something, don't: all of your ideas are written down and if you come up with something at a later date, you can simply add it in.

For this reason I always carry a notepad with me and jot down any ideas that come to me. You never know when you're going get inspiration and come up with a great idea. If you think that you'll remember it later, think again. It's always better to write it down when you think of it, that way you know that it'll be there and you can free your mind to come up with more ideas!

Decisions

Once you've written down a bunch of ideas, it's exciting to see all of your ideas and dreams. It usually becomes a little easier to decide what you're going to do once you can see all of your options right there. Sometimes though, when you see all of the things that you want to do, it could become overwhelming trying to decide on what to do first/next. This happens sometimes when bands see all of things that must be taken care of when releasing a CD. Here again, our outline comes to the rescue. If you have all of the things outlined in front of you and you're a bit overwhelmed, the best thing to do is to just pick something on the list and get started. If it's the wrong thing to do, it'll become apparent pretty soon. Either way you've started and you have some momentum going. Once you've started on something, you can sit back and see if it brings any results. If it does then you know you're heading in the right direction. You'll still have to make some adjustments to your plan but you're moving ahead and things are getting done. Having the outline in front of you can help you decipher if what you are doing is bringing you closer to your goal or if you're heading in the wrong direction. It's having that outline there that allows you to stay on track. It's like having a roadmap and it case there's any trouble or questions, you just have to refer back to the roadmap.

Work in Progress

The difference between this and a real roadmap is this outline is a work in progress. It's going to have to be continually adjusted and updated. Once you've set out and done a couple of items on the list, you'll have to take time out and see if your actions brought any results and check if you're heading in the right direction. We'll talk in a future post about some of the decisions and questions you may want to ask yourself when going through your brainstorming sessions. This outline will have to be updated and new ones will have to be created on a regular basis. Once you get into the habit, it becomes easier to do and you'll be more effective in planning your future and seeing those plans to fruition. Writing out an outline is an effective way to organize thoughts and streamline the creative process. It helps in brainstorming, writing, organizing, and in this case, is very effective in planning your music career. Take time at least once a month to outline what you have achieved and what you plan on doing next and you may find yourself getting more done and getting further than you ever imagined.

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