By Tom Hess

I often receive e-mails from musicians seeking advice on how to make it in the music business. In nearly all cases, musicians are asking all the ‘wrong’ questions that:

1. Are rooted in common music industry myths.

2. At first glance seem to be good questions, but are actually based on assumptions that will take them away from their ultimate music career goals.

3. Completely neglect important steps that the person should take to advance their career (such as the ones I discussed in this article about becoming a highly successful professional musician).

To grow your music career fast, you need to understand which questions you are asking that are leading you down the wrong path and replace those questions with much higher quality ones that will help you reach your greatest musical goals in little time.

The following questions are the worst questions you can ask when trying to succeed in the music industry:

Bad Music Career Question #1: Do I Have To Become A ‘Starving Artist’?

A lot of people believe that making a living as a professional musician means one of two things: Either you ‘make it’ and go on to tour the world and sell millions of albums or you ‘become a starving artist’ and have to play at crappy bars and street corners just to get by. This music business myth makes sabotages people’s careers from the start, either by making them believe they need to get full time jobs unrelated to music and ‘try to do music on the side’, or be afraid of trying to enter the music business.

In reality, there exist tons of ways to earn good money in the music business and there is actually a HUGE ‘middle class’ in the music industry. In fact, it’s EASIER to earn good money with a secure job as a professional musician than it is to become successful in other fields of business. However, before you can make this happen, you need to ask a higher quality question. Rather than worry about how you can ‘avoid’ becoming a starving artist, you need to be thinking “How many different ways do I want to earn good money in the music industry?”

As you work in the music business, you are not forced to live from one paycheck to the next like in a normal day job. Instead, it’s always possible to be earning multiple sources of income at the same time. This makes becoming a professional musician a much more stable career choice since you don’t have to be dependent on just ONE source of income. In addition to the obvious ways that musicians seek to make money in music (selling albums/downloads, playing live shows or recording as a session musician), there is one thing you can do right now that will quickly boost your music related income:

Teach music lessons and build a large student base. This will instantly create various sources of income (having many different students) through working only part time hours every week. This will give you the free time to work on building your music career. Learn how to teach guitar so you can begin teaching music for a living right away.

When you build many sources of musical income as discussed above, it’s very possible (and not as hard as you might think) to annually earn more than $100k in your music career (I know this, because I’ve helped many musicians to do it). To learn more, read this article about how to make money in music.

Bad Music Career Question #2: How Do You Get A Record Deal?

To really know why this is not a good questions to ask, answer this: “What’s in it for someone else to give you a record deal?” If you think the main thing you offer to a record company is good music writing skills… think again. This is simply not enough incentive for a music company to want to work with you. People will not invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into your music career just because you’ve written some nice music. Think about it like this: Let’s say you saved up a couple hundred thousand dollars – Would you go spend it all to bet on a horse at the race track OR would you try to find someone to invest it into who can prove to you that they have the ability help you make a big return? Certainly you would make the prudent choice and work with the person who would help you earn more money. This is the same mindset that record label executives have. Therefore, you need to stop worrying about how you can ‘get signed’ and begin making yourself into the best possible investment a record company could take. Hint: This means doing a lot more than just writing music, playing an instrument or having a Facebook music page.

Here are the actions you should be taking to make yourself into a valuable investment for a record company:

1. Understand what music companies are looking for in musicians before they work together with them.

2. Work every day to build your music career. Record companies want to see that you have a good track record before they will begin working with you. The more things you do as an independent musician, the more likely it is that you will gain the interest of a record company.

3. Get music career coaching from an experienced mentor who has already accomplished big things in the music business and helped others get signed to recording contracts.

Once you begin developing your music career on your own, you will make yourself like a beacon of light and record companies will come searching for YOU!

Bad Music Career Question #3: How Can I Get My Music ‘Heard’ By More People?

The majority of musicians want to get their music heard by as many people as possible, believing that this will help them earn money and become successful pro musicians. However, the quantity of people who listen to your music is not very significant in and of itself. What really matters is the amount of people you are able to turn into a highly dedicated fans who will do anything to support you and your music.

So instead of asking yourself “How can I get more people to listen to my music?” you must ask: “How can I develop a following of dedicated FANATICS?” Only after you have asked (and take action on) this question will it become necessary to get a lot more people to hear your music (because it will then be much more likely that you will be able to turn them into committed followers).

To find out more about making money in your music career and gaining more fans, read this article on how to promote a career in music.

Bad Music Career Question #4: What Is The Best Music City To Move To?

