Hi everyone!
Tom D'Antoni and I sat down last week and talked about jazz. Some of it got videotaped. Here is the video and a link to Tom's article:
http://oregonmusicnews.com/2012/12/18/video-pete-petersen-making-a-septet-sound-like-a-big-band/
Now here's the thing: I have discovered that I don't do interviews well. By which I mean I don't really know how to look at the camera, and I don't ever know what to say until after it's done, at which time I keep wanting to add "oh yeah, and I forgot to mention..."
So here are a few "oh yeah and I forgot to mention" moments:
We talked a bit about arranging, and specifically why I like to write for a 4-piece horn section. That pretty much got covered in the interview, except that I forgot to mention that although I've been inspired by big band writing from the beginning, writing for a smaller group really is its own thing. There are some textures and colors that are only possible with a 17-piece jazz orchestra, and try as we might it's impossible to replicate that with only 4 horns. Still, it's possible to make some things sound very big-band-esque, and that's some of what I aim to accomplish when I write for the septet.
I love to compose original tunes as well as arrange tunes that have been written by others. Both require a different head-space; when I'm composing an original tune I sometimes don't think about the arrangement at the time, or I'll think of ideas but I don't come up with a full arrangement until after I've got the melody and rhythm and chord changes solidified. Sometimes I'll think about what kind of timbre I want certain voices to sound like, but most of the time the composing process is completely different than the arranging/orchestration process.
Another thing we talked about was odd-meters. I think playing (and writing) in 7 has always been something I've dreaded. I've never felt comfortable in 7, or 11, or 5... most of the Prime numbers in fact. I think that is the case for most people. When we walk, we are unconsciously thinking in a 2-beat (duple) meter, because we are using 2 legs alternating back and forth. Our heartbeat is a simple duple meter. 4 is just a multiple of 2, so 4 is easy to conceptualize as well. 3 is a very common meter & we've all heard a lot of waltzes. A lot of swing feels like triplets. So those things all help rhythms in 2, 3, and 4 feel mostly natural and intuitive. 7 is its own beast. I think there is a tendency by composers to write things in 5, 7, or 11 just to show that they are "educated". Like there's no other reason to write in 7 except because it's in 7. Almost like they are being counterintuitive on purpose. I don't feel like that's something I need to do. Music should feel intuitive, not labored. But then I listen to the famous Paul Desmond tune "Take Five" which feels natural in its simplicity - that tune feels like it's perfectly natural and comfortable to be in 5, like 5 is the most normal thing in the world. This is the secret to composing and playing in odd meters, and is the nugget of truth that I wish I would've been able to think of an easy concise way to say during the interview: Music should always feel intuitive and natural in order to convey its true purpose of making listeners feel what the composer/performer wishes them to feel; odd meters need to also feel intuitive and natural or else they defeat the basic purpose of music.
We also talked a bit about Ellington and Strayhorn and their contribution to the art of arranging & orchestration. Duke really was ahead of his time. The more I learn about orchestration, the more I'm drawn back to the colors Duke was able to get from his orchestra.
As I watch this video I am reminded of Max Headroom. It's definitely a portable handheld cam. Sorry the video is so choppy. But considering 30 years ago it would've required a TV crew in a production studio to do an interview like this, I am glad for the advances in technology that make it possible for Tom and I to be able to sit in a relaxing tea house and talk.
I didn't really talk much in the video about the gig we've got coming up on the 30th: I wanted to get a chance to mention that this gig is going to be a lot of fun. Here's what I'm thinking: most of us are working the next night (Dec 31st) so let's all cut loose and have a great time the night before. If you're a musician bring your horn (or your voice) and sit in. Let's eat and drink and be merry!
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Thursday, November 1, 2012
Ridin' that Train
[note: clearing out the archives... This was originally written a little over two months ago. The train pulled into the station while I was still typing, and it was a mad scramble to get my stuff put away and get off the train, then I did gigs all weekend, then I came home and SLEPT... so the publishing of this blog got pushed aside and eventually sidetracked. Sidetracked... there's a railroad expression for you. See, there's only one main track going from town to town. When an express train or a freight train needs to get through in a hurry, it has to go around the passenger trains that stop from town to town - so the passenger trains are sometimes temporarily moved over to a short piece of track that runs to the side of the main track. SO the slower train is "sidetracked" temporarily while the faster train goes around it. If there are a lot of train cars with higher priority, the slower train can be sidetracked for quite a long time. As is what happened with this blog entry... Anyway, here it is, rolling along again...]
Originally from August 18, 2012
Why don't more people take the train? Are we so addicted to our cars that we would rather subject ourselves to several hours of eyestrain, road rage, accidents, and horrible gas-station food, than a nice leisurely train ride? I'm writing this from a comfortable seat in a rail car on Amtrak's "Cascades" line between Portland and Seattle. The train takes about the same amount of time as the aggravating drive through the I-5 corridor. There is access to Wi-Fi, AC outlets, and other amenities that make this trip even more pleasant than traveling by air. The dining car has a variety of hot and cold entrees and snacks and a fine selection of local microbrews. And now that gasoline is looking like it's going to top $4/gallon again, a rail ticket from Portland to Seattle actually costs LESS than a tank of gas.
But the primary thought that pervades my reckoning at the moment is far less practical. As I ride comfortably gazing out the window at Puget Sound, I feel connected to an incredible history. Our nation has literally grown up with rail travel. From the very first days of the Industrial Age, trains were the primary means of moving people and cargo across long distances. The automobile and the interstate highway system have only really been around in abundance for the past 60 years - before that time, if you wanted to travel from once city to another, you took a train. In almost every old movie if a character needed to travel any kind of distance, there was a train involved. Our grandparents and their parents and grandparents traveled by train all the time. Trains are part of our cultural heritage.
It is strangely troubling, then, that a large portion of our society has disconnected themselves from this heritage, choosing instead to crowd onto already-crowded freeways or to pack themselves like sardines into a flying metal tube. I can appreciate the convenience of the latter; for any great significant amount of distance such as a cross-country trip, it is preferable to spend 3 or 4 hours belted into an airplane seat rather than 2 to 3 days by car or train; but for medium to short distances such as the commute between Portland and Seattle, there is nothing like the train.
Unfortunately, rail travel has had a rough couple of decades. Decreased ridership means decreased revenue from ticket sales, which makes it more difficult to keep tracks maintained and trains upgraded. We have already fallen behind the rest of the civilized world in rail technology; Europe and Japan both have high-speed rail lines connecting most major cities; US trains still run comparatively slow. Federal funding for rail travel has dwindled, while federal subsidies for the fossil-fuel industry have skyrocketed.
However, the passenger experience on the train is still much improved over even 10 years ago; As I walk from my seat to the dining car I see almost every passenger using a laptop computer, an iPad, or other electronic device, watching movies or surfing the internet, and when I arrive at the dining car I see even more passengers enjoying a leisurely meal as if in a restaurant or bistro. The food fare consists of microwaveable items (burgers, & sandwiches) snack foods (bagels, fruit, candy) as well as some local specialty items (Snoqualmie Falls oatmeal, Ivar's clam chowder) soft drinks, and a full bar of beer, wine, and spirits. Contrast this to a typical airline meal (do they even still serve meals on airlines anymore?!?) or the gastrointestinal disaster that is truck stop/gas station food along the interstate.
Rail travel is a refreshing, relaxing, change from the aggravation of the "I-5 Drive".
Originally from August 18, 2012
Why don't more people take the train? Are we so addicted to our cars that we would rather subject ourselves to several hours of eyestrain, road rage, accidents, and horrible gas-station food, than a nice leisurely train ride? I'm writing this from a comfortable seat in a rail car on Amtrak's "Cascades" line between Portland and Seattle. The train takes about the same amount of time as the aggravating drive through the I-5 corridor. There is access to Wi-Fi, AC outlets, and other amenities that make this trip even more pleasant than traveling by air. The dining car has a variety of hot and cold entrees and snacks and a fine selection of local microbrews. And now that gasoline is looking like it's going to top $4/gallon again, a rail ticket from Portland to Seattle actually costs LESS than a tank of gas.
But the primary thought that pervades my reckoning at the moment is far less practical. As I ride comfortably gazing out the window at Puget Sound, I feel connected to an incredible history. Our nation has literally grown up with rail travel. From the very first days of the Industrial Age, trains were the primary means of moving people and cargo across long distances. The automobile and the interstate highway system have only really been around in abundance for the past 60 years - before that time, if you wanted to travel from once city to another, you took a train. In almost every old movie if a character needed to travel any kind of distance, there was a train involved. Our grandparents and their parents and grandparents traveled by train all the time. Trains are part of our cultural heritage.
It is strangely troubling, then, that a large portion of our society has disconnected themselves from this heritage, choosing instead to crowd onto already-crowded freeways or to pack themselves like sardines into a flying metal tube. I can appreciate the convenience of the latter; for any great significant amount of distance such as a cross-country trip, it is preferable to spend 3 or 4 hours belted into an airplane seat rather than 2 to 3 days by car or train; but for medium to short distances such as the commute between Portland and Seattle, there is nothing like the train.
Unfortunately, rail travel has had a rough couple of decades. Decreased ridership means decreased revenue from ticket sales, which makes it more difficult to keep tracks maintained and trains upgraded. We have already fallen behind the rest of the civilized world in rail technology; Europe and Japan both have high-speed rail lines connecting most major cities; US trains still run comparatively slow. Federal funding for rail travel has dwindled, while federal subsidies for the fossil-fuel industry have skyrocketed.
However, the passenger experience on the train is still much improved over even 10 years ago; As I walk from my seat to the dining car I see almost every passenger using a laptop computer, an iPad, or other electronic device, watching movies or surfing the internet, and when I arrive at the dining car I see even more passengers enjoying a leisurely meal as if in a restaurant or bistro. The food fare consists of microwaveable items (burgers, & sandwiches) snack foods (bagels, fruit, candy) as well as some local specialty items (Snoqualmie Falls oatmeal, Ivar's clam chowder) soft drinks, and a full bar of beer, wine, and spirits. Contrast this to a typical airline meal (do they even still serve meals on airlines anymore?!?) or the gastrointestinal disaster that is truck stop/gas station food along the interstate.
Rail travel is a refreshing, relaxing, change from the aggravation of the "I-5 Drive".
Sunday, July 1, 2012
"Death-defying" BBQ Sauce
Death Defying BBQ sauce:
(this is mainly a guideline to create the base sauce; as with anything, it is designed for improvisation. All measurements are approximate and can be adjusted to taste...)
Equipment:
Deep saucepan with a lid that fits
Long spoon
Wire whisk
A well-ventilated area that is cleared of all flammable objects (not kidding about this)
long-handled lighter (aim 'n flame or similar)
Dry ingredients:
Brown sugar (a large handful; approx 1 cup)
Paprika (approx 2 tablespoons)
Dry Mustard (approx 2 teaspoons)
Onion powder (approx 2 teaspoons)
Ground black pepper
Kosher salt or sea salt (go sparingly on this; the meat will already be salty)
Garlic powder (small amount when cooking beef; I usually leave out the garlic for pork)
Cayenne pepper (depending on how much kick you like)
(*Beef option: Onion soup mix)
Liquids: Bourbon (at least 2 cups)
(*note: Rum may be substituted for bourbon for a slightly mellower, sweeter flavor)
Apple juice (approx 1 cup)
Apple cider vinegar (about a cup)
(distilled white vinegar works too)
Options (use one or more of these depending on your taste preference and choice of meat)
Tomato paste
Yellow mustard
Dijon mustard
Honey
Maple syrup
1. Start with the bourbon and the brown sugar.
1a. It is important to taste-test the bourbon for quality SEVERAL times throughout the cooking process. Begin the quality-assurance process by pouring yourself a shot.
2. In a saucepan, pour about a cup of the bourbon in. Taste-test for quality assurance.
3. heat to NEAR boiling while you add the brown sugar and stir with a whisk to dissolve.
4. At this point it should be emphasized to maintain proper safety at all times.
4a. Drink a shot of the bourbon for luck.
5. Set the bourbon-sugar on fire with the lighter, stirring frequently with the long spoon. Keep the lid handy to clamp down in case it gets out of hand. (It's good to do this before the bourbon reaches full boiling or the alcohol vapor will ignite above the pot and you'll have a big problem.)
Ideally what should happen is that the sugar will Carmelize and give it a nice flavor.
6. Clamp the lid on it to put the fire out.
6a. At this point, if you're still alive and your house isn't burned down, pour yourself another shot to celebrate your accomplishment.
7. Add the apple juice and the rest of the spices. Bring it back to a full boil again, then reduce heat and simmer while the rest of the alcohol cooks off.
