Before I do, please let me address some of the comments that I have received by email. Some people are very concerned and think there must be something wrong with me or in my life. Some have brought up the death of Becky last summer.

This decision was made over a year ago, long before Becky and her children died. I will not deny that their deaths hit us hard. It was devastating. But it did not cause me to spiral out of control and out of music as some have suggested.

I really am fine guys. I am telling you the truth about all of this. I know it is unusual to take this step but there is nothing significant behind the scenes you don’t know about.

I have a lot of emails to answer and I will answer them all. It will just take some time but I will get back to you. Thank you for your encouragement and good thoughts.

OK, on to the post.

Highs and lows

When I think about all the big moments during the past dozen years, here are the three that stand out the most:

• My first orchestra studio session recording Reflections on a Journey. I will never forget the moment they started playing. You have to understand that I was just a lowly piano minor in college and never thought I would have the opportunity to play with an orchestra, much less possibly the best studio orchestra in the world. That was a huge deal to me.
• A concert series in Scotland probably eight years ago. I remember the thousands of passionate music lovers who were lovely people in a lovely part of the world.
• The Looking Up TV concert I did at Gwinnett Performing Arts around 2012. It was my biggest budget show by far and incredibly complex to pull off.

The lows outnumbered the highs of course. Not everything in professional music is big and flashy. There were lots of late flights and travel disruptions and technical problems. There were mistakes, sometimes glaring ones. There were poorly attended concerts and money issues. Sometimes it was flat out hard to almost not fall asleep during a concert. As an aside, I remember a time in New Hampshire where I thought I took a Tylenol before a concert but actually took a Tylenol PM by mistake.

If you go into music, prepare to work and understand that most of the work will be mundane. Getting a album out requires hundreds of hours of work that no one ever sees. There is a ton of work that happens before you get on a concert stage.

In the end, if you do your best, it is worth it. But it is hard. Very hard.

Favorite things

My favorite pieces I have recorded in order (all available on YouTube)

• Soul Rest
• MasterBuilder
• HolyPlace
• His Eye is on the Sparrow
• It Is Well
• No More Night

My favorite albums

• Reflections on a Journey
• Looking Up
• Portraits of Hope
• Lovenotes
• Quiet Place

My favorite industry/studio people

• Pam Sixfin (the lovely first chair violinist of the Nashville String Machine that worked on all my orchestra projects)
• Andy Leftwich (multiple Grammy winner and fiddler on a few of my projects)
• Bob Clark (my big orchestra engineer)
• Steve Mauldin (my orchestrator and conductor)
• Jason Prisk (who produced and worked on all my early albums)

There is a strange thing about the studio. You can do huge pieces with an orchestra and they give you goosebumps. But one thing you find out is that even better goosebumps come from the unplanned, simple improvisations like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOo7o6qTZpY

I smile when I watch this video. It was during a long, long day and I looked like death warmed over. But these are the moments I will always remember.

Recordings I did that I hate

• Timeless Reflections (ALL of it)
• Most of Seasonal Spice
• “Heaven Came Down” and “Tis So Sweet” on Portraits of Hope

Most successful things

Most successful albums (this might not be fair since the oldest albums have had more time to sell)

• Reflections on a Journey
• Quiet Place
• Portraits of Hope
• Timeless Reflections 

Most successful songs (downloads/streaming)

• It Is Well (millions of plays across Pandora and YouTube)
• Jesus Paid It All (my top played song on Pandora with mucho million spins even though I almost cut it from the album it was supposed to be on)
• His Eye is on the Sparrow (my closing concert song for years)
• No More Night

Other successful endeavors

• The Looking Up show in 2012 which was high budget but paid for itself quickly.
• My instructional courses which sold (and still sell) better than I would have ever imagined.
• My hymn arrangement of the month club.

Things that bombed

• Live in Charleston which got lots of TV play but I will never move all the DVDs I have in the warehouse in a million years. Does anyone even have a DVD player any more?
• My attempts at an online music school which worked me to death and never gained any traction.
• A million other ideas that I have gratefully forgotten for the most part.

Thoughts on my work

My music consisted of several prongs: recording, performing, education, writing and this blog. When I step back and look at the big picture, here is how I would rate the five in significance:

• Blog
• Education
• Recording
• Writing/arranging
• Performing

The blog is most significant to me because it has delved into issues outside music. In some respects, I think music was a tool to give me a voice to say other things that I feel even more strongly about.

I consider education more important than the other areas because I always wanted to equip church musicians in particular to be able to improvise and arrange for themselves. In fact, I never published any arrangements at all until the last few years because I thought it might distract pianists away from the education.

Performing tends to be the flashiest of the five but I have it rated last because in the end of the day, it has the least impact. I think the biggest impact performing has is in inspiring other musicians but that kind of impact can be short-lived.

