What is a musician? What are the necessary components to navigate the modern music industry? What tools do they need? What education? What quality? This blog will look in depth at this topic.
Ok, enough with the intro. Let’s get into it.
I’ll try to go first with the most obvious. A musician is someone who plays music, someone who has some kind of knowledge about an instrument, whether it’d be a piano, or a clarinet, a bag pipe or a drum set, it doesn’t matter.
That is usually the first drive for all these young aspiring professionals: they go to school with a guitar or a microphone under their arm, ready to learn and eat the world.
So, as it is, being a musician will establish some rules right off the bat: you will be learning, studying, spending long hours shaping your body and mind to understand this delicate craft. You will have to do your scale, have some grasp over harmony, form, history as well as developing speed, comfort, nimbleness on your bass or your saxophone. Those 10,000 hours will have to be done if you wish to go on a professional stage again and again and make a living as a playing musician.
I went to the conservatory in France. It was not interesting at all. I didn’t learn anything in drumming, but it made me understand the discipline necessary to become a player. That much they were able to assert. Then I crossed the ocean to come see the good people of America. My plane landed at Berklee College of Music. The passengers, musical instrument suitcases in hand left the plane and I was shown what studying the drum set looked like. It was a kick in the gut compared to what I had known. I was in heaven knowing that my instrument was taken seriously, and in hell because those instructors in France had forgotten to give me an education in drum set playing and I will have to work my butt off to catch up to the crowd at Berklee.
Still, I was ready to put my nose to the ground and do it. I started piling up the hours. 10, to 12 hours per day on my horse. Badabim-badaboom! No rest for this guy until he has learnt the basic of drumming.