When you put most your energy into developing your natural talents, extraordinary growth is possible.

There is no way I could become the next Michael Jordan.  For one thing, I am only 6 feet.  Right there my genetics have made it extremely hard for me to make it into the NBA.  That coupled with the fact that I am a white boy who can’t jump and the fact that so many others have much more raw basketball talent than I really slims my chances of being an All Star down to almost zero.

Your efforts are much more effectively spent leveraging your own talents.  You don’t have to learn country guitar if you are a heavy metal shredder.  You do not need to master acoustic folk songwriting if you are a funk machine.  Of course it doesn’t hurt to be exposed to new things and styles.  After all, you may discover a hidden talent or passion within yourself.  But if you know you aren’t something, then don’t waster your time trying to be whatever that is!

There is a great formula in the opening chapters of Tom Rath’s Strengths Finder 2.0:

Talent X Investment = Strength

Talent: A Natural way of thinking, feeling, or behaving

Investment: The time spent practicing, developing your skills, and building your knowledge base.

Strength: The ability to consistently provide near-perfect performance.

Building your talents into strengths requires practive and hard work.  If you are born with the ability to build large biceps, but you do not exercise these muscles regularly, they will not develop.  Much like mastering the guitar.  You may have an uncanny talent for music and guitar, but if you don’t practice and strive to improve, you will never maximize your guitar potential.

So what are your talents?  What are you passionate about?   Are you sure you aren’t trying to be something that you are not?

Many traditional guitarists and tone purists will say, “All you need is a guitar and an amp,”  which is true in some cases, but I feel that that could be quite limiting.

If you were an artist, would you rather have only red and blue paint?  Or would you rather have a wide assortment of shades and colors?

Well it definitely depends on what your style is and what you are trying to put out into the world, but I am loving how Oz treats each effect as another sonic shade to paint his musical canvas.   Check it out:

• *Austin, TX
• *Purchase, NY
• *McLean, VA
• *Chicago, IL
• *Los Angeles, CA

The National Guitar Workshop is dedicated to bringing the most comprehensive music education program to guitarists, bassists, keyboardists, drummers and vocalists across the country. Students of all ages immerse themselves in week-long programs tailored to their personal musical interests. They truly offer a supportive learning environment and a world-class curriculum.

David Smolover, wanting to create an educational and collaborative atmosphere for students and teachers alike, founded the National Guitar Summer Workshop in 1983. Within this environment, participants would live, learn, and practice with each other. In the words of one student that year,

“It’s like a dream come true to think, eat and sleep guitar for a whole week.”

During the day, they would take courses in a variety of musical styles, and they would attend master guitar workshops at night. This first summer, many noted musicians including Al DiMeola, Rory Block, George Gritzpah, Arlen Roth, Eric Schoenberg, Dennis Koster and Larry Coryell taught the master classes. The first faculty consisted of folk, rock, jazz, classical, bluegrass and bass guitar experts, many of whom were New York City studio musicians and college professors. The first summer took place at the South Kent School, located in South Kent, Connecticut, and consisted of four one-week sessions.

“It was a nice feeling to be involved with a new and innovative program. There was nothing like the NGW at the time and it was exciting to help to get the program off the ground and established.” –Lou Manzi, founding and current faculty member.

The NGW experience is like a year’s worth of material compiled into one week. Like most workshops, the benefits of NGW don’t completely take form until the participants have gone home. “It would be impossible for someone to learn and use everything they hear at the Workshop in a week or two,” said owner David Smolover. “They should be able to just absorb everything, and then take it back with them and begin to work it all out.”

As part of the NGW experience, students have the opportunity to perform in front of a live audience, jam with other musicians, and study with world-famous artists in an accessible and relaxed manner. The NGW provides a positive, supportive and non-competitive learning environment through hands-on teaching and teamwork.

Sign up today at http://www.guitarworkshop.com!

“Simplicity is the final achievement.  After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.”

-Frederic Chopin

Is the old saying “Quantity does not equal Quality“  really true?   Or is it just a myth that those who have achieved success would rather have you believe so that their unique genius is looked upon as the reason for their achievements?

Keep reading to find out why the old saying flat out sucks balls…..

