You do have a prac­tice plan, right?

It’s one of the most impor­tant tools for any musician.

But what do you put on your prac­tice plan?

List all the impor­tant basics, all the cool play­ing tech­niques, all the styles you’d like to get into, all the tunes to mas­ter — put every­thing on your plan and you end up with a gar­gan­tuan prac­tice sched­ule that’s totally imprac­ti­cal and even counterproductive.

Why?

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In 1991 I bought “The Advancing Guitarist” by Mick Goodrick. I pur­chased lots of instruc­tional books at that time. Matter of fact, I was obsessed with instruc­tional mate­r­ial. VHS tapes, books, music mag­a­zines... any­thing to help me get to grips with the mys­ter­ies of music.

The book puz­zled me.

What do I mean?

All of my other instruc­tional books pre­sented some sort of solu­tion. They pro­vided a method, a cer­tain way of doing things. Do this exer­cise and you’ll become the fastest gui­tarist in the known uni­verse. Learn this chord voic­ing and Miles Davis will call you to join his band. Read the rest of this entry

 

Image by TW Collins via Flickr

 

Am I rich?

Yes, of course.

Before you get the wrong idea of 100+ feet yachts, lux­ury cars, pri­vate jets, Caribbean island vaca­tions, Crystal for gar­gling, white pow­der to coat the inside of my nose with, etc... — that’s not what I meant.

I’m talk­ing about the intan­gi­ble riches, the joy and sat­is­fac­tion of doing some­thing you love and are pas­sion­ate about.

Personally, I feel really for­tu­nate to be able to make a liv­ing with music. No soul-sucking cubi­cle job for me.

Contrary to the cliché of the starv­ing musi­cian, there’s actu­ally a wealth of options avail­able for gen­er­at­ing the cov­eted pieces of paper with the dead pres­i­dents on it.

Just to give you an idea — here’s how I’ve made money with music in the past: Read the rest of this entry

Image by EssjayNZ via Flickr

As a pro­duc­ing musi­cian you sim­ply just can’t have enough sounds, right? And why shouldn’t you? Your girlfriend’s closet is spilling over with clothes, shoes and hand­bags, so it’s only fair that your hard drive is filled with sounds.

To each his/her fetish.

This sum­mer I upgraded my home stu­dio. I took advan­tage of an EWQL 2 for 1 deal and got me Symphonic Orchestra Gold and Goliath. I drooled in antic­i­pa­tion while I was wait­ing for the last DVD to finally give me the “Installation com­plete” message.

Goliath alone has over 40 Gigs. That’s quite a sound library. 600+ patches of new sounds to explore.

The Problem with Having Too Many Sounds...

Here’s the danger...

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