7a. I use onion soup instead of apple juice when I'm making sauce for beef dishes. Take the onion soup mix and blend with hot water according to the package, then add this to the sauce instead of the apple juice.
8. Add the vinegar and continue to simmer.
9. Taste the mixture. Adjust any spice quantities at this point to your preference.
10. Add your choice of either tomato paste or mustard. Or varying amounts of both.
11. Resample the flavor. If it's too intense, you can add more apple juice.
11a. Resample the bourbon.
12. Thats it; you can either use it to mop the meat while it cooks, or you can add corn starch and thicken it to make table sauce.
Enjoy!
(this is mainly a guideline to create the base sauce; as with anything, it is designed for improvisation. All measurements are approximate and can be adjusted to taste...)
Equipment:
Deep saucepan with a lid that fits
Long spoon
Wire whisk
A well-ventilated area that is cleared of all flammable objects (not kidding about this)
long-handled lighter (aim 'n flame or similar)
Dry ingredients:
Brown sugar (a large handful; approx 1 cup)
Paprika (approx 2 tablespoons)
Dry Mustard (approx 2 teaspoons)
Onion powder (approx 2 teaspoons)
Ground black pepper
Kosher salt or sea salt (go sparingly on this; the meat will already be salty)
Garlic powder (small amount when cooking beef; I usually leave out the garlic for pork)
Cayenne pepper (depending on how much kick you like)
(*Beef option: Onion soup mix)
Liquids: Bourbon (at least 2 cups)
(*note: Rum may be substituted for bourbon for a slightly mellower, sweeter flavor)
Apple juice (approx 1 cup)
Apple cider vinegar (about a cup)
(distilled white vinegar works too)
Options (use one or more of these depending on your taste preference and choice of meat)
Tomato paste
Yellow mustard
Dijon mustard
Honey
Maple syrup
1. Start with the bourbon and the brown sugar.
1a. It is important to taste-test the bourbon for quality SEVERAL times throughout the cooking process. Begin the quality-assurance process by pouring yourself a shot.
2. In a saucepan, pour about a cup of the bourbon in. Taste-test for quality assurance.
3. heat to NEAR boiling while you add the brown sugar and stir with a whisk to dissolve.
4. At this point it should be emphasized to maintain proper safety at all times.
4a. Drink a shot of the bourbon for luck.
5. Set the bourbon-sugar on fire with the lighter, stirring frequently with the long spoon. Keep the lid handy to clamp down in case it gets out of hand. (It's good to do this before the bourbon reaches full boiling or the alcohol vapor will ignite above the pot and you'll have a big problem.)
Ideally what should happen is that the sugar will Carmelize and give it a nice flavor.
6. Clamp the lid on it to put the fire out.
6a. At this point, if you're still alive and your house isn't burned down, pour yourself another shot to celebrate your accomplishment.
7. Add the apple juice and the rest of the spices. Bring it back to a full boil again, then reduce heat and simmer while the rest of the alcohol cooks off.
7a. I use onion soup instead of apple juice when I'm making sauce for beef dishes. Take the onion soup mix and blend with hot water according to the package, then add this to the sauce instead of the apple juice.
8. Add the vinegar and continue to simmer.
9. Taste the mixture. Adjust any spice quantities at this point to your preference.
10. Add your choice of either tomato paste or mustard. Or varying amounts of both.
11. Resample the flavor. If it's too intense, you can add more apple juice.
11a. Resample the bourbon.
12. Thats it; you can either use it to mop the meat while it cooks, or you can add corn starch and thicken it to make table sauce.
Enjoy!
A faster brisket?
Question: what do you do if you want brisket but you only have 8 hours?
Our daughter Alyx is back in town visiting from LA for the day. In anticipation of this, I decided to do a brisket. Now, the thing about brisket is it just takes so dang long to do it right. Most of the time at least 12 hours, and for a really big one it's best to start it the night before and smoke it overnight.
Another thing about brisket is that the people in the butcher department at grocery stores think they're doing us a favor when they pre-trim it to remove the fat cap and cut it into pieces. I don't fault them for this, the whole huge hunk of brisket can be a little bit intimidating, they probably don't sell too many of them as-is, some department manager somewhere probably figured out that they can sell more if they trim the fat off and package it attractively in nice manageable portions. Usually the way around this is to buy it from a specialty meat market like Gartners, or Ponderosa, or Sheridan's, but in a hurry I sometimes don't have the time to make a specialty trip to one of those places when there's a Winco right around the corner. And Winco does seem to always have a great selection of the types of meats that are best for BBQ, they're one of the only meat departments where you can get a whole "picnic roast" pork shoulder. (Most grocery meat departments sell the shoulder in parts, again probably because they can sell more volume and get more money that way.)
Fortunately there are ways to work with a pre-trimmed brisket and still make it delicious. There are certain things we can add to make up for the lack of fat-cap. See, what should happen is that the fat-cap renders down during the long hours of cooking and keeps the brisket from drying out. If the fat-cap is gone, we must rely on other means. These means involve several strips of bacon, woven together in a mat and placed on top of the brisket. Mmmmm.... bacon... is there nothing it can't do?
So two days ago I bought a medium-sized piece of pre-trimmed brisket. The first thing I did when I got it home was immediately place it in a casserole dish, cover the outside of it with Montreal Steak Seasoning (one of McCormick's best seasoning products IMHO) and pour a liquid marinade mix over it consisting of 3 equal parts of Worcestershire, Balsamic vinegar, and olive oil, blended with a whisk. There it has sat for slightly less than 2 days.
So the original plan was to get up, start the fire, smoke the thing for most of a day, and have a nice dinner at around 6:30 or 7pm. The Best Laid Plans and all that... turns out we don't get the luxury of having a nice leisurely dinner. Having a grown-up daughter who's only in town for a day means sharing her with all of the friends she grew up with who also haven't seen her in years. So the deadline is now an afternoon late-lunch of brisket.
"but Brisket can't be rushed, you say..."
That's what I thought, too. This is where the panic sets in. Obviously for a full-size brisket it would work better to have started smoking the whole thing last night. Where's the TARDIS when you really need it? Or that little necklace Hermione had in the Harry Potter series that was elemental to the plot in saving Buckbeak, but somehow couldn't be used to go back in time and save Harry's parents or rescue Dumbledore. Maybe Doc Brown is available with his deLorean. I know, I know, he'd probably just lecture me about the dangers of rewriting history and all that. That's the thing about time travel, it's so risky...
So instead of breaking the space-time continuum this time, I'm just going to try to see if I can get this thing to get done a little faster by using some very unorthodox methods and tricks that will probably make the BBQ purist curse my name. The following method will get your brisket done faster, if you absolutely positively can't wait 12 hours.
1: take the casserole dish with the marinating brisket and place it (covered with foil) in a 350-degree oven. Set the timer for 45 minutes.
2: while the brisket is in the oven, go out and set some wood on fire. Let the firebox rage and heat up the BBQ to smoking temperature. I usually start a full cylinder of lump charcoal, and once that is going I pour that into the firebox and add 2 full-sized pieces of oak. Run it with the dampers full open at first until the wood all catches. The smoker will heat up to 450+ right away once the wood is fully burning. At that point I turn the intake damper down to about 1/4 open, add a big piece of cherry wood, and let the fire settle.
Once the smoker temp is cruising along back down at a steady 225, it's ready for the meat. If the timing is right, the meat will have been braising along in the oven for 45 minutes by now. Time to...
3. Take the brisket out of the oven. I use a digital meat thermometer, now would be the time to stick the probe into the thickest part of the meat. It should already be reading 80-90 degrees internally. Set the temp alarm for 180 degrees.
4. One more step in the preparation: Take 6 strips of bacon and weave them together in a mat; lay the mat on top of the brisket to take the place of the fat-cap that the butcher so thoughtlessly removed.
5. Take the bacon-matted beef out to the smoker and place it directly on the grate. Find something to do for the next few hours.
6. Check the wood every so often; you'll probably need to add more wood every few hours or so. If the smoker temp gets too hot or too cold, adjust the damper to regulate the level of air in the firebox so the smoker stays right around 225 to 250.
7. At this point you can make some of my death-defying BBQ sauce.
8. When the internal beef temp reaches 150 or so, it will hit a plateau. No one knows why this happens, but the temp will rise steadily until it gets to 150-ish, then it will stay there for hours. Keep the BBQ temp steady, don't panic, everything is normal. It will eventually start rising again. After that you'll need to watch it closely because it will rapidly jump up to 165, at which point you're less than an hour away from carving into it.
9. When the meat hits 165 or so, take the (now fully-cooked) bacon off, mop it with some sauce and put it in a "Texas Crutch". That's basically fancy-talk for wrapping the meat in foil for the last hour of cooking. This keeps the meat moist and juicy and helps give it just that little extra added tenderization at the end. It's important to keep the fire going at this point, usually by this time the coals are starting to die down a little bit.
10. This is a good time to get those side dishes started!
11. When the meat's internal temp reaches 180 you have a choice: you can pull it off the heat (keep the foil wrapped around it) and let it sit for 30 minutes before carving, or you can leave it on the heat. I sometimes leave mine on until it reaches 200, it will be well-done inside but won't be dry because it's in the foil.
12. That's it: take it out of the foil and slice it into thin slices across the grain. This meat will be so flavorful it will make you jump up and down. 8-hour brisket won't be as tender as 12-hour brisket, (after all, I canna' defy the laws of physics, Captain!) but it'll be flavorful and juicy. Put the sauce on the table as a garnish, chances are it won't even be needed.
10.
Our daughter Alyx is back in town visiting from LA for the day. In anticipation of this, I decided to do a brisket. Now, the thing about brisket is it just takes so dang long to do it right. Most of the time at least 12 hours, and for a really big one it's best to start it the night before and smoke it overnight.
Another thing about brisket is that the people in the butcher department at grocery stores think they're doing us a favor when they pre-trim it to remove the fat cap and cut it into pieces. I don't fault them for this, the whole huge hunk of brisket can be a little bit intimidating, they probably don't sell too many of them as-is, some department manager somewhere probably figured out that they can sell more if they trim the fat off and package it attractively in nice manageable portions. Usually the way around this is to buy it from a specialty meat market like Gartners, or Ponderosa, or Sheridan's, but in a hurry I sometimes don't have the time to make a specialty trip to one of those places when there's a Winco right around the corner. And Winco does seem to always have a great selection of the types of meats that are best for BBQ, they're one of the only meat departments where you can get a whole "picnic roast" pork shoulder. (Most grocery meat departments sell the shoulder in parts, again probably because they can sell more volume and get more money that way.)
Fortunately there are ways to work with a pre-trimmed brisket and still make it delicious. There are certain things we can add to make up for the lack of fat-cap. See, what should happen is that the fat-cap renders down during the long hours of cooking and keeps the brisket from drying out. If the fat-cap is gone, we must rely on other means. These means involve several strips of bacon, woven together in a mat and placed on top of the brisket. Mmmmm.... bacon... is there nothing it can't do?
So two days ago I bought a medium-sized piece of pre-trimmed brisket. The first thing I did when I got it home was immediately place it in a casserole dish, cover the outside of it with Montreal Steak Seasoning (one of McCormick's best seasoning products IMHO) and pour a liquid marinade mix over it consisting of 3 equal parts of Worcestershire, Balsamic vinegar, and olive oil, blended with a whisk. There it has sat for slightly less than 2 days.
So the original plan was to get up, start the fire, smoke the thing for most of a day, and have a nice dinner at around 6:30 or 7pm. The Best Laid Plans and all that... turns out we don't get the luxury of having a nice leisurely dinner. Having a grown-up daughter who's only in town for a day means sharing her with all of the friends she grew up with who also haven't seen her in years. So the deadline is now an afternoon late-lunch of brisket.
"but Brisket can't be rushed, you say..."
That's what I thought, too. This is where the panic sets in. Obviously for a full-size brisket it would work better to have started smoking the whole thing last night. Where's the TARDIS when you really need it? Or that little necklace Hermione had in the Harry Potter series that was elemental to the plot in saving Buckbeak, but somehow couldn't be used to go back in time and save Harry's parents or rescue Dumbledore. Maybe Doc Brown is available with his deLorean. I know, I know, he'd probably just lecture me about the dangers of rewriting history and all that. That's the thing about time travel, it's so risky...
So instead of breaking the space-time continuum this time, I'm just going to try to see if I can get this thing to get done a little faster by using some very unorthodox methods and tricks that will probably make the BBQ purist curse my name. The following method will get your brisket done faster, if you absolutely positively can't wait 12 hours.
1: take the casserole dish with the marinating brisket and place it (covered with foil) in a 350-degree oven. Set the timer for 45 minutes.