After all, if everyone only knew that all it took was learning + quantity to equal quality, then the world would be filled with successful artists, athletes and business people.

Here is an excerpt from Derek Sivers’ blog which is an excerpt from the book, Art and Fear

The ceramics teacher announced he was dividing his class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right graded solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would weigh the work of the “quantity” group: 50 pounds of pots rated an A, 40 pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an A.

Well, come grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity!

It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

The key to this approach is learning from your mistakes and successes.  As long as your are constantly learning, tweaking, and optimizing your approach, you are getting better.  The quality of your work will thus improve more so than by just contemplating and predicting.  Action, and lots of action, plus learning will lead you to more success than you probably thought possible.

Chopin realized that the more and more notes you play, the faster you learn which combinations and progressions sound best.  By practicing and playing as much as possible, you are then able to simplify your approach to the ones that are most effective to getting your music across.  But in order to know which ones work, you have to discover which ones don’t and why.

So this weekend or at your next performance,  take notice to which songs people respond to the most.  Take notice to which guitar solos really reach out and connect with your audience.  Discover why it is exactly that a certain song on the radio makes you tear up.

Get out there and experiment. A lot.  Learn.  Understand.  Simplify.

Want to learn how real professional guitar players have used this approach? Check out our interview series with guitar playing professionals who are making their living with the guitar. Studio Guitar Secrets: Making Guitar Your Career

Do you want to be a professional musician, but don’t know where and how to start? Do you really want a successful career in music, but your fear of failure is holding you back? Are you unsure about what to do if your plan doesn’t work?

Most aspiring musicians receive a lot of advice from friends and family about the best approach to take with building their music career. Among the many things suggested, is the idea of having a backup plan. Many people give advice about “the need to have something to fall back on in case the music career doesn’t work out” or “a Plan B”. Typically, musicians are encouraged to go to school and get a degree in something they can easily find a job in, and do music on the side, in their “free time”.

If/when you reach the point where your music career begins to develop, you are probably advised to work less in your day job and focus more on the music until you can leave the day job and make the music career work for you. This advice sounds good in theory, but in reality fails to work as intended in almost every case. Why? Usually the job that most musicians get to support themselves until their music career kicks off, has nothing to do with music in general, or their music career specifically. As a result, most end up in a very frustrating situation that makes it virtually impossible to achieve any kind of lasting success as a professional musician.

Keep reading to see the 4 reasons the backup plan is usually doomed to fail….

4 Reasons why this kind of “backup plan” is usually doomed to fail

Reason #1: Not having an effective exit strategy

The idea of slowly phasing out your day job while building your music career is good, but in order to work, it needs to be done in the right way. Most musicians have nothing planned or prepared that will allow them to gradually decrease the time spent at their day job and focus more on music. When choosing a “backup plan”, musicians typically find a job that is the most “safe and secure” and the one that pays the most money. However, most people fail to plan the “exit strategy” and think ahead to the time when their music career situation will allow you to focus less of your time on the day job. When they finally reach that point, they realize that they are trapped in their day job and are unable to “gradually” phase it out. They are faced with the choice of either quitting the job entirely, or sticking to it until retirement (more on this shortly).

The best exit plan is to have a job that will allow you to gradually decrease the number of hours you spend on it: from 40 hours per week to 30, from 30 hours to 20, from 20 to 10, until eventually you can quit the job altogether! So you must take care to select an occupation that allows a lot of flexibility in work schedule. That means you need to be careful to select an occupation that allows a lot of flexibility in work schedule. This way, when the time is right, you can make a “gradual” transition into a full time music career. Unfortunately, most traditional occupations (such as being an accountant, computer programmer, office manager etc…) do not allow this flexibility. Remember, your boss at work will not all of a sudden allow you to “work 3-4 days per week instead of 5”, simply because you want to work on your new CD an extra few days per week. It is possible to begin by working in a non-music related job at first, BUT do not select “any” job offer without considering the exit strategy first.