Many musicians think they will be much more likely to succeed in the music industry by moving to a ‘music city’. Then with this belief in mind, they pack up their things and move, believing that opportunities will simply ‘fall into their lap’ once they arrive. Once they have been in their new location for a while and nothing has changed, they blame it on the city and look for a new location to move to (while being completely unaware of the TRUE reasons why they aren’t successful).

Where you live has nothing to do with your chances of becoming successful in the music industry. This is especially relevant today as it is easier than ever for someone to get signed to a record contract, release music from a home studio, schedule major world tours or do work as a session musician no matter where they live. Massively successful musicians do not achieve success because they live in a specific city or location. If that were the case, no one living in ‘non-music’ cities would become successful in the music business. No matter where you live, the principles for becoming a successful pro musician apply exactly the same.

Rather than making the massive (wasted) effort of trying to research and find the best music scene, go through the following process that has been PROVEN to work for musicians:

1. Determine your unique goals as a musician (using this article about how to identify musical goals).

2. Get music career coaching and build an effective strategy for reaching your musical goals.

3. Work each day to get closer to achieving your goals until you reach them.

When you focus on what is most important (using the process above), you will achieve success in your music career much faster.

Now that you’ve learned why many common music career questions actually steer your music career down the wrong path, here is what you need to do to get back onto the right path:

Step 1. Break down your musical goals in as much depth as possible. Use the articles and resources mentioned above to gain clarity on how the music business works.

Step 2. Continually ask yourself high quality questions to achieve much greater results in your music career.

Step 3. Don’t try to become a pro musician alone. Get music career coaching from a trainer who will help you build a highly successful career in music.

 

About The Author:

Tom Hess is an online guitar teacher, recording artist and music career coach. As a music career coach, he helps musicians from many countries break into the music industry. On his music instruction websiteyou can find out how to become a pro musician and learn how the music industry works.

by Tom Hess

Are you waiting for the day when you can earn a living as a professional musician by touring, writing music and releasing your records to thousands of fans? Most musicians never make it in the music industry and end up working full time hours at a job they despise. However, you do not have to accept the same fate!

First thing is first: you need to stop feeling sorry for yourself, get up and start taking action to become the professional musician you should be!

Get your music career going on the right track by following the same approach used by Olympic competitors who succeed on the highest platform in the world for their respective sports. If you have been keeping up with the events of the Olympics, you’ve seen how evenly matched the athletes seem to be from event to event. However, there are always winners and losers… no matter how good an athlete is, they will either get a medal or miss the podium altogether. The margin for error in these events is extremely thin – one athlete may miss out on a medal when they only performed ‘slightly’ underneath the level of another athlete (such as losing a race by fractions of a second, or failing to lift a weight for a single rep less).

For the athletes who come away with a medal, they gain massive popularity amongst their fans/countrymen and end up getting tons of opportunities to sign deals for endorsements or make big money in other ways. For the athletes who do NOT get a medal (for example, someone who misses getting 3rd place by 1/100 of a second in the 100 meter dash), they remain unknown to the general population and lose out on all the opportunities of those who place above them. This can cause them to feel a lot of frustration due to the amount of hard work and effort they put into their training only to come up with nothing.

Like these athletes, you have spent many years to work on your music career. You have very specific musical goals you would like to achieve through your efforts. You do not want to have spent all that time working to reach your music career goals only to end up with a career in some industry completely unrelated to music while others accomplish all the things you wanted to do for yourself. To avoid this worst case scenario, you have to take action to make yourself the absolute best musician for success in the industry. This is NOT something that someone will do for you… no one will suddenly knock on your door because they heard you playing music and immediately sign you to a record deal.

You might be thinking: “What do I need to do to set myself apart from everyone else so I can get all the biggest music career opportunities?” The answer is NOT simply becoming a better ‘musician’ than everyone else. Truth is, musicians who are the most talented are not necessarily the ones who get the most opportunities from music companies. Instead, to put yourself on top of the list above everyone else you must develop a total understanding of how to deliver ‘high value’ while eliminating the ‘risks’ you present for others when they work with you.

All musicians (whether they know it or not) bring various levels of ‘risk’ and ‘reward’ to the other people they work with in the music industry. It is absolutely imperative that you learn your own negative risks and positive assets so you can make yourself into the best candidate whenever a music company (or band) is looking for someone to work with. Hint: this kind of stuff goes far beyond just writing or playing good music.

If you don’t already understand what makes working with you ‘risky’ or ‘valuable’, don’t feel so bad. Most musicians never think about these things because there are no resources you can find anywhere that address these topics specifically. There simply isn’t a list of risks and values in the music business that you can just look up online. Why is this? The values and risks that will lead you to becoming a successful musician are specific to your personality, situation and musical goals. You need to look into what your personal value and risk is in any given scenario. This is why I haven’t merely written down a big list of risks and values here in this article.