What I regret

I never expected the blog to have the significance it did. I am still in awe at how many people have read it in spite of the fact that I think my blog is where I have messed up the most. Too often, the blog became a source of regrets. Let me give you a list:

• I regret that I ever delved into the church music war issue. What a waste of time that is. It reminds me of the musicians playing “Nearer My God To Thee” on the Titanic as it was sinking. The church is sinking over big issues and yet people are actually still bickering over music styles. I can’t imagine why I ever thought it would be helpful to jump into that.
• I regret that I ever took personal issues public on my blog. No I did not do it much but there were some times where I acted incredibly foolishly. One time many years ago, I took public offense with a celebrity chef whose restaurant treated my family poorly. Because it was public, he fixed it publicly in a very gracious way. I felt like a bully. I was a bully.
• I regret that I let fear keep me from publishing things that I wanted to publish. I started a lot of draft articles that never got published. They tended to be about life things and I would have lost subscribers over them. I should have published many of them anyway.

Besides my blog, what do I regret about music?

• I regret not studying music in my twenties.
• I regret times where I was unkind or too demanding.

What I don’t regret

The truth is that in regards to my music itself, I have few if any regrets. I did the projects I wanted to do in the way I wanted to do them. However, as I write this, I feel sorrow because I have lost friends (or at least acquaintances) over the years because of my music. Remember that I come from a very conservative background and not everyone has liked what I have done. I heard a few years ago about some former friends who left one of my concerts and went home and unfriended me on Facebook because my music was too wild (it was indeed wild that particular night). In some respects, I regret that, but on the other hand, I would not change any of my musical choices.

One thing that makes me happy

There are a lot of things about my music career that make my happy. However, one thing that makes me very happy as I leave music is that the last three big songs I released (MasterBuilder, Soul Rest, and HolyPlace) are my favorite things I ever recorded. I can honestly say I did my best, and when I left the industry, I was on the top of my game. For me, I think those pieces represent the best I can do (at least at my current skill/knowledge level).

Now let me give you some closing thoughts.

For musicians (and all artists): beware of the money thing

I have said this over and over here and let me say it one more time. If you do music professionally, try to make money as small of a part of the equation as possible. If you can earn a living another way and do music as a parallel career, that is a great thing. If you need the money you earn from music, it will affect your decision making in a negative way. It will enslave you in some ways to key people you want to impress. It will hold you back in your music.

He who has the money has the control. Resist anyone trying to control you (many will try). Listen to a lot of people’s advice but don’t let any of them control your music.

None of them…

Here is another reason to keep money out of the equation. If you don’t need the money, you can afford to be ultra generous and generosity has a way of paying you back. When a musician comes to me and asks me for advice about professional music, I always say the same thing: be generous. It worked when I started and still works today.

And one final thought for everyone: it is harder to be good than it is to be great

Everyone wants to be great. I get that. In fact, every time you hear me use the word “significance” in these farewell posts, you are hearing someone tip his hand that he wants to be great.

Here is something I have learned over time though. The world does not need us to be great; it just needs us to be good.

It needs us to be honest…

It needs us to be involved parents…

It needs us to be solid employees…

It needs us to be kind and respectful…

It needs us to be openminded and balanced…

It needs us to be true, involved friends…

It needs us to be generous…

It needs us to fight tenaciously for the disadvantaged and abused…

Guys, with a few breaks, anyone can get labelled “great” but it is much harder to be good. It is not empty hat “great” politicians in Washington DC that are the bedrock of society; it is rather the people you have not heard of that are good. To be good is neither the byproduct nor the cause of a successful life. It IS a successful life, even if few ever hear of you.

Go evangelize the world but make sure you are good before you do. Go make your mark in business but only if you are good. Go out and be great but not at the expense of being good.

I mentioned in the first post that it is hard to trade a level of notoriety for obscurity but for a while at least, I am going to concentrate on the very hard job of just being good in my small obscure way.

I hope you will join me.

So why am I leaving professional music? The first and overriding reason is just that my desires have changed. I got tired of doing concerts about four years ago and then got to the point where I was dreading studio work. I have told you guys over and over here on the blog that you need to find a way to do the work that you love. You get one shot at life and in my opinion, you spend entirely too much time working to not enjoy it.

Furthermore, as a Christian, your desires are a primary way God directs you. God does not direct anyone by talking to them. Nor (contrary to how it is often presented) does he direct by asking you to interpret a complex puzzle of coincidences in your life like a fortune teller reads tarot cards. If you are doing your part to follow God, it is a safe bet to pay attention to your desires for an indication of what you should be doing. That is an easy application of Psalm 37:4.

As you guys know, I have had three careers already. I started in software development, then moved to internet retail and finally music. I guess I am just the kind of person that needs that. I always sort of knew that I would eventually want to do something else after music. It is just the way I am wired. My desires change.

The second reason I decided to leave music is that I felt boxed in with no way forward. I have in some respects painted myself into a corner. I could discuss this in detail but let me just put it this way: I felt I had pretty much explored the available repertoire as much was possible without either repeating myself too much or getting so creative that it would drive away my audience. (Here is an example of me getting too creative for my audience.) Professional music is not a very safe place for innovation I am afraid. I knew that if I pushed things in directions I really wanted to go, I would essentially end up starting over.

As an aside, I mentioned in the last post that back in 2017, I was starting to no longer believe in what I was doing. The reason I say that is because I sort of knew I was in a rinse/repeat cycle where I was not offering anything really new. I was also looking at the fact that there are numerous arrangers (many of them pretty good) covering the same 150 hymns over and over and wondering what I was bringing to the table that was really different or significant.