An ideal job for an aspiring professional musician is teaching guitar. Not only can you make very good money doing it, but you are in complete control over how many hours you choose to work. Not everyone may desire to teach full time for the rest of their life (and this is fine). But as long as you are going to be working anyway, why not do something that is already related to what you enjoy, help students reach their goals faster and make money in the process? In addition, teaching is already a “music related” activity that is probably much more fun to do than sitting in an office!

Another possibility is to work as an independent contractor in sales or marketing or doing consulting work for hire. Always check about the flexibility of work schedule before accepting a job offer. Remember that in most industries, the 40-60 hour work week is the norm, with little or no possibility for part time employment. This makes it impossible to make a smooth transition to a full time music career.

Reason #2: There is too much risk involved

Slowly phasing out your day job seems to be a very ‘safe and secure’ approach, but it can actually backfire and “trap” you by its sense of security. If you are making $60,000 per year at your day job, and have managed (through working nights and weekends) to build up your music related income to $25,000 per year, then, all together, you have a total income of $85,000 for the year. Here is where the reality catches up to you. Should you decide to go full time into music, you will invariably need to quit your day job completely at some point. Until you can recover and build your music career to higher and higher levels, you will be making $60,000 less per year than before! This kind of risk is uncomfortable to think about for most people (especially those who get married, have kids and/or have significant expenses), and keeps them trapped at their day jobs their whole lives.

Reason #3: You are often not able to take advantage of opportunities.

What if you put extraordinary effort on nights and weekends into recording a great sounding CD with your band, spend a lot of time promoting it in hopes of getting signed by a record company and go on tour, and then you really get the opportunity to do a 10 week tour in another country in the world. It is VERY probable that you would NOT get paid a lot of money while on a first tour, but as a whole, this kind of tour is exactly the kind of breakthrough you have been searching for. What are you going to do? Are you going to turn down a huge opportunity to advance your music career? Or are you going to agree to take a huge cut in pay by quitting your day job to do the tour? I think you can agree that neither of these options sounds entirely appealing. Wouldn’t it be great to do the tour and not worry about how you are going to feed yourself (and your family) while you are gone?

Reason #4: There is not much quality time and energy to get anything done.

This may seem like a more subtle issue, but it is actually very important. If your most productive hours in the day are spent on the least productive activities, then reaching your goals will take MUCH longer than it needs to. Think about it: if you wake up at 6:00, get to work by 8:00 or 9:00 and spend 8-10 hours there, and another 1-2 hours commuting back home, by the time you are ready to begin working on your music career, you are already tired! This is also not taking into account the time taken up by other things in life that you have to tend to. It will take a truly extraordinary effort to get anything worthwhile accomplished during the time on nights and weekends, to build multiple streams of music related income that will enable you to quit your non-music related job without putting yourself and your family in financial struggle.

Now that you see why this kind of backup plan isn’t as good as it seems to be, you may ask yourself what you should do instead.

What is the solution?

Well, having no backup plan is definitely NOT the solution. In order to build a successful music career, you need to be prepared and you cannot simply hope that “things will work out”. The underlying problem with the conventional backup plan I described is that it originates from thinking about how not “to lose”. This type of thinking lacks real ambition and it forces you to stick to that which is the most familiar and so called “safe and secure”. As a result, you typically end up with what you wish for: a familiar, average, safe and secure life. However, this attitude rarely leads to significant achievements, breakthroughs and victories in the music industry.

What the most successful musicians do is arrange their backup plan or Plan B around their MUSIC CAREER GOALS (Plan A). This requires real ambition and courage, and it is based on thinking about how “to win”. This also requires you to think how you can integrate Plan B with your present and future life as a professional musician.

There are many possibilities for truly effective “back up” (which are more like “support”) plans. In many cases, they involve designing systems and multiple income streams coming from music business sources that will support them continuously.

It’s important to put a lot of thought into which kinds of “backup plans” and approaches are best suited to your specific goals. To find the right plan for you, there are two important things you need to do:

First, study how the music business works (this is key!). Understanding it will greatly help you with designing the most effective strategy for reaching your goals in the fastest period of time. Building a successful, long term career takes a lot of focused effort and dedication. The more you understand about the music business, the easier it will be to design the kind of backup plan that will help you reach your goals instead of restricting and trapping you.