2: while the brisket is in the oven, go out and set some wood on fire. Let the firebox rage and heat up the BBQ to smoking temperature. I usually start a full cylinder of lump charcoal, and once that is going I pour that into the firebox and add 2 full-sized pieces of oak. Run it with the dampers full open at first until the wood all catches. The smoker will heat up to 450+ right away once the wood is fully burning. At that point I turn the intake damper down to about 1/4 open, add a big piece of cherry wood, and let the fire settle.
Once the smoker temp is cruising along back down at a steady 225, it's ready for the meat. If the timing is right, the meat will have been braising along in the oven for 45 minutes by now. Time to...
3. Take the brisket out of the oven. I use a digital meat thermometer, now would be the time to stick the probe into the thickest part of the meat. It should already be reading 80-90 degrees internally. Set the temp alarm for 180 degrees.
4. One more step in the preparation: Take 6 strips of bacon and weave them together in a mat; lay the mat on top of the brisket to take the place of the fat-cap that the butcher so thoughtlessly removed.
5. Take the bacon-matted beef out to the smoker and place it directly on the grate. Find something to do for the next few hours.
6. Check the wood every so often; you'll probably need to add more wood every few hours or so. If the smoker temp gets too hot or too cold, adjust the damper to regulate the level of air in the firebox so the smoker stays right around 225 to 250.
7. At this point you can make some of my death-defying BBQ sauce.
8. When the internal beef temp reaches 150 or so, it will hit a plateau. No one knows why this happens, but the temp will rise steadily until it gets to 150-ish, then it will stay there for hours. Keep the BBQ temp steady, don't panic, everything is normal. It will eventually start rising again. After that you'll need to watch it closely because it will rapidly jump up to 165, at which point you're less than an hour away from carving into it.
9. When the meat hits 165 or so, take the (now fully-cooked) bacon off, mop it with some sauce and put it in a "Texas Crutch". That's basically fancy-talk for wrapping the meat in foil for the last hour of cooking. This keeps the meat moist and juicy and helps give it just that little extra added tenderization at the end. It's important to keep the fire going at this point, usually by this time the coals are starting to die down a little bit.
10. This is a good time to get those side dishes started!
11. When the meat's internal temp reaches 180 you have a choice: you can pull it off the heat (keep the foil wrapped around it) and let it sit for 30 minutes before carving, or you can leave it on the heat. I sometimes leave mine on until it reaches 200, it will be well-done inside but won't be dry because it's in the foil.
12. That's it: take it out of the foil and slice it into thin slices across the grain. This meat will be so flavorful it will make you jump up and down. 8-hour brisket won't be as tender as 12-hour brisket, (after all, I canna' defy the laws of physics, Captain!) but it'll be flavorful and juicy. Put the sauce on the table as a garnish, chances are it won't even be needed.
10.
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Website: Major upgrade in the works...
Well, it's that time again. I haven't updated my website since 2010. Technology keeps going, and it's high time I got going with it.
I started my first website in 1995, pretentiously titled "JazzSite". At that time, the web was brand new, HTML was in its infancy and there were no rules. No one else nabbed the name "JazzSite" (until later when they did) -- so why not?
I had, at the time, the grand vision of a "virtual jazz club" where jazz fans and players could socialize, post messages for each other, listen to clips, and promote each other's gigs. A tall order, especially given the state of technology at the time -- we were all still using dial-up modems at the time at the blazingly-slow speed of 28.8kbps (or if you were lucky enough to work at a computer store, you might've been one of the few early-adopters of 56k modem technology) -- no broadband, no cable modems, no DSL, no satellite, those were the days, ahhh!
Thanks to the Wayback Machine, there is still a copy of that old site out there. The last time I updated that one was I think 1997, at the crest of the forefront of the Swing Revival when a lot of us were seeing our jazz audiences grow from 20 to 200 to 2000 overnight. Still very primitive by today's standards, and ugly too! Some of the links don't work anymore but there's still some content up there so check it out...
The Petepetersen.com domain was started in 1999, and the early incarnations of that site were fairly primitive by today's standards too. That was back before anybody knew what an MP3 was, and YouTube didn't exist yet... We had RealAudio (now known as RealPlayer) and Quicktime for our audio clips, a gig calendar that was updated the old fashioned way by changing the HTML every time a new gig was added to the calendar, the standard "business card info" of address and phone number (remember when people still used their phones for calling other people to talk to them?) and a few low-res jpg images.
Since those days, the website has been maintained and updated, new tricks added (remember when javascript mouseovers first came out, and every page had images that would change to other images as the mouse moved over it?) and in 2010 I completely overhauled the entire site to make it easier to find important content by changing the layout to vaguely resemble a social networking site everyone else was using - but the whole thing still basically functioned as an 'online business card' as it always did.
Lately it occurs to me that people use the web in a completely different way than they did back then; we have plenty of Social Networking options (facebook, twitter, etc), lots of Content-providing options (YouTube, Instagram, SoundCloud), some very solid e-commerce options to sell CDs and merch (iTunes, Amazon, CafePress), a very nice Musician-friendly gig-advertising site (Reverbnation) and even Blogging options such as this one. People are also using smartphones and tablets to surf the web in addition to desktop computers. So why is the average musician website nothing more than an online business card? Why not take every advantage of the new web?
So as I overhaul the site this time, I am trying to remain conscious of the new ways people are using the web for information, and what they will see when they first open up the petepetersen.com page:
First off, the new site will have a portal page with easy links to my Facebook page, my Twitter feed, this Blogspot, my AllMusicGuide entry, my ReverbNation, my SoundCloud, my YouTube channel, etc. Those sites are where most of us spend our online lives, so that's the first thing people will see, right there in front. The front page will also have basic contact info (phone # etc) of course, and then it will have a "click to enter site" link that could possibly determine whether they want to go to a version of the site optimized for smartphones.
One of the things everyone should keep in mind when designing a website is what the purpose of that site is. What do people need to see there, and what is the intent? For anyone in the creative arts, especially in music, this is a difficult question. We need our site to be an 'online business card' with our contact info, and we also need to display samples of our work and let others know about upcoming opportunities to see and hear us. We need to sell our music (a primary source of income!!) and other merchandise. Most of us also teach, so it's important to have resources for students, as well as a curriculum vitae displaying prominent credentials as a teacher or instructor. All of this information splays out in many different directions, so one purpose of a musician website should be to organize information and make it easy for everyone to find exactly what they need to find. And finally, a good music website should be a resource for content, something to draw traffic in. Something like Charles McNeal has on his page, with a huge resource of transcribed solos. Or Dave Valdez's Casa Valdez page. Or Ralph Patt, whose "Vanilla Book" is still a great resource for finding the basic chord changes for a ton of jazz standards. Or these guys, with hundreds of pages of advice for young jazzers. Those sites all get huge amounts of traffic, much more so than the typical "online business card" site that most musicians have.
So here are a few of the things my new website will have:
And yes, that stuff ALL needs to be there, and it all needs to be easy to find!!! A Herculean effort if ever there was one. But it is possible. Take a look at Jay Thomas's page, for example.
So as we go forward, I will be making changes to my website. I will gladly be accepting help from my daughter, Alyx Jolivet, to design the new site. She knows what she's doing, yo! If any of you out there reading this have any additional suggestions for content, ideas, design, etc, please feel free to leave them in the comments section - I look forward to hearing from you!
See you next time!!!
Pete
I started my first website in 1995, pretentiously titled "JazzSite". At that time, the web was brand new, HTML was in its infancy and there were no rules. No one else nabbed the name "JazzSite" (until later when they did) -- so why not?
I had, at the time, the grand vision of a "virtual jazz club" where jazz fans and players could socialize, post messages for each other, listen to clips, and promote each other's gigs. A tall order, especially given the state of technology at the time -- we were all still using dial-up modems at the time at the blazingly-slow speed of 28.8kbps (or if you were lucky enough to work at a computer store, you might've been one of the few early-adopters of 56k modem technology) -- no broadband, no cable modems, no DSL, no satellite, those were the days, ahhh!
Thanks to the Wayback Machine, there is still a copy of that old site out there. The last time I updated that one was I think 1997, at the crest of the forefront of the Swing Revival when a lot of us were seeing our jazz audiences grow from 20 to 200 to 2000 overnight. Still very primitive by today's standards, and ugly too! Some of the links don't work anymore but there's still some content up there so check it out...
The Petepetersen.com domain was started in 1999, and the early incarnations of that site were fairly primitive by today's standards too. That was back before anybody knew what an MP3 was, and YouTube didn't exist yet... We had RealAudio (now known as RealPlayer) and Quicktime for our audio clips, a gig calendar that was updated the old fashioned way by changing the HTML every time a new gig was added to the calendar, the standard "business card info" of address and phone number (remember when people still used their phones for calling other people to talk to them?) and a few low-res jpg images.
Since those days, the website has been maintained and updated, new tricks added (remember when javascript mouseovers first came out, and every page had images that would change to other images as the mouse moved over it?) and in 2010 I completely overhauled the entire site to make it easier to find important content by changing the layout to vaguely resemble a social networking site everyone else was using - but the whole thing still basically functioned as an 'online business card' as it always did.
Lately it occurs to me that people use the web in a completely different way than they did back then; we have plenty of Social Networking options (facebook, twitter, etc), lots of Content-providing options (YouTube, Instagram, SoundCloud), some very solid e-commerce options to sell CDs and merch (iTunes, Amazon, CafePress), a very nice Musician-friendly gig-advertising site (Reverbnation) and even Blogging options such as this one. People are also using smartphones and tablets to surf the web in addition to desktop computers. So why is the average musician website nothing more than an online business card? Why not take every advantage of the new web?
So as I overhaul the site this time, I am trying to remain conscious of the new ways people are using the web for information, and what they will see when they first open up the petepetersen.com page:
First off, the new site will have a portal page with easy links to my Facebook page, my Twitter feed, this Blogspot, my AllMusicGuide entry, my ReverbNation, my SoundCloud, my YouTube channel, etc. Those sites are where most of us spend our online lives, so that's the first thing people will see, right there in front. The front page will also have basic contact info (phone # etc) of course, and then it will have a "click to enter site" link that could possibly determine whether they want to go to a version of the site optimized for smartphones.
One of the things everyone should keep in mind when designing a website is what the purpose of that site is. What do people need to see there, and what is the intent? For anyone in the creative arts, especially in music, this is a difficult question. We need our site to be an 'online business card' with our contact info, and we also need to display samples of our work and let others know about upcoming opportunities to see and hear us. We need to sell our music (a primary source of income!!) and other merchandise. Most of us also teach, so it's important to have resources for students, as well as a curriculum vitae displaying prominent credentials as a teacher or instructor. All of this information splays out in many different directions, so one purpose of a musician website should be to organize information and make it easy for everyone to find exactly what they need to find. And finally, a good music website should be a resource for content, something to draw traffic in. Something like Charles McNeal has on his page, with a huge resource of transcribed solos. Or Dave Valdez's Casa Valdez page. Or Ralph Patt, whose "Vanilla Book" is still a great resource for finding the basic chord changes for a ton of jazz standards. Or these guys, with hundreds of pages of advice for young jazzers. Those sites all get huge amounts of traffic, much more so than the typical "online business card" site that most musicians have.
So here are a few of the things my new website will have:
- Contact Info (phone, address, email, etc)
- Audio Clips, Video clips, Photos and other "sell the band" content
- Dynamically-updating content (blog, RSS, gig calendar, etc)
- Information about various services offered (arranger, orchestrator, freelance sidemusician & woodwind specialist, Instructor/educator, etc)
- Samples of arranging/orchestration work and an easy explanation of rates/prices/etc.
- Links to e-commerce sites where my for-sale items can be purchased (iTunes, Amazon, cafePress, etc)
- Promo (press quotes, hi-res images, etc)
- Business essentials (stage plots, sample contracts, riders, etc)
- Biography/discography/Curriculum Vitae
- Educational resources (pdf exercises, transcriptions, course descriptions, handouts for students)
- Some new and unique eye-popping content that you can only get right here at petepetersen.com
And yes, that stuff ALL needs to be there, and it all needs to be easy to find!!! A Herculean effort if ever there was one. But it is possible. Take a look at Jay Thomas's page, for example.
So as we go forward, I will be making changes to my website. I will gladly be accepting help from my daughter, Alyx Jolivet, to design the new site. She knows what she's doing, yo! If any of you out there reading this have any additional suggestions for content, ideas, design, etc, please feel free to leave them in the comments section - I look forward to hearing from you!
See you next time!!!
Pete
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Tips for venues on how to be successful with Live Music
I have worked as a professional musician for over 20 years. Through that time, I have traveled to many different cities, I have seen venues come and go, I have seen businesses succeed and I have seen others fail, and through it all I have accumulated quite a few good suggestions for anyone who wishes to be successful hosting live music. Whether you're a nightclub wishing to have live music on a regular basis, or an events promoter who does an event with a live band once in a while, or a swing dancer wanting to put on a big dance-centered event with one, or possibly multiple, live bands; I hope these tips will help your event become a successful one.