The third reason I am leaving music is simply because I want to free up my time for things that are more important to me. I am a busy person by design but I am doing a lot of things right now to free up time for family during these last few years the kids will be here. I want more time to spend in the basement on weekends playing Madden with my sons. I want to be more available in the evenings. I want to travel with the family; this summer, we are going to live in New England. I can’t wait to show the kids all of the things I love about that part of the world. One of the highlights of my life was the family trip we took to Europe last summer. Those are the kinds of things I want to do.

I appreciate so much all of you that have sent me emails over the weekend, even the “Judgmental Judys” that have not been kind. I will tell you that the notes that mean the most to me are the ones that don’t talk about music at all. They are the notes about the other topics I wrote about on my blog: the life advice, the abuse series, and so on. The reason I love to read those is because that is where my desires have shifted in the past few years. I started to want to write about life much more than music. If I had to choose between doing a piano concert or a public talk on an important life issue, I would choose the latter every single time.

We don’t know the future, but I can tell you that if I ever come back to a more public life, that is what I probably will be doing. I plan on taking a lot of time off but at some point, I may start writing/speaking a bit and in a few years when the kids are all in college, may launch something new. You might wonder why I just don’t try to pivot the audience I have in that direction but the truth is that I can’t. While many of you may resonate with the things I want to talk about, most of my audience will not. I think it is best to just say goodbye and come back later fresh.

So, those are the main reasons I am leaving music though there is admittedly a lot to read between the lines. I could talk about this forever but don’t see much value in it. I do hope that if you are a professional musician or an aspiring musician that this does not discourage you. I love the industry and I love the people in the industry. Furthermore, the industry is extremely important. If you spend your entire life in it, you will be doing something of great significance. Just because I could not does not mean you should not.

One last blog post is coming and it will be a fun one (for me). See you there.

Today though, my post title is intentional and direct. I am saying goodbye to this blog and professional music. I am going to take some time and try to explain why I am taking the steps I am going to take; it will take 2-3 posts but I won’t belabor it too long. Let me say this up front though: this is not related to any kind of personal or family emergency. We are all fine (at least as far as we know). Nor have I decided to become a hermit. I am not fighting depression or anything like that and I am actually happier than I can remember being for a long long time. Nor is this a hasty decision; I have been carefully considering it for a few years and this post has been written for a few months.

The first blog post I ever wrote was in March, 2007. I had just finished recording Reflections on a Journey and was starting to get concert opportunities and it was just sort of dawning on me that I might want to take all this more seriously. Since then, I have written close to 1300 posts and about a million words on a variety of topics. Some of that content has been good and some has been very bad. At some point during this farewell, I will tell you my regrets about my music career but probably my biggest regrets of all involve things I have written here.

In addition to this blog, since I started music, I have recorded ten albums, two for-TV concerts, and some 35 hours of instructional video for pianists. I have produced or at least worked on many other albums, written well over a hundred arrangements for publication, authored a book on music marketing, and performed hundreds of concerts. Basically, what I am saying is that I have done a lot over the past dozen years. In a lot of respects, I think that in the world of music, I have done enough. I have done my best and I have given it all I can. I have had opportunities I never would have dreamed possible. Even if I am only 46 years old, there is really nothing else I can think of that I really want to do in professional music.

As a general rule, musicians don’t walk away from the kind of professional music career I have gratefully enjoyed. They may retire and do a farewell tour once their voice/skills are shot but invariably it seems that the farewell doesn’t “take” somehow. It is hard to walk away even after the voice starts wavering and the technique falters. Sometimes they are trapped because of their financial situations and sometimes, they are addicted to the notoriety. I get both of those things and I will talk about that a bit before I am done here.

On the flip side, there are some musicians that do walk away. I have been listening lately to a podcast called The Pivot which is a series of interviews with people that walk away from careers like music. Many of them do it with grace, and when I listen to their stories, I hear the same theme over and over. People that walk away invariably recognize that there are seasons of life. They understand that they are more than their career and that they can function without that career. They understand that it really is OK for things to end. Things start and they end, and ending well is just as important as starting well.

The seasons of life concept resonates with me and is where I am. If I am being honest, I have been moving in that direction for several years. It took a while to really accept that I might leave music but I first got real peace with the idea in late 2017 when I was just finishing a series of recordings and it dawned on me that I was no longer really enjoying what I was doing. In some ways, I no longer believed in what I was doing. This is something I will unpack a bit in a followup post.

I will be open and admit what is hardest about my decision: it is the idea that I am trading notoriety (as limited as it is) for obscurity. I mentioned already that musicians struggle with this and I am no exception. It took me a while to make peace with the idea. But on the other hand, I eventually realized that what I would be gaining was more valuable.

Many of you will want to know the reason for this and I will get to that in a followup post. There are actually a number of reasons why. Some of them I will share and some I am going to choose not to share. Part of exiting graciously means keeping some things to myself. If you catch me for coffee on a good day, I will possibly share some things privately that I won’t share here. I am not going to lie here but I will keep some things close to the vest.

Before I stop for the day, I do want to tell you what my plans are for this site and my music going forward.