To understand this better, think about the Olympian athletes I mentioned above. These athletes face extreme levels of competition where the difference between one athlete’s skills and the skills of another is very small. When one athlete is off by even the tiniest degree in his/her training or mental preparation, this person will end up going home without a medal. That’s why the most successful Olympians do not train by themselves. Instead, they work together with a coach who will consistently keep them performing at the highest level possible so that they do not ‘slip up’ when it is time to compete. By working with a coach, the athlete not only is able to compete at a higher level, but is able to quickly correct any fundamental flaws that would keep them from reaching their goals (something that they simply couldn’t do on their own).

The musicians who become the most successful in the music industry all use coaches in this same manner. Just like Olympic athletes, you will struggle to correct all the errors in your thinking and preparation if you try to do everything by yourself. Fact is, there are so many musicians who are just a step away from achieving great success, but are unable to see a key mental error that is keeping them from fulfilling their full potential. Only the musicians who work with coaches or mentors are able to spot any fundamental mistakes they are making in order to rise above the rest. These are the musicians who reach the greatest success in this industry.

Learn more about the benefits of working with a music industry coach by checking out this article on developing a career as a professional musician.

The bottom line is this: when it comes time for you to develop your music career, don’t go down the same path of mediocrity that other musicians take by working alone. Find a coach who when train you to achieve as much success as possible in your music career. Don’t be satisfied with merely ‘competing’ in the music industry – Go for the podium!

Take this assessment about training with a music career success coach to learn how an experienced mentor can help you reach your unique musical goals.

About The Author: 

Tom Hess is a recording artist, composer and a touring musician. Tom also mentors and coaches musicians worldwide to make it in the music industry. Go to his musician development site to get free music industry advice and learn more about the music industry.

Tom Hess is our resident author, for other information including how to become an online guitar tutor go to http://www.internet-guitar-lessons.com/page28.html

 

By Tom Hess

Do you have a lot of questions about how to grow your guitar teaching business? Truth is, you must continue asking questions and learning before you will grow as a guitar teacher. However, you must also ask ‘the right’ questions. If you ask the wrong questions (like most teachers do), you will ‘never’ expand your business and become successful on a large scale.

As someone who has trained many guitar teachers around the globe, I have answered a massive amount of questions on what it takes to build a successful guitar teaching business. There are countless questions that should NEVER be asked, because they are based on false assumptions and myths about becoming a successful guitar teacher. Even if you are able to find an answer to one of these questions, you will still end up going down the wrong path, eventually to fail in your guitar teaching business. Understanding what these specific questions are and why they are so destructive for your guitar teaching career will help you succeed where most guitar teachers fail. The following are 7 destructive ‘common sense’ questions that will cause you to fail in your teaching career:

Question #1: What Is The Best Way To Advertise Guitar Lessons In A Bad Economy?

This question contains the entirely unfounded assumption that you must utilize different marketing whenever attracting students during a slow economy versus attracting students a booming economy. This dangerous misconception could not be more wrong. If you ever receive advice for this question from another guitar teacher, understand immediately that they do NOT run a highly successful business.

Guitar teachers who achieve massive success use the same marketing strategies no matter how well the economy is doing. Rather than asking how you should change your advertising/marketing approach in relation to the economy, you should learn the most effective way to build your guitar teaching business in any economic condition. Then, you must use that approach religiously throughout the year. This is the best and only way to make sure that your business will continue to expand as teachers in your local area lose more and more students when the economy struggles.

Question #2: Where Should I Advertise My Guitar Lessons?

This question will greatly limit your opportunity to develop a guitar teaching business for these reasons:

1. There does not exist any ‘perfect’ place where your advertisements will always be effective in bringing in more business for you. There are tons of ways to effectively market your guitar teaching business and you need to learn them all. This is how you will continually grow your business.

2. When you focus exclusively on a single method of gaining new students, you make your guitar teaching business extremely vulnerable. If you are unable to continually get great results from the single method you chose, your teaching business will crumble very quickly. You MUST diversify your advertising and marketing approaches so that you are not relying on only one all-or-nothing approach at any given time.

Moral of the story: Don’t look for a single, best approach to advertising your guitar lessons. Instead, learn how to develop an effective strategy consisting of ‘many’ approaches in order to expand your business faster in a much safer manner. You will learn a wide assortment of powerful strategies by working with a guitar teaching success trainer.

Question #3: How Do I Attract More Students?

Of course you DO need to attract new students on a consistent basis – however, guitar teachers typically (and falsely) believe that getting more new students is the ‘only’ way for them to grow their income from teaching.