1. Give your potential audience an expectation, and then exceed that expectation. Give your event or venue a focus. Audiences need to know what they're getting into. If you're a jazz venue, stick to a jazz format. If you're a blues venue, stick to hiring blues bands. The most successful nightclubs with long-running histories have a built-in reputations that are more powerful than any other form of advertising. If you walk into the Blue Note or the Village Vanguard in New York City, you know exactly what type of music you will hear, no matter who the musicians are. There is a club in Denver called El Chapultepec that has had live jazz seven nights a week every night since the 1930s. The faces of the musicians come and go, the style of the music changes with the times, but everyone in the city knows that if they want to hear good jazz music any night of the week, they can walk into the 'Pec and they won't be disappointed. The same goes for the Candlelight, a blues club in Portland, OR. Blues fans no that no matter what night of the week, they can go to the Candlelight and hear some great live blues music. The club doesn't need to tell people that they are a blues club; that's understood because they have never deviated from that format through all of their years.
This principle also applies to event organizers, not just nightclubs. I have played music for swing dancers for the past 14 or 15 years and have seen those events succeed or fail too. The most successful events are the ones that have a "theme". Something that gives audiences an idea of what they're buying a ticket to. This can be as simple as a catchy, descriptive name, or it can be an entire marketing plan, but it needs to be something that clearly conveys to your potential audience exactly what they should expect at your event. This is called Branding, and it is important if you want people to attend your event.
Please note that your Theme doesn't necessarily need to limit the style of music you present to your audiences. Having a singular style of music definitely makes it easier for your customers to define their Expectations, but it is by no means the only way to do so. Your theme could be "French Restaurant with classy acoustic background music". Or it could be "we serve the finest local wines, and look we have Live Music too." The only rule is, if you're planning on presenting Live Music at your event or venue, give your audience an idea of what to expect and why it's important that they spend their money at your venue or event.
2. Reach the widest audience possible - This is the number one secret to success in any business, and the number one preventable cause of failure. The Live Music business is no exception. Unless your Theme (see above) is "we're so hip we don't want anyone to know about us" in which case your business should expect to lose money for at least a year or two while the word-of-mouth does its work, (which is doubly ironic since the shelf-life of a "too-hip-to-advertise" business is only a couple of years until the hipsters decide that their hangout has become "too mainstream" and move on) the Bottom Line is you should always plan on reaching the widest possible audience. You might have an idea of what kind of clientele is your "target audience". By all means court them, cater to their every whim, but don't exclude the rest of the world in the process. You yourself might not care about little details like atmosphere, wall decor, or the quality of the wood in the dance floor, but as crazy as it sounds, there are potential paying customers who do care about those things, and it could mean the difference between having a few people walk through your door who share exactly the same interests with you, or having a lot of people walk through your door who share enough similarities to be interested.
This is all about atmosphere. 10% of your potential clientele might be interested in exactly the same reasons for being there that you are. But in order to achieve "critical mass" you need to give 100% of your potential clientele a reason for wanting to cross your threshold. Some of them might be there for the drinks. Others might be there for the food. Some might choose your venue because of your fine selection of microbrews. Others might enjoy the fact that you have a dance floor. There might even be some who like the color scheme of the artwork on your walls. Whatever the reason, it is vitally important to understand that different people have different reasons for going out on the town. The more of these reasons you can successfully accommodate, the more people will have an incentive to choose your venue in which to spend their money.
One example of a business failing because of this: I once worked as a musician in the house band at a jazz club in a ski town in Colorado. The owner's vision was to provide a "touch of class" in the midst of all the skier bars and pub hangouts where the smell of days-old beer and cigarette ashes permeated the bare floors of all of those other places. So he invested in a sound system, built a stage, covered his entire floors with carpet, and emphasized an upscale atmosphere with good food and classy jazz music instead of the typical bar-band fare. A nice concept, which could've worked well. He even made his venue non-smoking, which, in 1994 was still unheard-of for a bar. But he overdid it. He stocked his bar with top-shelf scotch and decided to charge at least $1 more per-drink for his Well drinks than any other bar within walking distance. (note: in a ski resort town, there are Many bars within walking distance!) His rationale was that this would limit his clientele to only those with plenty of money to spend. Venue owners call this a "riff-raff filter" and yes that's a real term in the industry. So what happened? Customers would go get liquored up down the street and then come in and listen to the high-quality music for free. Due to the density of bars featuring Live Music within walking distance, no bar was willing to be the first to charge a cover, so the only way any of them could make any money was from food/beverage sales; the other bars were all doing fine but he was losing money every night even though his room was packed with people. The riff-raff filter didn't keep out the riff-raff, it just kept them from spending any money in his establishment. Meanwhile, his bar was so crowded with non-paying customers, that the people who did want to buy drinks from him had to wait 45 minutes to get served by one overworked waitress. The lesson to be learned from this: this owner could have easily turned his business around by offering a low-cost, competitively priced alternative to his top-shelf fare. His top-shelf clientele would still show up; he had done everything else right; atmosphere, music, food, sound system -- but his one crucial mistake was not having at least a few affordable menu/drink items for the casual bar crowd that made up 90% of his potential customer base. Instead, he chose to blame the band for costing him too much in overhead. He fired the band, cancelled his Live Music to save money (thus eliminating the one remaining reason why customers should patronize his establishment at all) and his doors were permanently closed in less than a year.
Another example of a narrow audience base leading to a diminished role for Live Music is the Swing Dancing scene. I have been playing music for Swing Dancers since the early days of the "revival" in 1997. Before that, I was playing in a Big Band in a small club on Wednesday nights. The guys in the band, all professional musicians with established careers, saw these Wednesdays as our "bowling league nights". You know, a chance for 18 guys to hang out and drink beer and have fun making music together for $20 bucks per man. Our audience consisted of about 30 dedicated fans who showed up regularly once a week to dance to our music and drink wine. Then, suddenly, in about 1997, we saw our audience explode to 200 young people trying to cram into that tiny space. We eventually moved to a larger space, a former Masonic temple that had been repurposed with a brand new, pristine dance floor -- and not much else. No bar, no food, no atmosphere, and no fun. Our original fans, most of whom liked to enjoy a few glasses of wine or beer throughout the night, stopped going to these dances where no alcohol was served. The new crowd of Lindy Hoppers stopped going too, because they discovered there was a different swing band with a weekly gig at an actual bar, their dance floor was slightly smaller but still big enough to accommodate hundreds of dancers. Inexplicably (since the majority of swing dancers don't drink) the presence of alcohol and an actual "bar atmosphere" seems to be more inviting than a multipurpose building with a great dance floor but no atmosphere.
I use the word 'inexplicably' because the majority of swing dancers will tell you they don't drink and that they don't care if there's no alcohol, no food, etc -- but obviously someone does care, and here is the truth of the situation: a successful Live Music event needs some diversity. DJ'd dance events on the other hand do not. A Swing Dance Event with a top-notch DJ and top-notch instructors will attract people who are interested in dancing, but a Live Music event necessarily needs to attract listeners as well as dancers in order to be viable. Even back then, this was true. The most successful "dance" events took place at bars and established businesses where people could dance if they wanted to, or they could sit and be a bystander and feel like they were part of the "scene" even if they weren't participating. The past few years have seen too many Swing Dance events organized by people who don't put much thought into anything but the bare essentials: the dance floor, the band, the DJ, the instructors, etc... Don't get me wrong, these are all important!! But they are not the only things that are important. Lots of people, especially those who are listeners or who are casual sometimes-dancers like to sit and have a drink, socialize, and watch once in a while. If you want your event to be successful, give those people some kind of reason to be there, too.
There is a certain amount of attrition to the Swing Dance scene (dancers grow up and start families & don't go out all the time anymore) and there is hardly any new blood coming in. The dancers' solution to this, unfortunately, has been to hire fewer live bands, to rely more on DJs playing recorded music for their events. For one thing, it's cheaper; and for another, if people only care about the dancing, the floor, the instructors, etc at their event, then Live Music is less of a priority and is often the first thing to get cut when budgets are an issue. Swing organizers will often pay huge amounts of money for big Name instructors to teach their dance lessons, but they balk at paying for a live band or paying to have their event in a decorated room with food and/or drinks for the non-dancers. As a result, the only people who show up to these events anymore are those who are so completely obsessed with dancing that nothing else matters. And how does one become so completely obsessed with dancing in the first place? Every one of these dancers started out as a non-dancer first; they came to the venue or event for some other reason (such as to hear the band) and they decided the dancing looked like a lot of fun. That's not going to happen if you don't give them a reason to show up in the first place.
If you want to organize a successful Swing Dancing event, or an ongoing successful Swing Dancing community, the secret is to grow your community; reach out to non-dancers and give them a reason to keep coming back. Appeal to the widest audience possible. And I'm not talking about just offering a free lesson ahead of the band's performance. Most people will not take the lesson their first few times, they just want to watch, soak up the scene, determine whether they want to join in. People are inherently shy, they need to feel comfortable. It's a lot easier to make people feel comfortable if they have some semblance of ambience they're used to. A bar, a restaurant, a candlelit table, things people associate with "going out on the town". Most people do not associate a gymnasium or multipurpose building with "going out on the town" so if you want to appeal to a wider audience than just established swing dancers, (and you should want to appeal to a wider audience than just established swing dancers) you need to create an atmosphere that gives people a lot of reasons to want to be there, not just the dancing.
3. Location, location, location - this is another most important secret to success. If you're operating a bar where your primary income is from liquor sales, you want to be located in a part of the city where people don't have to do a whole lot of driving when they leave your establishment. Access to public transportation and/or taxi service is important, and will increase your liquor sales and overall patronage. If you're operating a Live Music venue, you want to be accessible and easy to find, with plenty of parking and conveniently located to other eating and drinking establishments. When people are going "out on the town" or to "dinner and a show", they're typically going to start at a restaurant, then go to your Live Music venue, then possibly finish up at a bar if the date is going really well. If all of those establishments are within walking distance of each other, that increases the likelihood that your venue will be on their itinerary. If they have to park their car more than once, it's not as likely - especially if there's alcohol involved. The most successful Live Music venues are the ones that are easy to find. Having a prominently displayed marquee advertising your place of business definitely helps, but even more simply than that, picture yourself as someone giving a newcomer directions to your establishment. The more complicated the directions are, the less likely they'll be to find it. A simple cross-street directive works best, such as "12th and Hawthorne on the East Side", or "NW 10th and Everett" - but if you have to tell someone "it's at that weird triangle-shaped intersection where the 205 and the 26 come together at the bottom of the hill below the medical school" your potential audience is going to be lost before they even start looking for your place. Also: the Suburbs are automatically a bad location for a Live Music venue, don't even try.
4. Promote it like it's the Second Coming. Seriously. Your target audience should feel like their lives will be over if they miss this event. They should have no excuse to miss it. "I didn't hear about it because I never saw it advertised anywhere" are words that should never be uttered by anyone in your target audience. Which brings up another point: Never expect the band to do your promoting for you. Musicians are very good at entertaining people but as a general rule we aren't promoters. We always do everything we can, including mailing lists, emails, and Facebook/Myspace/Twitter feeds, but your event needs the benefit of a real P/R professional to really do it right.
5. Get your reputation honestly. Face it, the first few weeks any new club is open, they'll still be ironing the bugs out. Some customers will have to wait too long for their food, others might have trouble finding parking, who knows what or why but there are bound to be people who have a bad experience during the first few months of a venue's existence. And unfortunately, those people are likely to complain to their friends, because it's human nature. This is normal, and it's why the rule of thumb in the nightclub business is to have enough capital to be able to operate at a loss for a full year before things turn around. The people who wrote that rule knew this fact: first impressions happen immediately, but lasting reputations are built over time. Keep your focus and don't lose your mojo; the number of people who have good experiences at your venue over time will overcome the few who had a bad experience early on. If your menu is tasty and your music is worth the money people are paying in cover charges, people will eventually catch on. (on the other hand, if the bad reputation is well-deserved, good luck trying to shake that, because people will complain, especially if they keep having a reason to.)
Note that this is not an end-all-be-all of how to run a nightclub or live music venue. I sure wouldn't want to do it. My hat's off to the people who do - it's a tough business but we all appreciate the fact that there are still live music venues out there. Hopefully some of them will take this advice to heart and stay in business...