• GregHowlett.com will stay up indefinitely. All the products currently on the site will remain for sale though I will continue to retire physical products and move to downloads. Shortly, the instructional courses will be available only by download.
• I am going to unpublish all of the blog posts that I have written that do not directly relate to music instruction. All the blog posts that I consider helpful to musicians will be organized into a directory that will replace the blog format. In other words, all that content will no longer be organized by time but by subject. That should make that content much more useful. The site will basically be about music and nothing else. The one exception will be the abuse series which I feel is perhaps more important (and likely more impactful) than anything I have ever done musically.
• My music will stay on all streaming and download sites including Pandora, Spotify, YouTube, iTunes, etc.
• I owe four more arrangements to the monthly hymn arrangement club subscribers and I was originally planning on getting them out on schedule. I may still do that but if I choose not to, I will either give refunds or something else of equivalent/greater value to those who are owed it.
• I may (or may not) release a few more singles like the one I released yesterday because they are already pretty much wrapped up. I haven’t really decided. If I release them, it will be on YouTube.

What it boils down to is this: there is no real reason to change the distribution model already in place. The main thing that will change is that I am stepping out of an active role in writing for the blog, writing arrangements, producing/recording music, and marketing. Things will just go on auto-pilot.

As for me, I am not retiring; in fact, I am planning on going on to other things, some of which may be public things. There are skills I want to learn to do better. For example, I am interested in improving both my public speaking and writing. I also plan on starting to study music again, mostly for my personal benefit but who knows? Maybe in a decade I will be back in professional music in some capacity. I rather doubt it but it is possible.

For those of you that have followed my music, whether for one day or the entire decade, I want to sincerely thank you for your support. You are incredible and have always amazed me. I will miss many of you who interact me with me here.

All kinds of people read this blog and follow my music. You come from all different branches of Christianity and from religions other than Christianity. Some of you are atheists. Yet, regardless of what your belief system is, here is something I can pretty much guarantee: gratefulness is a core value of it. We all understand the power and necessity of gratefulness.

I am no exception. As I leave music, let me assure you that I am grateful. Very grateful.

In a few days, I will post a follow up with more closing thoughts.

One of the things she said made me laugh:

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? You rent it…

She is dead right of course. Carnegie does not really invite anyone to perform there or at least not many. Anyone can pay to play though and these days, many do. When your friends let it “slip” that they have performed at Carnegie Hall, smile and pretend to be impressed but just know that it is just a resume bragging point that means very little. It just means someone opened a checkbook.

The closest I have gotten to playing in Carnegie Hall is a few months ago when I stayed at the Hyatt across the street. However, in case you are interested, I can guesstimate the cost from previous experiences I have had. My guess is you can rent a decent sized space there for less than $5K though with required union labor and such, you might be lucky to get out the door for under $10K. The larger halls cost more. Here in Atlanta, the Fox Theater would be the most comparable venue and it costs $15K/day to start though again, the additional costs could easily double that.

While the finances might be interesting, that is not the point though. Robin’s point was that musicians need to bring a certain mindset to the table. I resonate strongly with her message because I feel the same way. What it boils to is this: if you want to do music as a business, start acting like a business person and just make things happen.

In Robin’s case, breaking out of the hotel piano lounge world meant going out and renting auditoriums to do concerts all over the country. Sometimes no one came but she plowed on anyway. Eventually, things started clicking, and eventually, I presume that she either rented Carnegie Hall or had proved herself to the point that a promoter was willing to invest in her.

In my case, I dropped $30K on Reflections on a Journey with no idea if I could sell even 1,000 CDs. Later, I would invest $120K into one show without knowing if the money was coming back. Our paths are different but I like her so much because our underlying philosophy is the same. I am not saying I have not made mistakes; I have in fact made breathtakingly stupid mistakes and not everything has worked. The same is true for Robin. But when that happens, you get up and keep fighting because that is what it takes.

I have three bits of hard truth for those of you that want to do professional music.

Forget about KickStarter and fund your music business like a real capitalist does.

I don’t see much of what I would call a healthy financial mindset among most musicians if I am being honest and it often starts at the very beginning. Many are scared to invest their own money so they head for KickStarter to guilt their friends into shouldering the risk for them. I don’t like KickStarter (in case I have not said that recently). KickStarter is basically anti-capitalistic because it encourages entrepreneurism without risk, but even more importantly, it allows would-be entrepreneurs to short circuit the development of financial discipline that you need to have in business. Look at it this way: if you can’t save $5K yourself to start your business, do you really think you can manage the financials of the business itself? Don’t count on it….

I know that some will say KickStarter is just micro investing and the principle has been around forever. Friends and families have always financed startup businesses. I get that but that does not make it OK. Most businesses fail already and I guarantee that your chance of failure goes up significantly if you don’t have your own skin in the game. I also know that in Christian music especially, musicians justify KickStarter by hiding behind the “ministry” label. Guys, if you feed your family with your music, it is not really a ministry regardless of how you try to spin it. It is a business and needs to be treated that way.

Are there exceptions to the rule? Yes. Can KickStarter be used in good ways? I think so. But get out of the mindset of thinking you can’t start your music without other people’s money.

Forget about golden tickets and getting discovered and big breaks.