Simply put, gaining additional guitar students is only one of many ways that you can earn money in your business. There are tons of additional ways to earn good money as a guitar teacher (many that you would never expect) and you must learn them all in order to be successful. A lot of these concepts are discussed and explained in this free resource about earn more money teaching guitar.

Question #4: “What Would You Like To Learn Today?” (Many Guitar Teachers Ask This To Their Students)

At first, it may seem logical to ask your guitar students what they would like to learn during each lesson. Fact is, this is an extremely damaging question to ask and it will actually hold your students back from making significant progress. Whenever I help a guitarist choose a teacher to work with, I ALWAYS tell them to avoid teachers who ask them such a question. These are the reasons why:

1. As the guitar teacher, YOU are the one with the expertise. Your guitar students are your ‘students’ for a reason, and it is not their job to decide how they will become better players.

2. Your students cannot differentiate between the things they ‘want’ to learn and the things they ‘need’ to learn. Certainly your students should be allowed to tell you what they ‘want’ to learn, but because they are inexperienced, it is impossible for them to know what they ‘ought’ to be learning to accomplish their goals. Students will do more harm than god by trying to dictate to you how to teach them.

To overcome this, you must put time into learning how to teach guitar in a way that will bring bigger results for your students.

Question #5: What Do I Need To Teach My Students?

Seeking an answer to this question is very destructive for both you and your guitar students. Why? Your students are not taking lessons with you just so you can show them random stuff on guitar. They come to you in order to get a very specific ‘result’ or ‘solution’. You must help them get this by creating a highly personalized strategy for each student.

The majority of guitar teachers make the all-too-common mental error of teaching random guitar playing information/licks/songs to their students because they think this is what they are supposed to do as ‘good teachers’. On the contrary, you must design a specific strategy around your students’ unique goals to truly help them make progress on guitar.

Here is what you should do:

1. Stop focusing on finding new ‘things to teach’ and start looking for ways to help your students accomplish their specific guitar playing goals.

2. Know how to analyze the ‘symptoms’ of problems that your students share with you and identify the core problems that must be solved.

3. Become effective at guiding your students toward their highest musical goals.

For a complete understanding of these things, get a guitar teaching success trainer.

Question #6: What Is The Best Way To Approach Teaching Make Up Lessons?

This is a very common question asked by guitar teachers. Unfortunately, no matter what answer you get to this question, you will end up damaging your guitar teaching business. True experts who have achieved massive success in their guitar teaching businesses will tell you that you should a) never teach make up lessons and b) completely abandon the idea of using a lesson cancellation policy. There are countless reasons why teaching make up lessons will ruin your guitar teaching business. Here are just two:

1. When you teach make up lessons, you are working additional ‘unpaid’ time. This causes you to lose money in two ways: First, you lose an extra spot in your teaching schedule where you could be earning more money with another student. Second, you lose time that you could be working to grow your guitar teaching business and bring in additional students. This effectively limits your growth as a guitar teacher and puts your free time in the hands of students who do not respect your time in the first place.

2. Your students will lose respect for you as a guitar teachers when they feel like they can walk all over you and ‘show up’ to lessons at their own convenience. Even worse, these kinds of students will not feel a need to practice at home or make a lot of improvement. As a result, they will make very slow progress. Eventually, you will end up damaging your reputation as a guitar teacher because word will get around that you have a schedule full of mediocre students who never reach their goals.

So what is the solution? You must require that all of your students pay for every single week of the year regardless of whether or not they decide to show up (with NO make up lessons). This is the same approach used by universities. They have a strict ‘no refunds’ policy that applies to all students whether they come to class or not. This is also the same policy that highly successful guitar teachers use to earn $100,000+ every year.

Question #7: How Much Money Should My Guitar Lessons Cost?

When you ask yourself this question, you immediately set yourself up for failure because you begin thinking with the mindset that you must ‘compete’ with the price of other teachers or charge something that is fair in relation to those in your local area. To make matters worse, basing your rates on the rates of everyone else makes your guitar lessons seem like a commodity. This forces potential students to focus ONLY on the cost of lessons, causing them to view your guitar teaching as ‘the same thing’ offered by any other teacher. This effectively drains all incentive from them to choose you over anyone else in your local community.

Additionally, by asking this question you make the assumption that there is only one way to offer guitar lessons (in 1 on 1 format), which is a completely limiting approach. Fact is, there are plenty of creative guitar teaching models you can use to get far greater results for students while developing a flourishing business and offering many pricing options to your customers. Discover these methods by checking out this free guitar teaching video.

The cost of your lessons should be directly based on the unique value you offer to your guitar students instead of whatever anyone else is charging in your community. Focus on working as hard as you can to increase the value you offer to your students, get big results for them and adjust your prices accordingly.