1. Give your potential audience an expectation, and then exceed that expectation. Give your event or venue a focus. Audiences need to know what they're getting into. If you're a jazz venue, stick to a jazz format. If you're a blues venue, stick to hiring blues bands. The most successful nightclubs with long-running histories have a built-in reputations that are more powerful than any other form of advertising. If you walk into the Blue Note or the Village Vanguard in New York City, you know exactly what type of music you will hear, no matter who the musicians are. There is a club in Denver called El Chapultepec that has had live jazz seven nights a week every night since the 1930s. The faces of the musicians come and go, the style of the music changes with the times, but everyone in the city knows that if they want to hear good jazz music any night of the week, they can walk into the 'Pec and they won't be disappointed. The same goes for the Candlelight, a blues club in Portland, OR. Blues fans no that no matter what night of the week, they can go to the Candlelight and hear some great live blues music. The club doesn't need to tell people that they are a blues club; that's understood because they have never deviated from that format through all of their years.
This principle also applies to event organizers, not just nightclubs. I have played music for swing dancers for the past 14 or 15 years and have seen those events succeed or fail too. The most successful events are the ones that have a "theme". Something that gives audiences an idea of what they're buying a ticket to. This can be as simple as a catchy, descriptive name, or it can be an entire marketing plan, but it needs to be something that clearly conveys to your potential audience exactly what they should expect at your event. This is called Branding, and it is important if you want people to attend your event.
Please note that your Theme doesn't necessarily need to limit the style of music you present to your audiences. Having a singular style of music definitely makes it easier for your customers to define their Expectations, but it is by no means the only way to do so. Your theme could be "French Restaurant with classy acoustic background music". Or it could be "we serve the finest local wines, and look we have Live Music too." The only rule is, if you're planning on presenting Live Music at your event or venue, give your audience an idea of what to expect and why it's important that they spend their money at your venue or event.
2. Reach the widest audience possible - This is the number one secret to success in any business, and the number one preventable cause of failure. The Live Music business is no exception. Unless your Theme (see above) is "we're so hip we don't want anyone to know about us" in which case your business should expect to lose money for at least a year or two while the word-of-mouth does its work, (which is doubly ironic since the shelf-life of a "too-hip-to-advertise" business is only a couple of years until the hipsters decide that their hangout has become "too mainstream" and move on) the Bottom Line is you should always plan on reaching the widest possible audience. You might have an idea of what kind of clientele is your "target audience". By all means court them, cater to their every whim, but don't exclude the rest of the world in the process. You yourself might not care about little details like atmosphere, wall decor, or the quality of the wood in the dance floor, but as crazy as it sounds, there are potential paying customers who do care about those things, and it could mean the difference between having a few people walk through your door who share exactly the same interests with you, or having a lot of people walk through your door who share enough similarities to be interested.
This is all about atmosphere. 10% of your potential clientele might be interested in exactly the same reasons for being there that you are. But in order to achieve "critical mass" you need to give 100% of your potential clientele a reason for wanting to cross your threshold. Some of them might be there for the drinks. Others might be there for the food. Some might choose your venue because of your fine selection of microbrews. Others might enjoy the fact that you have a dance floor. There might even be some who like the color scheme of the artwork on your walls. Whatever the reason, it is vitally important to understand that different people have different reasons for going out on the town. The more of these reasons you can successfully accommodate, the more people will have an incentive to choose your venue in which to spend their money.
One example of a business failing because of this: I once worked as a musician in the house band at a jazz club in a ski town in Colorado. The owner's vision was to provide a "touch of class" in the midst of all the skier bars and pub hangouts where the smell of days-old beer and cigarette ashes permeated the bare floors of all of those other places. So he invested in a sound system, built a stage, covered his entire floors with carpet, and emphasized an upscale atmosphere with good food and classy jazz music instead of the typical bar-band fare. A nice concept, which could've worked well. He even made his venue non-smoking, which, in 1994 was still unheard-of for a bar. But he overdid it. He stocked his bar with top-shelf scotch and decided to charge at least $1 more per-drink for his Well drinks than any other bar within walking distance. (note: in a ski resort town, there are Many bars within walking distance!) His rationale was that this would limit his clientele to only those with plenty of money to spend. Venue owners call this a "riff-raff filter" and yes that's a real term in the industry. So what happened? Customers would go get liquored up down the street and then come in and listen to the high-quality music for free. Due to the density of bars featuring Live Music within walking distance, no bar was willing to be the first to charge a cover, so the only way any of them could make any money was from food/beverage sales; the other bars were all doing fine but he was losing money every night even though his room was packed with people. The riff-raff filter didn't keep out the riff-raff, it just kept them from spending any money in his establishment. Meanwhile, his bar was so crowded with non-paying customers, that the people who did want to buy drinks from him had to wait 45 minutes to get served by one overworked waitress. The lesson to be learned from this: this owner could have easily turned his business around by offering a low-cost, competitively priced alternative to his top-shelf fare. His top-shelf clientele would still show up; he had done everything else right; atmosphere, music, food, sound system -- but his one crucial mistake was not having at least a few affordable menu/drink items for the casual bar crowd that made up 90% of his potential customer base. Instead, he chose to blame the band for costing him too much in overhead. He fired the band, cancelled his Live Music to save money (thus eliminating the one remaining reason why customers should patronize his establishment at all) and his doors were permanently closed in less than a year.
Another example of a narrow audience base leading to a diminished role for Live Music is the Swing Dancing scene. I have been playing music for Swing Dancers since the early days of the "revival" in 1997. Before that, I was playing in a Big Band in a small club on Wednesday nights. The guys in the band, all professional musicians with established careers, saw these Wednesdays as our "bowling league nights". You know, a chance for 18 guys to hang out and drink beer and have fun making music together for $20 bucks per man. Our audience consisted of about 30 dedicated fans who showed up regularly once a week to dance to our music and drink wine. Then, suddenly, in about 1997, we saw our audience explode to 200 young people trying to cram into that tiny space. We eventually moved to a larger space, a former Masonic temple that had been repurposed with a brand new, pristine dance floor -- and not much else. No bar, no food, no atmosphere, and no fun. Our original fans, most of whom liked to enjoy a few glasses of wine or beer throughout the night, stopped going to these dances where no alcohol was served. The new crowd of Lindy Hoppers stopped going too, because they discovered there was a different swing band with a weekly gig at an actual bar, their dance floor was slightly smaller but still big enough to accommodate hundreds of dancers. Inexplicably (since the majority of swing dancers don't drink) the presence of alcohol and an actual "bar atmosphere" seems to be more inviting than a multipurpose building with a great dance floor but no atmosphere.
I use the word 'inexplicably' because the majority of swing dancers will tell you they don't drink and that they don't care if there's no alcohol, no food, etc -- but obviously someone does care, and here is the truth of the situation: a successful Live Music event needs some diversity. DJ'd dance events on the other hand do not. A Swing Dance Event with a top-notch DJ and top-notch instructors will attract people who are interested in dancing, but a Live Music event necessarily needs to attract listeners as well as dancers in order to be viable. Even back then, this was true. The most successful "dance" events took place at bars and established businesses where people could dance if they wanted to, or they could sit and be a bystander and feel like they were part of the "scene" even if they weren't participating. The past few years have seen too many Swing Dance events organized by people who don't put much thought into anything but the bare essentials: the dance floor, the band, the DJ, the instructors, etc... Don't get me wrong, these are all important!! But they are not the only things that are important. Lots of people, especially those who are listeners or who are casual sometimes-dancers like to sit and have a drink, socialize, and watch once in a while. If you want your event to be successful, give those people some kind of reason to be there, too.
There is a certain amount of attrition to the Swing Dance scene (dancers grow up and start families & don't go out all the time anymore) and there is hardly any new blood coming in. The dancers' solution to this, unfortunately, has been to hire fewer live bands, to rely more on DJs playing recorded music for their events. For one thing, it's cheaper; and for another, if people only care about the dancing, the floor, the instructors, etc at their event, then Live Music is less of a priority and is often the first thing to get cut when budgets are an issue. Swing organizers will often pay huge amounts of money for big Name instructors to teach their dance lessons, but they balk at paying for a live band or paying to have their event in a decorated room with food and/or drinks for the non-dancers. As a result, the only people who show up to these events anymore are those who are so completely obsessed with dancing that nothing else matters. And how does one become so completely obsessed with dancing in the first place? Every one of these dancers started out as a non-dancer first; they came to the venue or event for some other reason (such as to hear the band) and they decided the dancing looked like a lot of fun. That's not going to happen if you don't give them a reason to show up in the first place.
If you want to organize a successful Swing Dancing event, or an ongoing successful Swing Dancing community, the secret is to grow your community; reach out to non-dancers and give them a reason to keep coming back. Appeal to the widest audience possible. And I'm not talking about just offering a free lesson ahead of the band's performance. Most people will not take the lesson their first few times, they just want to watch, soak up the scene, determine whether they want to join in. People are inherently shy, they need to feel comfortable. It's a lot easier to make people feel comfortable if they have some semblance of ambience they're used to. A bar, a restaurant, a candlelit table, things people associate with "going out on the town". Most people do not associate a gymnasium or multipurpose building with "going out on the town" so if you want to appeal to a wider audience than just established swing dancers, (and you should want to appeal to a wider audience than just established swing dancers) you need to create an atmosphere that gives people a lot of reasons to want to be there, not just the dancing.
3. Location, location, location - this is another most important secret to success. If you're operating a bar where your primary income is from liquor sales, you want to be located in a part of the city where people don't have to do a whole lot of driving when they leave your establishment. Access to public transportation and/or taxi service is important, and will increase your liquor sales and overall patronage. If you're operating a Live Music venue, you want to be accessible and easy to find, with plenty of parking and conveniently located to other eating and drinking establishments. When people are going "out on the town" or to "dinner and a show", they're typically going to start at a restaurant, then go to your Live Music venue, then possibly finish up at a bar if the date is going really well. If all of those establishments are within walking distance of each other, that increases the likelihood that your venue will be on their itinerary. If they have to park their car more than once, it's not as likely - especially if there's alcohol involved. The most successful Live Music venues are the ones that are easy to find. Having a prominently displayed marquee advertising your place of business definitely helps, but even more simply than that, picture yourself as someone giving a newcomer directions to your establishment. The more complicated the directions are, the less likely they'll be to find it. A simple cross-street directive works best, such as "12th and Hawthorne on the East Side", or "NW 10th and Everett" - but if you have to tell someone "it's at that weird triangle-shaped intersection where the 205 and the 26 come together at the bottom of the hill below the medical school" your potential audience is going to be lost before they even start looking for your place. Also: the Suburbs are automatically a bad location for a Live Music venue, don't even try.
4. Promote it like it's the Second Coming. Seriously. Your target audience should feel like their lives will be over if they miss this event. They should have no excuse to miss it. "I didn't hear about it because I never saw it advertised anywhere" are words that should never be uttered by anyone in your target audience. Which brings up another point: Never expect the band to do your promoting for you. Musicians are very good at entertaining people but as a general rule we aren't promoters. We always do everything we can, including mailing lists, emails, and Facebook/Myspace/Twitter feeds, but your event needs the benefit of a real P/R professional to really do it right.
5. Get your reputation honestly. Face it, the first few weeks any new club is open, they'll still be ironing the bugs out. Some customers will have to wait too long for their food, others might have trouble finding parking, who knows what or why but there are bound to be people who have a bad experience during the first few months of a venue's existence. And unfortunately, those people are likely to complain to their friends, because it's human nature. This is normal, and it's why the rule of thumb in the nightclub business is to have enough capital to be able to operate at a loss for a full year before things turn around. The people who wrote that rule knew this fact: first impressions happen immediately, but lasting reputations are built over time. Keep your focus and don't lose your mojo; the number of people who have good experiences at your venue over time will overcome the few who had a bad experience early on. If your menu is tasty and your music is worth the money people are paying in cover charges, people will eventually catch on. (on the other hand, if the bad reputation is well-deserved, good luck trying to shake that, because people will complain, especially if they keep having a reason to.)
Note that this is not an end-all-be-all of how to run a nightclub or live music venue. I sure wouldn't want to do it. My hat's off to the people who do - it's a tough business but we all appreciate the fact that there are still live music venues out there. Hopefully some of them will take this advice to heart and stay in business...
On "quitting your day job"...
It has been about 10 years since I officially "quit my day job".
Actually, I have had a lot of day jobs over the years. I've sold cutlery and vacuum cleaners, I've done my required tenure among the barista ranks (which I think is required to qualify as a Pacific Northwest resident), I've flipped burgers and I've served hot dogs at a venerable locally-owned fast food joint near the Denver University campus, I've delivered pizzas. With any career in the arts, one gets used to doing whatever one needs to do to pay the bills and keep a roof over one's head. I manned a call center for a while (yes, you too can activate your brand new MaestroCard which gives you reward points and free gasoline every time you use it at the pump!) I've done retail in clothing stores, shoe stores, computer stores and more, worked for awhile as a projectionist at a movie theater, and I was even a ski lift operator for awhile. Through all this I was also playing gigs for money and making a solid attempt to find the hours each day to practice and improve myself as a player.