The biggest platform for discovering new talent these days is probably The Voice on NBC. There is a common mindset that the exposure of a show like that is a big break that will change the trajectory of a music career. It just does not work that way though. A contestant that kills it on The Voice wakes up the morning after the experience in pretty much the same shape. Yes, a few new opportunities might come along but those usually die off quickly. Probably at least 90% of The Voice contestants have nothing of substance to show for their exposure a year later other than fond memories and a new line on their resume.

Smart musicians know that exposure opportunities of any size are nothing more than a step in a journey. Of course there is value in great exposure but you have to capitalize and build on that exposure. There are a few exceptions to this rule that get attention and raise false hopes. Normally though, if you show me a person that is successful in music, I will show you a grinder that built their business step by step over the long term. There is nothing quick or easy about this. As I have said here many times, forget the home runs and just focus on hitting singles.

Forget about getting help until you prove that you don’t need it.

Here is a bit of sad truth. You will never get a good promoter if you can’t prove that you can sell tickets without a promoter. Promoters have to make money too and they are not going to promote musicians that can’t sell tickets. I know what it is like to try to sell out a venue and I have the spreadsheets to prove it. It is stressful and not fun but if you want someone to help you in that area, that is what it is going to take. Professional music is more about spreadsheets than Finale.

The same goes for radio promotion and CD distribution and licensing and all the rest of it. If you want to do this business, you need to forget about music for way more than half of your work day and learn how to do the business of music. Why? For a long time, you are going to be doing all that stuff yourself. I still do all the business stuff myself, partly because I prefer it that way but also because I just don’t have the clout to get the help I would like.

I have said a lot of this before and let me close by saying something else I have said before: this is a great time to be a professional musician. The opportunities we enjoy today did not exist a few decades ago. The tradeoff is that while musicians of the past could focus on music, today they basically have to wear two hats: music and business. If you can adjust to that reality, you have a great chance to succeed. I hope you do.

Let’s start with the introduction and in particular, the melody line of the introduction. When you arrange a familiar song, you obviously spend a lot of time on the existing melody; but typically, you get some space to write your own melodies. I like those times best if I am being honest. When you are not constrained by an existing melody, you have the freedom to really stretch a melody to make it more memorable and beautiful.

One of the big ways I do this is by looking at the relationship between the harmony and the melody. Let me give you an example:

When I first wrote this melody line, the A that was circled was a C. I played through it and of course it works. C is the 9th of that Bb chord. However, I changed it to A to get a more interesting sound. A is the major 7th of a Bb chord. I love the major 7th on top of a I or IV chord.

The moral of the story is this: after you write a melody line, go back through it and ask yourself if it is predictable or boring. If so, experiment with other options. Sometimes, changing just one note makes a big difference. This is the only note I changed, in fact.

As we move into the familiar melody, I am going to use the same general texture that I used in the introduction. There is nothing unique or interesting about that. However, at the end of the first line, I use this chord progression:

I wish I could say that this is somehow unusual but it isn’t. I use this progression all the time. It is a descending cliche where I am stepping down in diatonic steps. The one unusual chord is the b3dim7 (2nd beat of bar 13). This chord is a common connector chord in jazz between the iii and the ii chord.

Very quickly, I will point out inner voice movement in this passage:

I am not going to dwell on this kind of light-weight counterpoint because I have been using it a lot and talking about it. However, notice that it does not have to be complicated to be interesting. A little of this gets you a lot of mileage. Right now, not many arrangers are doing it so it will set your music apart.

It is common to see A7 (V/vi) on beat three of bar 22 but remember that any time you see a secondary dominant like that, you can possibly slip the ii in front of the V. A7 is the V/vi and Em7 is the ii/vi. When the target (vi) is minor, it is appropriate (and for me almost automatic) to turn the ii into a half diminished and add the b9 to the V chord. That is why you see Em7(b5) – A7(b9) – Dm here.

After the first verse, I return to the initial intro material, using it to build to a bigger chorus. And that is pretty much all there is to the arrangement.

Again, here is the demo of me playing it. If you don’t see the video below, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATEPP4y5n_c

About 17 years ago, I was working a job I hated (software development for Delta Airlines). I had started selling some stuff on a website but was not making much money with it. I was doing very little with music at the time. I had nothing recorded and was just playing some at church. To put it mildly, doing music in a professional way or as a career was not on my radar.

I quit Delta in 2001. It is sort of humorous that to this day, the main thing I think about regarding quitting Delta was losing our ability to fly first class. We always flew for free back in those days and it was almost always first class. Since I quit Delta, I have flown even more frequently; but I have never flown first class again. Not even once. I certainly don’t pay for first class and I don’t even get upgraded to first class because I have flown a lot. (That has nothing to do with this story, but it makes me laugh.)

Anyway, at some point during 2002, I sat down and wrote a document that described how I wanted our family life to look. I still have the document. Here is a screen shot of the first section. (I added the red circle today to draw attention to one of them.)

Now at this point in our lives, these were huge goals. My new business was not making much money but I clearly had a lot of hope and confidence. I clearly did not know much about writing goals back then because many of these are not measurable. I had not read enough self-help gurus yet to know that goals should be measurable. Not all of them were good goals either. Some of them have never been achieved and some of them I no longer want to achieve.