Second, be careful about taking advice from people who may have great intentions, but lack knowledge and experience about how the music industry works. Very often, our friends and family, with the very best intentions at heart, attempt to give us advice on what to do to “make it”. However, if you pay attention, you will notice that this advice has a common theme, which is “here is what you must do in order not to lose”. Very rarely do you get advice about how “to win”! This mentality (as described above) keeps you away from taking steps that will propel your dreams forward.

To make matters worse, although your friends and family may have the best intentions in their heart, most of the time, they simply aren’t qualified to give advice about the music business. It will be similar to you asking your brother who is a plumber (for example) about how to cure a disease, or asking your uncle who is a carpenter (for example) about how to solve a legal problem. It doesn’t matter that these people have your best interest at heart. If they don’t know what they are talking about (in a particular subject), they are not likely to give helpful advice.

If you truly want advice that works and if you want to learn the strategies of how to reach all of your music career goals, you need to find a mentor who you can rely on for effective advice. This means learning from someone who has already done what you want to do, and ideally someone who has trained many others to do the same.
The most effective, predictable and safe strategies to “phasing in” your music career

Now that you know about the problems with the conventional approaches to backup plans, I will show you the characteristics of a good backup plan (Plan B).

1. Flexibility

Your plan must be flexible. This can mean many things. One of them is having the ability to “gradually” decrease the amount of time you spend working on Plan B and increase the time you invest into Plan A! This can also mean the ability to integrate (leverage) the skills acquired (or the results earned) from Plan B into Plan A.

2. Passivity

Your plan should be mostly passive: it will really help if your Plan B mostly consists of passive income streams that you have created by only investing the work once! It should be pretty obvious to see how this will free up a lot of time to dedicate to your Plan A! (your music career)

3. Diversity

The plan should be diversified: do not become so dependent on only one stream of income! Many people argue that a music career is not secure, when nothing could be further from the truth. Which do you think is more likely, that a company lays off an employee in the blink of an eye (cutting off his one and only source of income, the paycheck), or that a music teacher with 40 students (who essentially has at least 40 “diversified” income streams) will suddenly lose all of his clients overnight?

By making your Plan B options diversified, you also build your own financial security, without depending on anyone else. I don’t know about you, but I feel much safer knowing that I am in control of my own future, rather than putting my faith into someone else’s idea of security.

4. Congruency and Relevance

This means that Plan B needs to make your primary goal (music career) MORE likely to occur! This also means (ideally), that the time you invest into developing skills and experience in Plan B can be easily used to enhance Plan A. For example, if you are known as an excellent guitar teacher, you can easily integrate teaching clinics and workshops with performances of your music, selling your future music CDs, other merchandise etc…etc…

I hope that you can see now how this strategy is vastly different (and superior) to the conventional wisdom of getting a day job, and then doing your best on evenings and weekends to launch a music career from scratch.

As you design your own path to a successful music career, compare the steps you are taking against the criteria above and modify your strategy if necessary. This will help save you from the frustration felt by most of the ‘wannabe’ musicians, who realize (much too late) that their strategy leaves them no way to manifest their dreams.

If you want to become a professional musician, I encourage you to test the effectiveness of your music career back up plan.

Resource Box:

Learn more about how to build a Music Career. Visit www.tomhess.net to get 15 free music career tips. Tom Hess is a professional touring guitarist and recording artist. He teaches, trains and mentors musicians from around the world.

Don’t be shy now!  Who knows, you could be picked to be in their Top 10!

Our very own Eric Brewer made the Top 10 last year and really rocked the place out!  Check out his performance:

Eric Brewer Guitar Superstar Performance

“To be normal is the ideal aim of the unsuccessful.”

-Carl Jung

"Damn, I love me some guitar!"

Taking guitar lessons, learning licks from friends, and imitating the greats is something that we definitely advocate.  But be sure that the reasons you are playing guitar or music are not just to fit into the collective aims of what people think guitar players should do or be.

Don’t be afraid to disagree with your teachers and colleagues.  Try new things.  Approach things differently.  Be weird.  Be crazy.  Be yourself.

Just don’t be normal.

PS.  Here is a great blog, Lateral Action, that you should be reading to expand your creativity. Check it out.  They do a great job over there.