The unfortunate reality is that a path to a lucrative career in the music industry doesn't ever start out immediately with a six-figure income. Or even a five- or four-figure income. Almost all musicians need to work multiple day jobs to afford to live while they develop their skills and do the requisite networking in order to hopefully eventually begin to earn some income as a music worker. The ones who can manage to stay focused on continuing to develop their musical skills while doing something else for money will eventually succeed, while those who choose to focus instead on doing something non-musical as a career will still hopefully be able to do music as a hobby and find some enjoyment, but that's never been enough for me. I have always had a drive to be the best musician I can be, and I have always found it incredibly frustrating when my skills aren't quite up to the level I think they should be; I don't think I would ever be able to be satisfied as a "hobbyist". For me it's never been any question about whether making music should be my number one priority; I see every day job as only a temporary means to finance my music habit, and I expect it will always be so. But the reality is that the bills need to get paid somehow, so we do what we must. Or at least we do what we think we must.
The truth of the matter is, music is a day job, or can be so if we treat it as such.
The first time I can remember not needing to work a day job at all was in 1993. I was part of a quartet that was the house band at a jazz club in the bustling mountain town of Telluride, Colorado. In the opening lines of the NPR JazzSet broadcast we were on, Branford Marsalis quipped "Welcome to Telluride, Colorado, a town that's so small that the number of jazz musicians who actually live here is small enough to fit into a quartet." In reality, Telluride was, at the time, getting the reputation of being the next Aspen. Or rather, the Aspen for those people who think Aspen has become too "celebrity mainstream". Our neighbors were movie stars, but they were the kind of movie stars who didn't want people to know where they were. One particular star, a famous director, had a house up on the hill with no roads leading to it; the only access was by helipad. Our gig in town was four nights a week, often the Telluride Jazz Festival people would bring a big name into town and we would be their band for the weekend, and the rest of the time we hiked, biked, skied, fished, and generally enjoyed the picturesque outdoor setting -- until, as all things do eventually, the gig ended, the club folded due to badly idiotic mismanagement and left us with no income and some very expensive ski-resort-town rent prices to keep up with. Ah, back to the day job. I took a job as a projectionist at the local theater, which was an older theater with two 35mm projectors; each film came to us in segments of 6 or more reels, part of my job was loading each projector while the other was running, and switching seamlessly as each segment ran out so the audience wouldn't notice anything going on behind the scenes. I also had a job as a ski lift operator during my year in Telluride, but that was more for the free ski pass than anything else.
Looking back on that year, I earned money by providing a service for which there was a demand. People came to that town to ski or fish or hike or bike during the day, but at night they wanted to be entertained by live music. We were employed by the club to provide that service. When the club closed and the demand for that service went away, we had to find other jobs providing services there was more demand for, and that took us out of the music realm temporarily, but for the better part of a year, we were full-time musicians without a
My first "day career" started to happen about the time I started to get tired of the retail rat race. I was working for a well-known computer store chain at the time, assistant-managing the cashier staff, counting register drawers and such, when an opening came for an entry-level position in the tech repair department. This company had a Squad of Geeks several years before that other company started driving around in black and white volkswagens. I have always been fascinated by computers - in 1981 I was part of a program at my school to be one of the lucky few to get out of regular math class and take computer programming classes learning BASIC on Radio Shack TRS-80s. I took the job in the tech department and began accumulating certifications. CompTIA A+, Apple ServiceSource, IBM, HP, Compaq, I took the exams and got the certifications and with every certification my value to the company rose. We wore red shirts (distantly foreshadowing the fact of our inevitable expendability) and for a while we were able to maintain the illusion that we were more than just the sales department's bitches. For three years I repaired Macs, PCs, laser printers, laptops, CRT's, and everything else, and by that time I was the Lead Technician (their version of an assisstant manager, or AssMan) in the department. I was able to make car payments, rent payments, and actually even put away some money.
But there was a dark side. I was neglecting my horn. I would wake in the morning and go to work, spend 8 to 10 hours dismantling laptop computers, replacing parts and reassembling them complete with a new "do not remove this sticker or warranty void" sticker courtesy of the manufacturers whose new parts we were replacing, and I would leave directly from work with my horn in the car, barely making it to the gig on time each night. And each night I would sound worse than the night before due to having not practiced. I was frequently late to gigs due to the fact that when you have a laptop in a million pieces on your bench, it can't be left alone overnight until it's put back together. I was also becoming more and more misanthropic. Customers who have broken computers were generally not very nice to the people who are trying to help fix their computers. And to top it off, we were but one department in one store that was part of a national chain - meaning I had about eight different bosses with eight different agendas. The tech manager was concerned that our department was not making the company enough money from repairs. The sales manager was concerned that our technicians were not "keeping our place" as the sales department's bitches. The original GM who had hired me was a former tech himself, but he got promoted to be a regional manager over all the stores in southern California, and his replacement the new GM was a sales guy, not a tech guy at all, so guess which department won that power struggle? I think the new GM had been the captain of his football team in high school and probably was one of those guys who liked to stuff nerds in lockers, so he clearly had a healthy amount of respect for all of us geeks in the tech department. (sarcasm).
I finally had enough when the sales manager came to us and told us we needed to start "finding" things wrong with people's computers so we could sell them hard drives, memory, and etc. Yeah, I don't like it when mechanics do that to me, why would I assume that it would be okay to do that to our computer repair customers? So I quit.
For a while I tried to stay with the tech field. I put an ad out, I mailed out flyers, I walked to local area businesses, and I got some tech clients together. All of a sudden instead of being paid $18/hour to do repairs that the company was charging $125/hour for, I was the one charging $125/hour. I paid my own taxes, bought my own supplies, and did my own one-man operation repairing PCs, laptops, laser printers, and etc. Meanwhile I was also accepting private music students and spending more time practicing again. Sooner or later another company offered me a job; this time it was a locally-owned Mac-specific sales and service company. They were, in fact, my dream job; I had submitted a resume to them years earlier and gotten no response; now they wanted me to be the manager in charge of their entire tech services department. And they were offering me a $50k/year starting salary, which, in 2002 was not too bad. I would've had to give up my own side tech business, but so what: I would be working on macs only, I would be around creative mac people in a fun work environment for a local company -- what's not to like?
Except:
It would've been a 70 to 80 hour/week time commitment. I would have had zero time to practice, and I would've had to give up all my students after spending the past 2 years developing rapport and seeing them progress from beginners to players of woodwind instruments. This was my dream job, but was the sacrifice too great? I agonized over the decision and during a conversation with my wife, I realized just in fact why she is awesome: "What would make you happy?" she asked. Of course, being able to perform and teach music full-time would make me happy. It's what I got my degree in, it's always been there, every day job I had ever had, including the past several years as an erstwhile geek, had been secondary to the fact that I am first and foremost a player of woodwind instruments.
So I called the nice people at the mac-only sales and service company, gave my apologies, and turned down my dream job so I could focus all my energy on being a musician.
The other thing that my amazingly awesome wife said to me was this: "If you put as much time and energy into your music as you did when you ran your own computer repair business, you will succeed." And she was right; I had put a full-time amount of work into advertising, bookkeeping, parts-ordering in addition to the actually repairing-the-computers part. Those things translate to the music biz as well. I spend time on the phone trying to book myself, I design flyers and advertisements, I go out and spend time networking with other music professionals, and that's all in addition to the time I spend actually practicing the 7 instruments I actively play on a regular basis.
And here is what I have learned in the ten years since I quit my day job: Any career worth any amount of reward is a hell of a lot of work. Music is no exception. There are certainly ways to enjoy music without making a career out of it, and there are large numbers of people who do just that. There are also people who like to throw a football or shoot a basketball at a hoop, some of whom are quite good at it but who would never dream of becoming a professional athlete. So I address this to those who choose to pursue music as a career, above and beyond the "hobbyist" level:
Firstly and foremostly, Be Better at it Than Everyone Else. "Good Enough" is not. There are so many music hobbyists who play instruments, who do one or two gigs a month and don't care if they get paid. Our job as professional musicians is to work hard to be better at it than the hobbyists, but beyond that our job is to be so good at it that we're justified in asking people to pay us to do it. There is no substitute for putting the necessary time in; most professionals spend at minimum 2 to 3 hours a day practicing scales, arpeggios and other exercises. This should be as regular as any other hourly-wage job. If you're going to expect to be paid to do a service, you need to be better at it than those other people who are offering to do the same service for free, otherwise why should anyone bother to pay you?
Secondly, we need to necessarily do a certain amount of selling. Any business will only succeed if there is demand for the product or service they are putting out. No demand = no dollars. In the music business, as in any entertainment-based industry, there isn't the same sense of necessity as there would be for food, clothing, or toilet paper. So we need to create that demand. Convince the nightclub owner why they would be better off hiring your band than a DJ or some other group of amateurs. Convince the concert promoter why they should take a risk on you when they put on their show. Convince the bandleader why they should hire you to play in their horn section. Convince the parents why they should hire you to teach their kids to play an instrument. Create demand for your product and people will buy it.
Thirdly, Diversify. There is no one road to success in the music business. You'll need to play in several bands at once, or play in one band that tours to several cities, and you'll also need to teach private lessons and more. All of these things added together make a career. The more instruments you play and/or teach, the better your chances of working. Professional musicians can't afford to be specialists. This also goes for the musical content or style of music you play. Sure, you might love to play avant-garde jazz, but if you want to work as a professional musician you'll also need to be able to play pop R&B dance music for weddings and corporate parties, and maybe do a few commercial jingles too. You don't have the luxury of being able to say "no" to a gig that's going to pay the bills just because you don't like that style of music. Your full-time job is to sound good at every style of music, so much so that people will never even suspect that you're out of your element.
Fourthly, Always Be Networking. This business is all about who you know. The more people you meet, the more opportunities you'll be able to make for yourself. As a bassist friend of mine says: "If you aren't appearing, you're dis-appearing."
Fifthly, Never Work For Free. It's the other side of "be good enough to justify your price". Once you have determined that your time and talent is worth money, you should never settle for less than the amount you're worth. Sometimes the actual amount will vary depending on the situation and it's important to be realistic and realize that nightclubs can't afford to pay as much as the big wedding and corporate clients, but there is no reason to ever give away your work.
Sixthly, however, there's also nothing wrong with handing out a sample once in a while if it makes intelligent business sense to do so. Costco stocks their lunch hour with dozens of people handing out samples of free food; they do this to increase demand and it works - They sell a lot of product that way. Other professionals hand out pens and fridge magnets with their business name and address on it, the local coffee stand uses punch cards to keep track of every five drinks you buy so they can give you the sixth one for free, retailers are always bringing customers in with "buy one get one free" specials. Guess what: there is nothing wrong with giving away a free sample if you do it in a way that brings in business. Most jazz musicians accomplish this by sitting in with other jazz musicians. It's also good to play a benefit show once in a while for a good cause if you can work it into a networking opportunity. Don't get carried away, your goal is to make money and you'll never do that if you're playing for free all the time, but it's okay to let people hear a sample of your work for free once in a while if you're doing it as part of a well thought-out business plan to increase demand for your services.
And seventhly, Be Professional. Show up on time, dress appropriately, have a good attitude and be easy to get along with and play nice with others. There is a big difference between getting a gig and keeping a gig. You get the gig based on your talent and networking abilities, but you'll keep the gig based on your ability to be a team player. This includes doing your homework and taking the time to learn the music ahead of the rehearsal. You're expecting people to pay you to do a service for them. Just like any other contractor or employee, part of what they're paying for is your professionalism. You wouldn't hold a job for very long in any other company if you constantly showed up late with a bad attitude and never put any attention into the quality of your work - So why would you expect it to be any different in the music business?
The bottom line is this: any career, in any field, takes a lot of focus and diligence to make it pan out and turn into dollars. The music business is no exception. Music has acquired an unfortunate reputation of being a hobby or pastime rather than a career, but it is definitely possible to earn a living as a music-industry worker. The key is to treat it like a career and work hard at it.
Actually, I have had a lot of day jobs over the years. I've sold cutlery and vacuum cleaners, I've done my required tenure among the barista ranks (which I think is required to qualify as a Pacific Northwest resident), I've flipped burgers and I've served hot dogs at a venerable locally-owned fast food joint near the Denver University campus, I've delivered pizzas. With any career in the arts, one gets used to doing whatever one needs to do to pay the bills and keep a roof over one's head. I manned a call center for a while (yes, you too can activate your brand new MaestroCard which gives you reward points and free gasoline every time you use it at the pump!) I've done retail in clothing stores, shoe stores, computer stores and more, worked for awhile as a projectionist at a movie theater, and I was even a ski lift operator for awhile. Through all this I was also playing gigs for money and making a solid attempt to find the hours each day to practice and improve myself as a player.
