Tag Archives: follow your passion

How Do You Get There When You Don’t Know What THERE Is?

So you want to be a singer / songwriter / or a producer? Do you want to be a winner in that race to fame and fortune and to be known as, “that guy who knows how to make good music” as the checks start to fall from your pocket?

If so, congratulations! The world is a delight. The music industry is the most freely expressed of of all. Be one of the successful, famous and talented musicians in that world, and you are a winner.

Get passion hearted, open your ears and listen to the world around you. You will learn how the world works. Be one of the millions of talented people out there, and you are a winner every time you play your guitar, or your piano, or your saxophone, or whatever your playing instrument is. It’s not easy to be a successful songwriter, but the rewards are great.

Don’t waste your time learning how to make good music. Work for it. Music is a business and if you are not used to it, you may find yourself in a position where you need to learn to navigate the road again. It’s like a war when you are out there,meet new people, make friends, make deals.

Be a musician and learn to communicate with your audience through your music. That is the kind of personality that we need today. People today are introverted by nature. They need to be friends with people. They need to feel like they know them. And there is nobody better than music to give them that. Music is the best tool to use to build lasting relationships.

Using your music to express yourself or whichever way you like is one of the best ways to make a living in this tough economy. Now, if you are going to apply that to your music, just bear in mind that your audience is also finding it tough to be associated with you, your music and your personality.

Appeal to the Blogosphere.

I am not getting out in the field of music blogs because it is a tough business to break into. Everyone knows about MySpace and Facebook. But there is a whole lot more out there. And a lot of it, may be harder to achieve.

There is a lot of content out there for composers. But you need to seek out the ones that are of a quality level appropriate for your purposes. Focus on the type of things you need to emphasis with. Again, it’s a balance.

Have a blog. If you don’t have one, start one. The great thing about starting one is that you can link to other blogs that are of high quality. The search engines read those blogs too.

Be reader.

There are many online articles and books and magazines and books on music. And they are all free. And they are focused on the topic of music. So go to your library and start looking for music books and articles.

And focus on the ones that are of high quality, like a book from the library. Go to bookmarked websites like “indie-music.com”, “guidetosemail.com”, etc., and look at the books you have sitting there that look interesting. Go to the book market and buy some great books. And don’t forget about magazines!

bandwidth is getting cheaper, too. It’s important to have enough bandwidth. You want to have the ability to upload and download as much music as possible, in good time. You need more than enough.

Earlier, I was looking at music blogs. I can use ones like “thisisplaying.blogspot.com” or “abthunder.olo.org” and download those songs I want. Now, I find a website called autotrader.com and join that. I pay them a small fee and they send me a monthly digest. I just join, once a month, and download what I need.

One bag of tricks.

Autotrader also lets me use their feature which is called Mozart mode. It’s a wonderful feature that turns any website into a streaming radio station. I find it wonderful for when I know only a few songs. It makes me feel like I am on tour with John Mayer.

Now, once I have myriads of songs in its MP3 entirety, I can autotune them and download them later. And I can spend hours and hours later mixing and matching andiddling with my downloads. And it will never cost me a dime.

And the amazing thing is, this is all free. Way Kahler. Go to the bank, tell them to shifter me the address of the MP3 file, and wait. The teller will give me a code and I just input the code into MySpace and boom!

Learn How to Play the Guitar (Part 2) – By Following Your Passion

Why do people quit?

Too many times I have seen friends of mine starting to learn how to play the guitar, only to give up after a few months or so. Some of them because it was to hard for them to learn, others claimed that it was to much for them to learn.

These are only poor excuses, I tell them. In my opinion, learning the guitar is an incredibly rewarding experience. Yes, it can be hard, but the rewards are immense.

If you want to learn how to play the guitar, here are three things to think about.

  1. What do you want to do?
  2. What level of playing do you want to achieve?
  3. What style of playing do you want to learn?

By thinking these thoughts, you can start to see where you’re going. Have you ever heard of a ” observers arrangement”? This is where friends who are learning to play the guitar get together and practice together. This is a great way to accelerate your guitar playing because your Observers are able to keep each other motivated by seeing how far they have come.

Whatever style you decide to learn, you’re bound to get bored if you go at it for too long without learning new things. Boredom is an extremely bad thing because you don’t want to practice just to return to the same level you were at.

It’s important to divide your guitar playing time up over a number of weeks, months or even years. The reason is that when the initial joy of playing the guitar is gone, so is the motivation. To repurpose your mind and get it to focus on new challenges is a much more effective way to get better rather than just playing the same thing over and over again.

  1. Level of playing what you want.

If you are just learning to play church style guitar, then playing some basic and vague chords will keep you busy for quite a while. As you get more advanced, this style of playing will become more defined and you will begin to really push the limits of your guitar playing.

The important thing is to set goals for yourself. You don’t need to learn tons of chords or scales in order to be a great guitar player, but you do need to be aware of what you want to achieve and how you want to play in order to grow as a musician.

  1. The style of playing what you like.

If you are just learning to play church guitar, you should be using a lot of mainly power chords and chord-heavy style songs. This is not the style of guitar playing that will get you nights and weekends worth of enjoyment.

You may think that learning to play power chords means that you can play absolutely any style of music and be successful. Forget it. You may be able to play more songs (rouse in your friends’ ears) with power chords than almost any other style of guitar playing. But if you want to be good, you will need to expand your ability and not limit yourself.

  1. Pick a cool guitar riffs from a CD or get inspired by your favorite band.

If you’re learning to play guitar, odds are you have already the musical influences that will get you going. Get a hold of some contemporary guitar riffs (most of the time state-of-the-art ones) and play them over the top of your power chords.

Never forget that the key behind playing guitar well is having fun. Don’t kill yourself trying to come up with interesting lead guitar parts. Have fun with your rhythm playing and write your own rhythm guitar riffs.

  1. Watch other guitarists live or online.

Take advantage of Google’s awesome new servers. If you don’t have the time to be in front of your computer and the opportunity to study some of the top guitar players online, strap on your big-screen theater chair and go to YouTube (see what I mean).

Note: This is not the time to be cheap. Lessons with a real guitar teacher can cost $20 or more per hour.

  1. Be extremely selective about your guitar teacher.

If your dream is to be able to play Ozzy, don’t be tempted to bite off more than you can chew. You need to build this important skill into your learning curve. Do your homework and only go with the highest quality lessons that are guaranteed to deliver results. When you are looking for a good guitar teacher, note the big difference in the cost of lessons.

The average cost of lessons will be between $15 and $50 (it depends on how far you wish to go) but do not be afraid to ask and explore the cost aspect of your situation to determine if this is the best use of your hard earned money.