Nevertheless, this document changed my life.

Overall, when I look at these goals, little has changed in what I value today, but I have changed some. I think the one big thing that has changed for me is I now know the beauty and fulfillment of work. No longer do I want a 3-day work week. I would really struggle emotionally if I worked only three days a week. I am not interested any more in a clear divide between my work life and personal life either. I think those particular goals were a result of just getting out of employment that I hated and having to do on-call stuff that often destroyed our family life.

Let me give you a practical example of how writing down those goals still guides us. This past week was a big week for my family because we moved our business (back) out of our house (see bullet point #4). Many of you know that I built a business that expanded to a warehouse in the period of 2005-2012. When we sold that business in 2012, my goal was to transition to music full time and we moved out of the warehouse into our basement. Over the past few years, our business has exploded and has started putting pressure on our quality of life in our house. The inventory was creeping out of the basement into the garage, a new building we built, and eventually, our first floor. It took a crew of twelve two days but we got everything moved and we will be shipping from a new location tomorrow.

Moving the business out our house was an expensive solution but important for us. It was a recognition that we had become misaligned with our goals written all the way back in 2002 and something had to change. So we changed it.

And of course, since this is a music blog, I want to talk about the circled music bullet point for a second. I have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote about becoming “very proficient” on the piano; I can tell you that I still don’t consider myself very proficient on the piano. However, as imprecise as that goal was, it gave me the drive to record my first album Timeless Reflections just two years later. And then, it led me make a call to John Innes to start studying piano in earnest which in turn led to Reflections on a Journey. And on and on it went with more and more albums and eventually the TV concerts and the instructional courses.

Guys, I am no one special. I am a guy with some talent who wrote down a goal in 2002 and then went out and found some ways to make that goal happen. I did not have a plan but I did know some steps I needed to take. For me, I knew I needed the pressure that recording an album would provide (deadlines and such) and I knew I eventually needed teachers to help me learn more.

I read somewhere this week that the word “talent” is often used when the correct word is “discipline.” That is true. You don’t get very far without discipline. But discipline needs an end game; you have to know why you are working so hard. That is where goals come in. Your goals fuel your discipline which is how good things happen.

I love the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Normally, I relax and go drink some coffee and think about how I want the next year to look. This year, because of the warehouse move, I have not had any down time. But next week, that is something I am going to do. I will write down a plan and some goals for the year.

I encourage you to do that, too. It will make a difference in your life.

Like I said, I have never paid much attention to Spotify. I knew I was earning a bit of money there, but also knew that it was not really significant. However, I have noticed that my professional musician friends that depend on streaming for their income have shifted a lot of focus from Pandora to Spotify. I will talk about how they are doing that in a second.

So, about my numbers. First, they are higher than I expected and they are growing pretty fast. That surprises me a little because Spotify’s audience is in general not my target audience. For example, my audience tends to be 35+ in age while a healthy majority of Spotify’s audience is younger than 35. That demographic in particular is the primary reason I have never focused on Spotify.

While the numbers are higher than expected, they are dwarfed by my numbers on Pandora and even YouTube. I think I will have somewhere over 2 million views on YouTube in 2018 and a total hours listened of maybe 350,000. Pandora will end up at several times the numbers of YouTube at least in streams (they don’t provide total hours listened stats and I don’t know that their “fan” count is very accurate at all).

That being said, Spotify pays way better than YouTube and Pandora. I don’t monetize YouTube (I could but would have to show ads) and Pandora generates around $1000 per million spins or $0.001/spin. However, if you pretty much own your song or it is public domain, you can earn 4 to 8 times that much on Spotify.

In other words, my 600K spins on Spotify in 2018 probably translates into between two and three thousand dollars. I don’t really know exactly how much off the top of my head because I just get bank deposits that contain all these streaming sources combined. I could go figure it out– but you can find plenty of other artists online giving their numbers to the penny.

So how do you get on Spotify? The answer is pretty much the same way you get on any streaming source. Pay to put your album on CDBaby or TuneCore and sign up for digital distribution. They will do the rest and of course will take a small cut of what you get paid.

Once you are on Spotify, you can do what I do and just ignore it and hope it grows. Or, you can do what my professional music friends do and promote playlists. Playlists are a key to growing exposure in Spotify in the same way that Pandora’s algorithm, that plays your music on similar artists’ stations, grows exposure.

In a nutshell, what my friends do is all partner together to build a playlist in Spotify of maybe 25 artists with one song each.  Then they all promote it to their fans. When their fans listen, they are getting exposure to the other 24 artists. It is a synergistic approach to help each other.

Like I said, I am seeing way more focus on Spotify playlists than Pandora these days. I suspect it is working for them.

Again, your success on Spotify is going to depend at least partly on the demographics of your fans. Not all artists are going to see good results there. On the flip side, if you are already on CDBaby or TuneCore, make sure you are at least opted in for digital distribution to Spotify. You have nothing to lose and possibly a lot to gain.