The unfortunate reality is that a path to a lucrative career in the music industry doesn't ever start out immediately with a six-figure income. Or even a five- or four-figure income. Almost all musicians need to work multiple day jobs to afford to live while they develop their skills and do the requisite networking in order to hopefully eventually begin to earn some income as a music worker. The ones who can manage to stay focused on continuing to develop their musical skills while doing something else for money will eventually succeed, while those who choose to focus instead on doing something non-musical as a career will still hopefully be able to do music as a hobby and find some enjoyment, but that's never been enough for me. I have always had a drive to be the best musician I can be, and I have always found it incredibly frustrating when my skills aren't quite up to the level I think they should be; I don't think I would ever be able to be satisfied as a "hobbyist". For me it's never been any question about whether making music should be my number one priority; I see every day job as only a temporary means to finance my music habit, and I expect it will always be so. But the reality is that the bills need to get paid somehow, so we do what we must. Or at least we do what we think we must.
The truth of the matter is, music is a day job, or can be so if we treat it as such.
The first time I can remember not needing to work a day job at all was in 1993. I was part of a quartet that was the house band at a jazz club in the bustling mountain town of Telluride, Colorado. In the opening lines of the NPR JazzSet broadcast we were on, Branford Marsalis quipped "Welcome to Telluride, Colorado, a town that's so small that the number of jazz musicians who actually live here is small enough to fit into a quartet." In reality, Telluride was, at the time, getting the reputation of being the next Aspen. Or rather, the Aspen for those people who think Aspen has become too "celebrity mainstream". Our neighbors were movie stars, but they were the kind of movie stars who didn't want people to know where they were. One particular star, a famous director, had a house up on the hill with no roads leading to it; the only access was by helipad. Our gig in town was four nights a week, often the Telluride Jazz Festival people would bring a big name into town and we would be their band for the weekend, and the rest of the time we hiked, biked, skied, fished, and generally enjoyed the picturesque outdoor setting -- until, as all things do eventually, the gig ended, the club folded due to badly idiotic mismanagement and left us with no income and some very expensive ski-resort-town rent prices to keep up with. Ah, back to the day job. I took a job as a projectionist at the local theater, which was an older theater with two 35mm projectors; each film came to us in segments of 6 or more reels, part of my job was loading each projector while the other was running, and switching seamlessly as each segment ran out so the audience wouldn't notice anything going on behind the scenes. I also had a job as a ski lift operator during my year in Telluride, but that was more for the free ski pass than anything else.
Looking back on that year, I earned money by providing a service for which there was a demand. People came to that town to ski or fish or hike or bike during the day, but at night they wanted to be entertained by live music. We were employed by the club to provide that service. When the club closed and the demand for that service went away, we had to find other jobs providing services there was more demand for, and that took us out of the music realm temporarily, but for the better part of a year, we were full-time musicians without a
My first "day career" started to happen about the time I started to get tired of the retail rat race. I was working for a well-known computer store chain at the time, assistant-managing the cashier staff, counting register drawers and such, when an opening came for an entry-level position in the tech repair department. This company had a Squad of Geeks several years before that other company started driving around in black and white volkswagens. I have always been fascinated by computers - in 1981 I was part of a program at my school to be one of the lucky few to get out of regular math class and take computer programming classes learning BASIC on Radio Shack TRS-80s. I took the job in the tech department and began accumulating certifications. CompTIA A+, Apple ServiceSource, IBM, HP, Compaq, I took the exams and got the certifications and with every certification my value to the company rose. We wore red shirts (distantly foreshadowing the fact of our inevitable expendability) and for a while we were able to maintain the illusion that we were more than just the sales department's bitches. For three years I repaired Macs, PCs, laser printers, laptops, CRT's, and everything else, and by that time I was the Lead Technician (their version of an assisstant manager, or AssMan) in the department. I was able to make car payments, rent payments, and actually even put away some money.
But there was a dark side. I was neglecting my horn. I would wake in the morning and go to work, spend 8 to 10 hours dismantling laptop computers, replacing parts and reassembling them complete with a new "do not remove this sticker or warranty void" sticker courtesy of the manufacturers whose new parts we were replacing, and I would leave directly from work with my horn in the car, barely making it to the gig on time each night. And each night I would sound worse than the night before due to having not practiced. I was frequently late to gigs due to the fact that when you have a laptop in a million pieces on your bench, it can't be left alone overnight until it's put back together. I was also becoming more and more misanthropic. Customers who have broken computers were generally not very nice to the people who are trying to help fix their computers. And to top it off, we were but one department in one store that was part of a national chain - meaning I had about eight different bosses with eight different agendas. The tech manager was concerned that our department was not making the company enough money from repairs. The sales manager was concerned that our technicians were not "keeping our place" as the sales department's bitches. The original GM who had hired me was a former tech himself, but he got promoted to be a regional manager over all the stores in southern California, and his replacement the new GM was a sales guy, not a tech guy at all, so guess which department won that power struggle? I think the new GM had been the captain of his football team in high school and probably was one of those guys who liked to stuff nerds in lockers, so he clearly had a healthy amount of respect for all of us geeks in the tech department. (sarcasm).
I finally had enough when the sales manager came to us and told us we needed to start "finding" things wrong with people's computers so we could sell them hard drives, memory, and etc. Yeah, I don't like it when mechanics do that to me, why would I assume that it would be okay to do that to our computer repair customers? So I quit.
For a while I tried to stay with the tech field. I put an ad out, I mailed out flyers, I walked to local area businesses, and I got some tech clients together. All of a sudden instead of being paid $18/hour to do repairs that the company was charging $125/hour for, I was the one charging $125/hour. I paid my own taxes, bought my own supplies, and did my own one-man operation repairing PCs, laptops, laser printers, and etc. Meanwhile I was also accepting private music students and spending more time practicing again. Sooner or later another company offered me a job; this time it was a locally-owned Mac-specific sales and service company. They were, in fact, my dream job; I had submitted a resume to them years earlier and gotten no response; now they wanted me to be the manager in charge of their entire tech services department. And they were offering me a $50k/year starting salary, which, in 2002 was not too bad. I would've had to give up my own side tech business, but so what: I would be working on macs only, I would be around creative mac people in a fun work environment for a local company -- what's not to like?
Except:
It would've been a 70 to 80 hour/week time commitment. I would have had zero time to practice, and I would've had to give up all my students after spending the past 2 years developing rapport and seeing them progress from beginners to players of woodwind instruments. This was my dream job, but was the sacrifice too great? I agonized over the decision and during a conversation with my wife, I realized just in fact why she is awesome: "What would make you happy?" she asked. Of course, being able to perform and teach music full-time would make me happy. It's what I got my degree in, it's always been there, every day job I had ever had, including the past several years as an erstwhile geek, had been secondary to the fact that I am first and foremost a player of woodwind instruments.
So I called the nice people at the mac-only sales and service company, gave my apologies, and turned down my dream job so I could focus all my energy on being a musician.
The other thing that my amazingly awesome wife said to me was this: "If you put as much time and energy into your music as you did when you ran your own computer repair business, you will succeed." And she was right; I had put a full-time amount of work into advertising, bookkeeping, parts-ordering in addition to the actually repairing-the-computers part. Those things translate to the music biz as well. I spend time on the phone trying to book myself, I design flyers and advertisements, I go out and spend time networking with other music professionals, and that's all in addition to the time I spend actually practicing the 7 instruments I actively play on a regular basis.
And here is what I have learned in the ten years since I quit my day job: Any career worth any amount of reward is a hell of a lot of work. Music is no exception. There are certainly ways to enjoy music without making a career out of it, and there are large numbers of people who do just that. There are also people who like to throw a football or shoot a basketball at a hoop, some of whom are quite good at it but who would never dream of becoming a professional athlete. So I address this to those who choose to pursue music as a career, above and beyond the "hobbyist" level:
Firstly and foremostly, Be Better at it Than Everyone Else. "Good Enough" is not. There are so many music hobbyists who play instruments, who do one or two gigs a month and don't care if they get paid. Our job as professional musicians is to work hard to be better at it than the hobbyists, but beyond that our job is to be so good at it that we're justified in asking people to pay us to do it. There is no substitute for putting the necessary time in; most professionals spend at minimum 2 to 3 hours a day practicing scales, arpeggios and other exercises. This should be as regular as any other hourly-wage job. If you're going to expect to be paid to do a service, you need to be better at it than those other people who are offering to do the same service for free, otherwise why should anyone bother to pay you?
Secondly, we need to necessarily do a certain amount of selling. Any business will only succeed if there is demand for the product or service they are putting out. No demand = no dollars. In the music business, as in any entertainment-based industry, there isn't the same sense of necessity as there would be for food, clothing, or toilet paper. So we need to create that demand. Convince the nightclub owner why they would be better off hiring your band than a DJ or some other group of amateurs. Convince the concert promoter why they should take a risk on you when they put on their show. Convince the bandleader why they should hire you to play in their horn section. Convince the parents why they should hire you to teach their kids to play an instrument. Create demand for your product and people will buy it.
Thirdly, Diversify. There is no one road to success in the music business. You'll need to play in several bands at once, or play in one band that tours to several cities, and you'll also need to teach private lessons and more. All of these things added together make a career. The more instruments you play and/or teach, the better your chances of working. Professional musicians can't afford to be specialists. This also goes for the musical content or style of music you play. Sure, you might love to play avant-garde jazz, but if you want to work as a professional musician you'll also need to be able to play pop R&B dance music for weddings and corporate parties, and maybe do a few commercial jingles too. You don't have the luxury of being able to say "no" to a gig that's going to pay the bills just because you don't like that style of music. Your full-time job is to sound good at every style of music, so much so that people will never even suspect that you're out of your element.
Fourthly, Always Be Networking. This business is all about who you know. The more people you meet, the more opportunities you'll be able to make for yourself. As a bassist friend of mine says: "If you aren't appearing, you're dis-appearing."
Fifthly, Never Work For Free. It's the other side of "be good enough to justify your price". Once you have determined that your time and talent is worth money, you should never settle for less than the amount you're worth. Sometimes the actual amount will vary depending on the situation and it's important to be realistic and realize that nightclubs can't afford to pay as much as the big wedding and corporate clients, but there is no reason to ever give away your work.
Sixthly, however, there's also nothing wrong with handing out a sample once in a while if it makes intelligent business sense to do so. Costco stocks their lunch hour with dozens of people handing out samples of free food; they do this to increase demand and it works - They sell a lot of product that way. Other professionals hand out pens and fridge magnets with their business name and address on it, the local coffee stand uses punch cards to keep track of every five drinks you buy so they can give you the sixth one for free, retailers are always bringing customers in with "buy one get one free" specials. Guess what: there is nothing wrong with giving away a free sample if you do it in a way that brings in business. Most jazz musicians accomplish this by sitting in with other jazz musicians. It's also good to play a benefit show once in a while for a good cause if you can work it into a networking opportunity. Don't get carried away, your goal is to make money and you'll never do that if you're playing for free all the time, but it's okay to let people hear a sample of your work for free once in a while if you're doing it as part of a well thought-out business plan to increase demand for your services.
And seventhly, Be Professional. Show up on time, dress appropriately, have a good attitude and be easy to get along with and play nice with others. There is a big difference between getting a gig and keeping a gig. You get the gig based on your talent and networking abilities, but you'll keep the gig based on your ability to be a team player. This includes doing your homework and taking the time to learn the music ahead of the rehearsal. You're expecting people to pay you to do a service for them. Just like any other contractor or employee, part of what they're paying for is your professionalism. You wouldn't hold a job for very long in any other company if you constantly showed up late with a bad attitude and never put any attention into the quality of your work - So why would you expect it to be any different in the music business?
The bottom line is this: any career, in any field, takes a lot of focus and diligence to make it pan out and turn into dollars. The music business is no exception. Music has acquired an unfortunate reputation of being a hobby or pastime rather than a career, but it is definitely possible to earn a living as a music-industry worker. The key is to treat it like a career and work hard at it.
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Terminology
Another thing that music teachers hate to hear is when parents call us up to cancel a lesson and they say "(insert name here) won't be at practice today because he/she is (insert excuse here)."
I think that word doesn't mean what you think it means.
I understand the confusion: for lots of other activities in which parents might enroll their kids, the word "practice" means a group activity where a team meets once a week to coordinate their efforts as a group. Example: "I drop off my kids at soccer practice twice a week." In music, however, we call this same group activity a rehearsal, while the word practice means something entirely different. You see the reason for the confusion.