After reading this article you have learned how even the most ‘common sense’ guitar teaching questions break down because they are based on false assumptions on how to become successful as a guitar teacher. To keep these problems from damaging your guitar teaching business, follow these steps:

1. Use the resources mentioned throughout this article to find out more information on how to become the best guitar teacher in your community.

2. Alter your current style of thinking and start asking yourself high quality questions within the topics of each of the seven questions above. Then take action to implement the advice I gave to you in order to expand your business to new heights.

By doing these things you will put yourself years ahead of any local competition and will achieve great success as a guitar teacher.

 

 

About The Author: Tom Hess is an electric guitar teacher online, recording artist and the guitar player. He trains guitar teachers from around the world on how to build their guitar teaching businesses in his guitar teacher program. Visit his website tomhess.net to receive many free guitar teacher resources, and to read more articles about teaching guitar.

By Tom Hess

Wish you knew why some musicians become massively successful (and how you can too)? Hint: It’s not by simply copying the actions of others in the industry – it’s by developing a success-oriented mindset as the foundation of your actions. Once you have the right ‘mindset’, everything else will fall into place in your music career and you will achieve success.

For the rest of this article I will assume that you have a great understanding of what you want to accomplish in your music career (if you don’t yet, stop reading right now and check out this article about how to plan a music career). To help you understand how you can achieve the greatest success in your music career, I am now going to compare the way ‘unsuccessful’ musicians think versus how ‘successful’ musicians think. By understanding the difference between the two, you will be able to reach your music career goals much faster.

Have Intense, Unbreakable Focus

Highly successful professional musicians make sure that everything they do works in congruence with their major goals. They have an intense focus on their goals and do not spend ‘any’ extra time, money or energy on things that will not help them achieve them. For instance, if your main goal was to release a solo album on your own, you will need to invest your time into writing and recording rather than simultaneously searching for a band or get local gigs.

Musicians who struggle to achieve success believe in the ‘common sense’ advice of ‘don’t put all your eggs in one basket’ when it comes to their music careers. Because of this, they end up spreading themselves too thin and fail to achieve any ‘big’ results in anything they do. Truth is, becoming successful requires being the very best at whatever you do – this only happens once you line up all your thoughts, beliefs and actions to focus toward the achievement of a single goal.

An additional aspect of ‘being congruent’ is staying true to your deepest desires when it comes to your music career. If your true desire is to tour in a big band but you settle for a job as a session musician because it feels ‘safer’, you will have a very hard time lining up all your thoughts, beliefs and actions to focus on that which is not what you truly want.

How can you apply this information into your own music career? The easiest way is to ask yourself the following question: “How do my current actions help me reach and accomplish my greatest music career goals?” If you are unclear about this, you are likely on the wrong road with the actions you are taking and need to learn more about how to reach your goal. On top of that, even if you ‘are’ taking actions that can help you accomplish your ultimate goals, they will often have little effect until you understand how to fully integrate them into an effective music business strategy.

Additionally, some of the actions you take might seem entirely unrelated to your main goals when they are actually completely related to them. For instance, many musicians who want to tour the world in a band refuse teaching music for a living, thinking that this will keep them from achieving their goal. However, the truth is teaching music is the quickest, most stable and flexible way to earn a living as a musician while working on other activities in your music career (such as going on tour – something you could never do working a regular full time job).

To summarize, it is just as ‘crucial’ for you to understand how an action will help you build your music career as it is to actually do it. Test yourself now to see if you are prepared to become a highly successful pro musician survey.

Eliminate “Zero-Sum” Thinking From Your Mental Vocabulary

All highly successful musicians think, believe and act on the following two premises:

#1. It is not ‘wrong’ or unethical for a musician to desire to earn as much money as they can from what they do. Until you agree entirely with this idea, NO music company will want to work together with you to help you build your music career. Why? Because all companies in the music industry exist for one reason and one reason only: ‘to make a lot of money’. Music companies would never invest tons of money into a musician who thinks that money is the root of all evil and has no intention to help the company earn their investment back tenfold. It is for this reason that the industry is called the music ‘business’ and not music ‘donation’. Caution: Even if you think you can fool a music company into working with you while at the same time not wanting to help them earn money, they WILL know. Companies can ‘sense’ this in you way before you even realize it. This is just another strong reason why you must be congruent in your beliefs as I mentioned above.

#2. The world is filled with opportunity and you can achieve unlimited success for yourself and those associated with you by using a win/win mindset and forming mutually beneficial partnerships.

These two mental approaches are fundamental for getting musicians to take the correct actions to achieve their goals and become highly successful.