Anyway, let’s talk pedal point for a few minutes. Pedal point is a very simple way to get some harmonic interest into a song. Basically, it consists of playing the song over a repeating bass note. Here is an example:

This is the tag. Note the numbers in red. I am repeating a two-bar phrase of the melody three times to create the beginning of the elongated ending. To get some contrast into that repetition, I am playing the second iteration over a pedal. More technically, I am playing over a pedal V because we are in the key of G and D is the fifth note in a D scale. You could also say I am playing a dominant pedal because V is a dominant chord in harmony.

There are two primary pedal points that are used: a tonic pedal which is the first note of the scale of the underlying key and a dominant pedal which is the fifth note of the scale of the underlying key. In other words, in the key of C, C is the tonic pedal and G is the dominant pedal. I will talk about why you would use one or the other in a second. Could you use other pedals? Maybe but they would not be as versatile and certainly require more writing skill.

I will tell you that at this point, I wrote a lot of technical stuff about how all this works. For example, why does a IV chord played over a V in the bass have the same function as a root position IV chord? (Answer: because a IV/V is just a suspended dominant and suspended dominants basically function as subdominants.) But then, I erased it all. It gets confusing when we get into all the possible variations and I sort of came to the realization that it does not matter. The whole point of using pedal points is that you can get an interesting sound without having to work or think very hard.

Basically, here is the rule: play a pedal point when it works. If it doesn’t work, try changing the chord on top to something else that fits the melody note and works well with the pedal point. If you can’t find anything, abandon the pedal. But you will be shocked how often it works.

Now, why would you choose a tonic pedal over a dominant pedal? It is not rocket science. If we examined the harmony created by pedals, we would find that the majority of the chords are shifted toward tonic and subdominant functions when you use a tonic pedal. On the other hand, when you use a dominant pedal, the majority of the chords are shifted toward subdominant and dominant functions.

Tonic sounds are more resolved and dominant sounds are transitional. If you are trying to build suspense (as I am in the example above), use a dominant pedal. If you are building into the huge verse of a ballad, you want a dominant pedal. If you are not necessarily trying to move anywhere in a hurry, you might like the tonic pedal better. Tonic pedals are more versatile as well.

Speaking for myself, I don’t use tonic pedals very often at all; and I probably use dominant pedals too much. Dominant pedals fit my harmonic palette very well because all of those chords played on top of a V pedal end up creating colorful dominant functions that I like to use anyway.

Like any other trick, don’t go to the well on this too often and don’t hang out on a pedal too long. Pedals definitely belong in your bag of tricks though, especially the dominant pedal through transitional or setup sections of your writing.

As it turns out, I know most if not all of the musicians listed in that article personally and many of them are friends. I like those guys. They are practically all members of Whisperings, a group of maybe eighty professional solo pianists (including me) that is the brainchild of David Nevue. If you get airplay on Whisperings Radio, you are a member by default. A lot of us get together every year, normally in San Diego, but next year in Atlanta.

The music of Whisperings is George Winston-like for the most part. Some would call it New Age and some would call it Neo-Classical. I prefer the latter because New Age has some negative connotations that have nothing to do with what these guys write. Basically, it is relatively uncomplicated music that you might hear at the dentist. It is the kind of music you play when you want to relax while reading a book or studying. Maybe sort of like elevator music. The two albums of mine that play on Whisperings are Solace and Quiet Place if that gives you an idea.

There are many professional musicians that sneer at this music. Frankly, I don’t care for some of it either but some of those guys are incredible musicians that can play rings around me. However, they intentionally write the music they do because there is a market for it. They could play Chopin but they choose to play music that might be classified as Chopin-Lite.

Again, a lot of musicians don’t understand that perspective. Those would be the musicians that are broke…

As the article points out, many of these guys make far more money than artists that you might hear on pop radio. A LOT more money in fact. The article mentions Michelle McLaughlin earning $250,000/year. That is probably low and I know others that make more than that or at least did at one time.

How can it be that musicians you have never heard of are making six figures in music while famous musicians are making almost nothing? How can it be that a guy that almost never does concerts with more than 30 people in attendance can earn more than some that play to thousands? It is not complicated. They have just found a niche: the niche of background music.

Basically, these guys are getting streams from people that are in situations where they want music that is not distracting. It is all about ambience. The music of ambience is a big business.

Let me peel back a few layers about the finances. The article mentions a few that have over a billion spins on Pandora (a spin is a single song streamed). Think about that number for a second. A billion spins is a ridiculously huge number. My Pandora spin count is only between 50-100 million spins but I think that is also a huge number. You don’t earn much per spin but you don’t have to if you are getting those kinds of numbers. Basically, as a musician, you can expect to earn about $0.001 per spin. That works out to $1,000 per million spins. If you have a billion spins, you have earned $1,000,000 from Pandora. Yes, you read that right.

I mentioned that I am way behind some of those guys in spins. One of my dumbest business mistakes ever was ignoring Pandora for as long as I did. The same guys in this article were the ones that turned me on to Pandora several years ago but I was already about ten years late to the party. If I had focused on Pandora as soon as they did, I don’t know where my spin count would be now but in general, Pandora does favor longevity. In other words, your spins tend to grow exponentially on Pandora rather than linearly.