So in the interest of smoothing relations between Soccer Moms and Music Teachers everywhere, allow me to provide a rough translation of commonly-used sports words and their appropriate equivalent in the music world:
In the athletic world, when someone spends individual time every day exercising to get himself/herself in shape for an upcoming event, developing muscle strength and physical coordination and mental focus, it's called Conditioning. This is what we musicians refer to as practice. Example: "I've got to practice that Brahms piece before my lesson next Thursday."
In sports, when someone meets one-on-one with an instructor or coach once a week, it's called Training. In music, when someone meets one-on-one with an instructor once a week we call it a "lesson". Example: "I just took a lesson with Pete Petersen, and my tone sounds awesome!!"
In sports, when an individual goes through a series of tests in front of a coach, manager, team owner or all of the above in hopes of making the team, it's called Tryouts. In music the same thing happens only we call it an Audition. Example: "I wouldn't say I'm worried or anything, but there were 200 clarinetists at that audition last week, all for a single part."
In sports, when a group of athletes meets a few times a week to go over drills as a team, it's called Practice. In music we call this a rehearsal. Example: "You know the conductor's going to expect us to nail that section of the Mendelssohn at tomorrow's rehearsal"
In sports, when a team or individual takes all of that preparation, coaching, practicing, conditioning and training and puts it all on the line in a competitive event where their skills are put on display for spectators, it's called a Game or a Match. In music we call it a Show, a Performance, or a Concert. Example: "Dude, I've got a concert next week. Want to go?"
Once more, to sum up:
SPORTS ------ MUSIC
=====================
Conditioning = Practice
Training = Lesson
Practice = Rehearsal
Tryouts = Audition
Game = Concert
I hope this clears things up. The appropriate phone call a parent should make to a music teacher should be "I'm sorry, (insert name) won't be able to make it to his/her lesson because (insert excuse here)".
I think that word doesn't mean what you think it means.
I understand the confusion: for lots of other activities in which parents might enroll their kids, the word "practice" means a group activity where a team meets once a week to coordinate their efforts as a group. Example: "I drop off my kids at soccer practice twice a week." In music, however, we call this same group activity a rehearsal, while the word practice means something entirely different. You see the reason for the confusion.
So in the interest of smoothing relations between Soccer Moms and Music Teachers everywhere, allow me to provide a rough translation of commonly-used sports words and their appropriate equivalent in the music world:
In the athletic world, when someone spends individual time every day exercising to get himself/herself in shape for an upcoming event, developing muscle strength and physical coordination and mental focus, it's called Conditioning. This is what we musicians refer to as practice. Example: "I've got to practice that Brahms piece before my lesson next Thursday."
In sports, when someone meets one-on-one with an instructor or coach once a week, it's called Training. In music, when someone meets one-on-one with an instructor once a week we call it a "lesson". Example: "I just took a lesson with Pete Petersen, and my tone sounds awesome!!"
In sports, when an individual goes through a series of tests in front of a coach, manager, team owner or all of the above in hopes of making the team, it's called Tryouts. In music the same thing happens only we call it an Audition. Example: "I wouldn't say I'm worried or anything, but there were 200 clarinetists at that audition last week, all for a single part."
In sports, when a group of athletes meets a few times a week to go over drills as a team, it's called Practice. In music we call this a rehearsal. Example: "You know the conductor's going to expect us to nail that section of the Mendelssohn at tomorrow's rehearsal"
In sports, when a team or individual takes all of that preparation, coaching, practicing, conditioning and training and puts it all on the line in a competitive event where their skills are put on display for spectators, it's called a Game or a Match. In music we call it a Show, a Performance, or a Concert. Example: "Dude, I've got a concert next week. Want to go?"
Once more, to sum up:
SPORTS ------ MUSIC
=====================
Conditioning = Practice
Training = Lesson
Practice = Rehearsal
Tryouts = Audition
Game = Concert
I hope this clears things up. The appropriate phone call a parent should make to a music teacher should be "I'm sorry, (insert name) won't be able to make it to his/her lesson because (insert excuse here)".
Why it's important to practice every day
I often have students come into their lessons and the first words out of their mouth are "I'm sorry I didn't have much time to practice much this week."
Let me tell you, that is the second worst thing any music teacher wants to hear. The worst thing, of course, is hearing a student say they practiced tons, only to find out the truth when they start trying to play.
I mean, on one hand, at least they're being honest. Honesty is a good thing. Kids are taught to be honest, I don't want to discourage that. But at some point, the frustration sets in and one wonders "why are these kids taking private music lessons in the first place?"
Because here's the thing. There is absolutely no way anyone can possibly become good at it if they only do it once a week. That doesn't just apply to music, that applies to everything in life. The way the human mind learns and processes the ability to do any particular skill depends on consistent repetition. Simply put, the more often you do a thing, the better you get at it.
Music is a skill that depends on precise motor coordination and muscle movement, in addition to a complex series of thought processes which all need to happen at nearly the same time. Think about it: musicians are expected to decode a double-cipher (convert a series of dots and lines into letter names from A to G, then convert those letter names into the appropriate tones on an instrument) at a very high rate of speed, anywhere from 60 to 360 times per minute, and at the same time to use very physical muscle activity in fingers, hands, facial muscles, lips, tongue and lungs, coordinating all of that in order to perform that series of tones in a way that will evoke an emotional response from listeners. That's a lot of stuff going on!
And yet, hardly any of us think about all of that while it's happening. The reason we don't think about it is because we have practiced it so many times so often that it has become completely automatic. That's the same thing with reading and writing, and even speaking. Those are things most people grew up with and can do them without thinking. When you write the letter "A" in pencil on a piece of paper, are you thinking to yourself "draw two lines at an angle that intersects at the top, and then draw a third line that crosses the other two"? No, you think to yourself "A" and your hand knows how to draw it on the paper. Did you always know how to write the letter "A"? No, you had to learn how to do it. At some point, probably around age 5 or 6, you spent a lot of time writing lots of A's on a piece of paper until your hand memorized how to do it. When you speak, are you thinking to yourself how to form the syllables into words with your tongue in your mouth, calculating just exactly how much air needs to expel from your lungs across your vocal chords? No, of course not, you've been speaking for almost your entire life, you just think the words and they come out of your mouth. But did you always know how to speak? No, you spent some time as a baby making syllables and forming words and eventually you learned to use those words to communicate.
Playing a musical instrument is a lot like learning to speak or write. The eventual goal is to be able to have the act of playing the instrument itself become completely thoughtless, completely automatic. At that point your mind is free to focus on the actual art itself, using the language of music to communicate ideas and evoke an emotional response in your listener. (Remember, that's what this whole thing is about - getting people to feel something when they hear you play) But that kind of skill, like any other skill, takes years to master. And, like any other skill, it needs consistent repetition in order to develop to the level where you're able to do it without thinking about it.
Try this experiment: Think back to yesterday. Try to remember everything you did yesterday, from the time you woke up to the time you went to bed. Remember as much detail as you can. Think about where you went; what you did; who you talked to; what you saw and heard. Only 1 day ago, it's not too difficult to recall a fairly complete mental picture of your entire day, complete with details.
Now think back to 3 days ago - same thing: try to remember as completely as you can everything you did 3 days ago. Where you went; what you did, who you talked to, etc. If you're like most people, you can still form a decent picture of the big events that happened, but the details are a lot fuzzier after 3 days.
Now go back a whole week. Do you remember what you were doing a week ago? Try to remember everything that happened to you a week earlier. Most people find it incredibly difficult to remember anything but the big items from a week ago; the minor passing items are less easy to remember, and the little minuscule details are next to impossible.
Playing a musical instrument, as we know, is a very detail-oriented skill. So if you, as a music student, go even 3 days without practicing, if you only practice your instrument once or twice a week, how likely is it that you'll remember the details from the last time you picked it up? If you sit through your lesson and your teacher gives you specific things to work on, how likely is it that you'll remember what those specific things are if you wait an entire week before you look at them again in the next lesson?
If, on the other hand, you make the time to work on your lesson material at least once every day, it'll be seven times easier to remember every little detail about everything you're working on. I can't emphasize this enough. Spending a little time every day is much more productive than spending a lot of time once a week.
I challenge you as students to choose one thing: a scale study, or an arpeggio study, or a jazz tune, something you've got that needs some work, and then make time to work on that one thing every day for a week. Spend serious time on it, don't just play it once and gloss over the hard parts, but really work on it. If, at the end of just one week, you haven't improved immensely after working on it every day, then you can say I'm wrong. But I'm not wrong.
Let me tell you, that is the second worst thing any music teacher wants to hear. The worst thing, of course, is hearing a student say they practiced tons, only to find out the truth when they start trying to play.
I mean, on one hand, at least they're being honest. Honesty is a good thing. Kids are taught to be honest, I don't want to discourage that. But at some point, the frustration sets in and one wonders "why are these kids taking private music lessons in the first place?"
Because here's the thing. There is absolutely no way anyone can possibly become good at it if they only do it once a week. That doesn't just apply to music, that applies to everything in life. The way the human mind learns and processes the ability to do any particular skill depends on consistent repetition. Simply put, the more often you do a thing, the better you get at it.
Music is a skill that depends on precise motor coordination and muscle movement, in addition to a complex series of thought processes which all need to happen at nearly the same time. Think about it: musicians are expected to decode a double-cipher (convert a series of dots and lines into letter names from A to G, then convert those letter names into the appropriate tones on an instrument) at a very high rate of speed, anywhere from 60 to 360 times per minute, and at the same time to use very physical muscle activity in fingers, hands, facial muscles, lips, tongue and lungs, coordinating all of that in order to perform that series of tones in a way that will evoke an emotional response from listeners. That's a lot of stuff going on!
And yet, hardly any of us think about all of that while it's happening. The reason we don't think about it is because we have practiced it so many times so often that it has become completely automatic. That's the same thing with reading and writing, and even speaking. Those are things most people grew up with and can do them without thinking. When you write the letter "A" in pencil on a piece of paper, are you thinking to yourself "draw two lines at an angle that intersects at the top, and then draw a third line that crosses the other two"? No, you think to yourself "A" and your hand knows how to draw it on the paper. Did you always know how to write the letter "A"? No, you had to learn how to do it. At some point, probably around age 5 or 6, you spent a lot of time writing lots of A's on a piece of paper until your hand memorized how to do it. When you speak, are you thinking to yourself how to form the syllables into words with your tongue in your mouth, calculating just exactly how much air needs to expel from your lungs across your vocal chords? No, of course not, you've been speaking for almost your entire life, you just think the words and they come out of your mouth. But did you always know how to speak? No, you spent some time as a baby making syllables and forming words and eventually you learned to use those words to communicate.
Playing a musical instrument is a lot like learning to speak or write. The eventual goal is to be able to have the act of playing the instrument itself become completely thoughtless, completely automatic. At that point your mind is free to focus on the actual art itself, using the language of music to communicate ideas and evoke an emotional response in your listener. (Remember, that's what this whole thing is about - getting people to feel something when they hear you play) But that kind of skill, like any other skill, takes years to master. And, like any other skill, it needs consistent repetition in order to develop to the level where you're able to do it without thinking about it.
Try this experiment: Think back to yesterday. Try to remember everything you did yesterday, from the time you woke up to the time you went to bed. Remember as much detail as you can. Think about where you went; what you did; who you talked to; what you saw and heard. Only 1 day ago, it's not too difficult to recall a fairly complete mental picture of your entire day, complete with details.
Now think back to 3 days ago - same thing: try to remember as completely as you can everything you did 3 days ago. Where you went; what you did, who you talked to, etc. If you're like most people, you can still form a decent picture of the big events that happened, but the details are a lot fuzzier after 3 days.
Now go back a whole week. Do you remember what you were doing a week ago? Try to remember everything that happened to you a week earlier. Most people find it incredibly difficult to remember anything but the big items from a week ago; the minor passing items are less easy to remember, and the little minuscule details are next to impossible.
Playing a musical instrument, as we know, is a very detail-oriented skill. So if you, as a music student, go even 3 days without practicing, if you only practice your instrument once or twice a week, how likely is it that you'll remember the details from the last time you picked it up? If you sit through your lesson and your teacher gives you specific things to work on, how likely is it that you'll remember what those specific things are if you wait an entire week before you look at them again in the next lesson?
If, on the other hand, you make the time to work on your lesson material at least once every day, it'll be seven times easier to remember every little detail about everything you're working on. I can't emphasize this enough. Spending a little time every day is much more productive than spending a lot of time once a week.
I challenge you as students to choose one thing: a scale study, or an arpeggio study, or a jazz tune, something you've got that needs some work, and then make time to work on that one thing every day for a week. Spend serious time on it, don't just play it once and gloss over the hard parts, but really work on it. If, at the end of just one week, you haven't improved immensely after working on it every day, then you can say I'm wrong. But I'm not wrong.
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