On the other side of things, unsuccessful musicians think with an opposing mindset to these two approaches. They believe that the amount of money available for everyone is limited and when someone becomes wealthy, it reduces opportunities for everyone else. In addition to these ideas being completely unproven, this style of thinking creates a mindset of ‘scarcity’ that leads musicians to think with in terms of ‘lose-lose’. No one in the music industry will want to work with someone who thinks like this.

This is a huge part of why it is ineffective to copy the tactics of other musicians. In addition to needing a complete, overall ‘strategy’, if you as missing the right belief system to make the foundation of the actions you take, you will never get the results you could in your music career.

Get Rid Of The Entitlement Mentality

Unsuccessful musicians assume that they need to beg people in the music industry for ‘a chance’ to get their big break (by sending off promo packs or demos for example). Whenever this doesn’t work, they complain that there is simply ‘too much competition’ and that making it in the music business is only for those who are privileged.

In contrast, people who go on to build successful music careers do not sit around waiting for someone to give them an opportunity just because they have written music or can play an instrument well. They are fully aware that they must ‘earn’ their success.

To do this, they must:

1. Understand exactly what the music company they intend to work with needs as well as what major goals the company has. Learn more about this by completing this short music career success assessment.

2. Create a well thought out plan for how they will meet the other side’s needs.

3. Make the other side ‘fully aware’ of the fact that working with them will bring great benefit for everyone involved.

4. Follow through completely to generate value for the other side and develop a reputation for being highly loyal, reliable and dependable.

Any musician who follows these four steps will put themselves at the head of the line in front of the other 99.9% of musicians. To learn how you can make your own opportunities and succeed in the music industry.

Be Able To Tell The Difference Between A ‘Strategy’ Versus A ‘Tactic’

Before you can hope to achieve any success with a career in music, you need to determine your medium and long-term goals. For instance, you may want to obtain a recording contract, get accepted into a great band, go on an international tour or gain the freedom to write your own songs without worrying about lacking the money to make ends meet. In order to accomplish these goals, you must develop an effectively organized combination of tactics that work as the glue to hold together an overall strategy.

A ‘tactic’ is an action you take that achieves a specific result in the short-term. Examples of this include: playing a show, trying to get your album reviewed or creating a new website for your band. Any single action you make is a tactic.

On the other hand, a ‘strategy’ generally means combining together many tactics as part of an entire system with the goal of reaching a longer term goal.

To illustrate the difference between the two ideas, think of this analogy: In football, a tactic could be making up a specific play while on offense or defense. A strategy would be understanding how that specific play ties into the big picture when it comes to beating the other team’s weaknesses in order to win. This means understanding how the play relates to the other plays you made before and the ones you will make afterwards to win the game.

Musicians who do not achieve success ‘only’ think with a mindset based around tactics. A lot of these musicians really try to ‘take action’ to move their careers forward, but struggle to make any progress because their actions are not part of an overall strategy. This is exactly why merely copying others does not help you achieve success (you are only copying the tactics without knowing the real strategy they are a part of).

Truth is, most musicians are not good at creating effective strategies to advance their careers (just like me when I first began). Because of this, it is essential to locate a mentor who will help you design a strategy to reach your music career goals.

Only Associate With People Who Will Help You Succeed

Everyone who is successful in the music industry is highly selective of who they invest time, money and energy into. You must also take on this trait if you wish to build a successful music career.

Here is a basic example that demonstrates how you can potential ruin your music career by associating with the wrong people:

In most cases, people who form bands (and desire to make it big someday) rarely consider anything about each band member other than musical skill. No one ever talks about each other’s long term goals, forms a strategy together or discusses a specific business plan for how the band will make money and advance in the industry. No one in these bands offers any real value to a music company, making the likeliness of the band becoming successful close to zero. These types of bands usually do not stay together for more than a couple of months.

Musicians who succeed know that there is much more to consider than musical skill alone. They look to find musicians who have the ‘complete package’ in terms of their mindset (made from the principles discussed in this article). To find out how to locate the right band members, study this free musician’s resource about how to find the best band members.

No matter what you plan on doing in the music industry, you must put together a network of success-minded musicians and business partners who will help you build your career just as you will help them. These people must be more than just ‘great musicians’. The must have all the same pieces of the puzzle as successful musicians.

After training and mentoring many musicians in my Music Careers Mentoring Program, I have truly seen the incredible value of building a network full of success-minded musicians who help each other earn money in their music careers, have joined bands together and toured internationally and constructed business relationships based on the principles of this article.

Now that you know the biggest differences between the mindsets of successful and unsuccessful musicians, you understand why only a handful of musicians ever ‘makes it’ in music. When it comes to developing your music career, your mindset will either be your strongest friend or your toughest enemy and you must learn how to make it work in your favor. After you develop the same mindset as professional musicians, you will achieve one hundred times more in your music career than you would have otherwise.