Thus, if you get on Pandora today, you should know that it will be probably be harder for you to get spins than it was for me and much harder than it was for the Whispering guys like Nevue and McLaughlin. That does not mean you should not get on though. Submitting to Pandora is free and if you get approved and start getting spins, it is great residual income. I get nice deposits in my bank account from Pandora’s licensing companies every month and will for a long time regardless of what I do with music in the future. As a great example of that, I am most associated with Anthony Burger on Pandora, a pianist familiar to many of you. Anthony has been dead for two decades but he is still earning money on Pandora for whoever owns his music.

Of course, you can’t just throw any music on Pandora and get spins. In the first place, they only take a small percentage of the music that gets submitted to them. And then, even if approved, you are not guaranteed much. Pandora is going to reward musicians that generate music that people like. They determine that of course by whether people skip songs and vote with the thumbs up button. In general, good music will rise to the top. So, if you want spins, get a time machine, go back ten years and submit great music to Pandora. If you can’t get a time machine, just submit great music to Pandora and be patient.

Now, let me give you the other side of this. The Whispering group has had an incredible run with Pandora but there are no guarantees that it will continue. In fact, there have been many changes in algorithms and payment calculations and some musicians have taken big hits on income. The smart ones have done everything possible to diversify their income across a lot of streaming platforms and have looked for ways to develop income outside streaming such as website CD and sheet music sales. Those guys will be fine in the long run for the most part. Others who have failed to protect themselves from Pandora issues and gotten used to the big checks and living large may end up in trouble in the future. The fact that Pandora has never been a huge part of my music income probably is not completely a bad thing for that reason.

The warning for you is to remember that things change rapidly. Pandora does not owe any musician anything really. They can cut your spins to zero or cut their payouts dramatically. Pandora itself could become obsolete or Congress could pass new laws for the music industry as they did a few weeks ago. Enjoy Pandora but as the Bible says, cast your bread on many waters. In other words, diversify.

So here is my takeaway: if you are a musician and can record ambience music, there is a huge demand for it not just on Pandora but on the Apple platforms, Spotify, YouTube, and many other streaming platforms that pay in a similar way. Streaming ambiance music is a great income strategy for pianists who can write it. I am not going to guarantee you can make a great living with it but it is something to look at. Just be careful, understand that nothing is forever, and plan on some bumps in the road along the way.

Here is another article I just saw this morning that is related and might interest you: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/nov/06/inside-the-booming-business-of-background-music

Sometimes I write in different styles just to prove to myself that I can. Sometimes, that means taking a step backward from what you are comfortable with and it is also a vulnerable thing because you know that you are exposing yourself to the experts out there in various genres.

For example, I can write jazz. I know exactly how to write jazz or at least something that would pass for jazz to 99% of the world. The problem though is that the other 1% would look at what I did and start laughing uncontrollably. There is a big difference between writing jazz and writing jazz well. If you are writing professionally, you have to write well. The problem is that if you want to learn to write well, you have to write a lot of poor stuff to get to the point where you are writing well. It is necessary but still uncomfortable.

I feel a bit like that with this arrangement of “Praise Him, Praise Him.” This is way outside my wheelhouse. I don’t write this chippy, light stuff very much. There is a different set of tools for it. For example, my normal harmony palette doesn’t work. I have to get back to triads and there are essentially no substitutions. In some ways, it feels like a step in the wrong direction but truthfully, I know it is not. This style is not bad; it is just different.

I probably wrote this piece from start to finish in an hour, including getting it into Finale. Before I went to Finale though, I did two things. First, I came up with an 8-bar progression that I would use to carry the entire arrangement. The 8 bars is really two 4-bar phrases as you see in bars 1-8 below. Second, I scratched out a form on paper that looked sort of like this:

Intro: 8×2 (Note: by this, I mean play the 8-bar progression 2 times)
Verse
Interlude: 8×4
Verse (1st line)
Tag: (last line 3x)
Out (2 bars)

From a philosophical standpoint, let me tell you what I am trying to do. My goal is to paint a portrait that is connected to a known hymn. The portrait is a happy one and the utilization of “Praise Him” grounds the portrait in a Christian context. Both of those things are important in church and let me explain why. You could get up in church and play a beautiful portrait of happiness that no one knows and it would sort of work. People would enjoy it but they would probably not connect to it. Likewise, if you play a familiar song without painting a picture, people might connect to it but not be moved by it. In my opinion, you usually need both things for an instrumental to work in church.

This song is 100 bars long and as you can see from the form above, the intro, interlude, and out account for 50 of those bars. In other words, “Praise Him” is only in half of the arrangement but that is more than enough. And by the way, I am doing absolutely nothing interesting during those 50 bars when “Praise Him” is present. Basically I am just playing the melody over the same bass line idea I am using during the intro and interlude.

There is really only one thing going on of real interest in this arrangement and that is the development of the 8-bar concept. That 8 bars is repeated six times in the song and is intentionally developed as we go. The first time is this:

… and the last time is this:

Obviously, there is a big difference between the first and last iteration, and that is the result of developing step by step on each iteration. The development of that idea is what makes the portrait. It is really all there is to hang your hat on. Whether it is enough is up for debate. Like I said, I am on the fence.

I do want to come back and talk about the pedal point in the tag in a few days because I think that is a good little trick to keep in your toolbox. See you then.