Complete this mini course on how to succeed in the music business to effectively apply all the concepts in this article into your music career right away.

 

 

About The Author:

Tom Hess is an electric guitar teacher and musician success coach. As a professional music career coach, he works with musicians around the globe to help them learn how to build a career in music. Find out more by checking out this free music career assessment and reading these free music career building articles.

by Tom Hess

Would you like to have the ability to write guitar solos that are highly melodic, expressive, and passionate? If you are like the majority, then you have a hard time making your lead guitar playing sound exactly how you want it to. A great way to solve this problem is to start listening more closely to your favorite singers. Once you can truly incorporate a singer’s vocal style with your current approach to lead guitar playing, you will be able to drastically improve your ability to play great guitar passages. Here is how I totally transformed the way I play:

During the 90′s I was auditioning to play guitar for a band. In the end, I didn’t make it in the band, but I still have a strong memory of that day. As I was packing up my equipment to leave, the last thing I was told was this: “Don’t come back until you can make your guitar sing.” In that moment, I felt bad for not making the band, but to tell the truth, this statement was some of best advice I have ever received in music. Unfortunately, at that time I didn’t truly understand it, and had no clue how to “make my guitar sing.”

As the next few months went by, I became interested in learning all about the singers I listened to. I started to examine the way in which they sang their vocal phrases, the rhythms they used, the techniques they applied, and other subtle distinctions of their styles. Once I began to understand the characteristics specific to a singer’s style, I would learn to play their vocal lines on my guitar. I found that I could identify the specific notes of their phrases without much difficulty, but bringing out the subtle parts of the singer’s style in my guitar playing was a much larger task.

Later on I was exposed to the first albums from the band Rhapsody Of Fire. For me, this was a huge turning point in my guitar phrasing. At the time I was shocked by the awesome vocals of their lead singer, Fabio Lione. From the first moment I heard his voice, I knew I had to study his style as much as possible so that I could use his powerful ability as a tool in my guitar soloing. I spent many hours analyzing the subtle vocal techniques in all of Rhapsody Of Fire’s music.

Here is the most valuable concept I learned:

It didn’t really matter what notes (or words) the singer was singing. What made a certain singer stand out were the subtle nuances of ‘how’ each note was sung.  For instance, why so many fantastic vocalists use different levels of volume in their voice for a certain phrase, why they ornament some notes within a melody in a particular way and why they sing with heavy vibrato at the ends of some phrases. At the moment when I truly began to see these subtleties, I started to make massive progress with my guitar soloing ability.

A lot of you know that I was contacted in 2011 by Rhapsody Of Fire and asked to play guitar in the band. Due to my unique ability to play guitar solos with “singing” guitar phrasing, the band took a great interest in adding my guitar playing style to their music.

What is the main thing you should get from this?

The ability to make your guitar solos have a “singing” style is a highly valuable concept to learn. Understanding how singers think to create their melodies will help you to become much stronger in your own musical expression. Another great part of this is that when you combine the mindset of a guitarist and a singer, you create a totally new method of creating guitar solos. This will set you apart from the other players out there who all use the same ideas.

Try this out. Listen to your most favorite singer and try to really focus on and understand all the subtleties in the way he/she sings. After you’ve done this, write a guitar solo while emphasizing these ideas in your guitar phrasing.

Watch this video to see an example of a solo I quickly wrote using this exact process.

About The Author: Tom Hess is a successful professional guitar player, composer and the guitarist of the band Rhapsody Of Fire. He also trains musicians to reach their guitar playing goals in his rock guitar lessons online. Visit his website, tomhess.net to read more articles about guitar playing, get free guitar tips and guitar playing resources.

By Tom Hess

Would you like to become a successful professional musician who works full time in the music industry? The truth is, starting a career in music and earning a good living doing it is a very attainable goal. However, many musicians make the mistake of trying to build a career into the music business with absolutely no strategy for success. As a result, it takes them much longer to accomplish what they want with music (if they ever do).
If you would like to start a career in music and quickly reach success as a professional musician, it is crucial to find a mentor who has already achieved great things in the music business. By learning about the music industry from a professional who has already done big things, you will be much more likely to succeed in your own music career.
To show you what I mean, think about the world famous basketball star Michael Jordan. Even if you are not a basketball fan, it is likely that you have heard of the incredible success that Jordan achieved throughout his career. Over the span of about two decades, Jordan became known as one of the best athletes ever (in any sport) as he broke countless records, won many championships, and made A LOT of money from his player salary (not to mention through endorsements, shoe sales, and other means). By himself, Jordan was certainly a very talented athlete; however, he did not make it to the top alone. In every moment of his legendary career, Jordan continually received the advice, coaching and training of many mentors both within basketball and outside of basketball. As a result, he was able to take the incredible natural ability he had to play and turn it into something truly unforgettable. In fact, this situation is not exclusive to Michael Jordan, any athlete who has ever achieved incredible success has always maintained connection to a mentor even after winning major titles, awards or medals.
Similar to Michael Jordan or any other highly successful athlete, if your goal is to succeed in your music career, you will be able to achieve much more by finding a mentor who can change you from a talented amateur musician to a successful music professional. In order to find a great mentor for your music career, it is important for you to know what qualities you should be looking for in such a person. Here are the top 3 qualities of a music career mentor who can help you become highly successful:
1. Has the ability to pay attention to the small details of your music career while also helping you to stay on track toward your larger, long term goals.
In order to maintain success throughout your music career, you will need to keep your biggest goals in mind with each action you take. For most musicians, it is easy for them to become distracted in their music careers and lose direction. This often leads them down a long and frustrating path as they seem to be ‘doing things’ in their music career, but in fact are not working toward what it is that they truly want to achieve. Additionally, the majority of musicians do not understand how to pursue their music career goals in a highly focused manner by using an effective strategy. These musicians generally see limited to no success and as a result are forced to work outside of the music business.
When looking for your mentor, you must make sure that this person understands how to build highly effective strategies to help you achieve your music career goals as quickly as possible. With that in mind, it is possible that even with the right strategy in place, you may still become distracted, confused or uncertain throughout the course of your music career. A good mentor will instantly notice subtle signs that you are going down the wrong path, and will quickly step in to help you find your way again.
If you have not determined specific goals for your music career yet, it is important that you do so right away. Take this music career test to get a find out specifically what you want to get out of your music career.
2. Is already highly successful in the music business, and is able to help you solve any problems that get in the way of your music career goals.
Starting a career in music is often a very frustrating experience for most musicians. Although there is a great deal of information about the music business online; most of it is intended for use by the general music community. As a result, you may have specific questions for your own challenges in your music career, but no specific answers to help you deal with them. On top of that, the music industry information you find online does not help you understand the difference between ‘useful’ information, and information that either no longer applies to most musicians or does not apply for you in your own music career. This is why it is absolutely essential that you find a mentor who understands the inner workings of the music industry and has already built a successful career by figuring these things out.
When you have access to personalized advice from someone like this, you will quickly be able to solve any issues that arise in your music career. This will give you the ability to approach a career in music with a clear understanding of exactly what needs to get done in order to reach your personal goals.
3. Has previously helped other musicians become highly successful in the music industry (and can show you the proof!)
The music industry is unique from many other industries because becoming successful with a career in music does not require attending university programs, receiving a degree or taking any kind of special tests. That said, it is much easier for amateur musicians to ‘talk big’ when it comes to their music careers. Sometimes you will come across people in the music industry who claim to be highly successful, when in fact they are not. As you begin looking for a music career mentor, it is very crucial that you avoid the advice of these types of musicians and find someone who can really back up their claims of success in the music business.
In order to find a mentor who truly knows how to help you succeed in your music career, look first at the success of the musicians he is training/has trained in the past. If this person is truly a great mentor, he will not need to tell you so. Instead, it will be obvious due to the overwhelming amount of positive feedback given by the current and former musicians who have worked with him. Once a great mentor has helped many musicians achieve their musical goals, they naturally will feel a need to voice their approval. This can be observed commonly in the form of testimonials on your mentor’s website or in other areas online.
As someone who has personally trained many people to become successful professional musicians, I cannot stress enough the importance of finding a mentor as you pursue a career in music. Fact is, I would not be where I am today in the music business if it weren’t for the help of my current and former mentors. Don’t make the mistake of trying to figure everything out on your own in the music business. This is the same thing that so many musicians do, and this is why most musicians DO NOT make it with successful music careers. Regardless of your current experience in the music industry, I encourage you to seek out your own music career mentor as soon as possible so you can quickly begin reaching your full potential for success in your music career.
Find out how you can become a successful pro musician in the music business by reading the information on this musician mentoring page.
Do you still have uncertainty about working with a mentor? Learn about your strong and weak areas as a musician in the music business by taking a free assessment and seeing if a music success mentor can help you get where you want to go.
About The Author:
Tom Hess is an electric guitar teacher online and a music career mentor. He plays guitar and tours with the band Rhapsody Of Fire. Tom also trains musicians on how to succeed in the music business. On his professional musician website tomhess.net you can read many more articles about making a living with a music career.