Music makes the people (hopefully) come together…
As you saw in my previous post, I have now decided to do some exploration for potential career paths in two areas in which I feel passionate about: music and writing. So, I’m writing this first post about music, as I feel it would be inherently weird to write a blog post about writing a blog post, and then reflect on the learnings from writing the blog post; feels a bit too inception-y, so let’s focus on the music for now.
OK, so, music, where to start? Well, I’m very glad to say that, so far, I’ve managed to beat down procrastination and embarrassment long enough (and provide a few swift kicks to the head, to make sure they stay down) to actually take some action and make some initial progress.
I feel what has been really helpful in this regard has been to stick to a few guiding principles to help push me to take action in a concrete way, and not to delay or wait for the perfect time or person to reach out to before actually doing something as I feel this would be a huge problem, especially given the time constraints; these are:
- Imperfect action is better than perfect inaction
- The worst that people can say is no, or not reply to your emails
- Be your genuine self and let your enthusiasm show
- Everything is an experiment and it doesn’t need to be perfect (probably the hardest one for me!)
But what did I actually do? Well as per the previous post, I had a few main areas to look into and take some action against, so I’ll walk you through each of these one-by-one in more detail below:
- Learning music
- Researching the music industry
- Creating music
1) Learning music
Question: how painful is it to start taking music lessons when you’re over 40?
Answer: Initially, excruciating. But, with a nice and patient teacher, still excruciating, just a little less.
When taking music lessons, there seems to be a number of peculiarities that appear to be specific to music itself. One is the assumption that music lessons are for children, not adults; I’m not entirely sure why this is, but this is definitely how it feels. Another is that people may feel emboldened to ask you to show them what you’ve learnt (e.g., “play us a song!”); which I feel is is a bit unfair as you wouldn’t ask a friend taking swimming lessons to jump in the pool and show you their backstroke!
Anyway, painful or not, I decided to not overthink this too much, just take some lessons as an experiment and to try my best to remain humble, and be ok with being an absolute beginner. In a previous life, I did learn to play the drums to a basic level (many, many years ago), but in terms of actual music theory, chords, notation and all that jazz, basically I’ve got nothing.
I started the process by using everyone’s best friend and workplace answer machine, Google, to find a place locally that offered adult music lessons; I wanted these lessons to be as local as possible so that I could walk there and minimise the potential for bailing out due to weather, tube strikes, my own psychoses etc. – the typical strategy I use for the gym. Turns out, there are a number of places nearby which offered what I was looking for (so, no excuses!) and so I bit the bullet and signed up to take an initial 1:1 lesson on singing and music theory.
Why singing? Where did this come from? Well I seem to have a love-hate relationship with singing, as I’m sure my wife does every time she hears me sing in the shower. But when looking over my life empirically, it seems I have a compulsion to sing and hum songs a lot of the time in an embarrassing fashion, and to instinctively try to replicate what I hear, so I thought: why not try to get better at something I seem to do anyway?
Now just to be clear, I don’t think I ever had a “naturally” good singing voice, but I like to think that I have a good ear (and can definitely tell when I or others sing out of tune!) and so feel I have a baseline to start from. Also, my initial aim is to get straight into learning actual music, and not spend a long time faffing around with basic piano or guitar chords before I’m able to express myself. So it seemed like a pragmatic thing to start here and then see where things lead.
The first lesson went kind of how I expected it to go: painful, cringing, interesting, not as bad as I thought, maybe even fun. We did a bit of getting to know each other and the teacher asked me some questions on why I wanted to learn to sing, what type of songs I typically like to sing, what are the types of music I prefer to sing to etc. – all totally valid questions, but ones I had never really considered in any depth before, so was an interesting (but slightly painful) reflective exercise for me.
However, then we got to the abysmally cringing part I knew was coming: where we “jumped straight in” and put on the song I had selected to sing (Hey Jude) on YouTube with the lyrics while I stood up and sang alone in the room…while being judged. This is the stuff nightmares are made of. Also, because I’d taken so long choosing a song to sing, I hadn’t had much time to practice; therefore, it was not good. However, it was an interesting feeling that arises when you know you didn’t sing a song well, the teacher knows you didn’t sing it well, you know you can do it better, the teacher doesn’t, and so you need to sit there while they are forced to be diplomatic in providing feedback and encouragement to not put you off and kill your dreams!
As you can tell, it was harder than I thought, a lot for my own personal issues with performing in front of others, but I also learnt a lot. I plan to stick with it for now, but just be reassured that when you’re going to start something new, it can be painful as hell outside your comfort zone (having experienced this first-hand) but stay strong and don’t let it put you off. My thinking was that the first lesson will be the hardest, my teacher may disagree on that, but I’m going to keep going and see what I can learn about both music and how/why I respond in different ways to these new challenges.
2) Researching the music industry
Similar to my technical music knowledge, my understanding of the music “industry” as some call it, was pretty limited. I mean, I knew that there were musicians who performed at gigs, got signed to record labels, recorded singles and albums and then went on tour, obviously (I don’t live in a cave). But that all felt very surface to me, so I wanted to get a deeper grounding in what the key parts of the industry were, how they operated and what type of roles existed within them.
To start this off I took a two-pronged approach, similar to consulting when, not uncommonly, you know literally nothing about an industry or subsector and you need to get smart quick; this is typically done by combining outside-in, desk-based research, coupled with expert insights or interviews:
Outside-in learning about the industry
For my desk-based research I wanted to look into a couple of key areas which seemed logical to start with: recording studios (where all artists typically have to go through to create their music) and record labels/publishing companies who tend to fund the artists and own the publishing rights. After some (Taylor) swift (really?) googling around, it was pretty clear that there were three major record labels in the industry: Sony, Warner and Universal, collectively owning about 70% of worldwide recorded music publishing rights. Quite a statistic and quite a consolidated industry, as these overarching corporate behemoths also own a whole load of subsidiary record labels which were set up independently and subsumed over the years into the big mothership (for example, think Def Jam, Motown, Roc-a-fella, all now owned by Universal Music Group).
This simplified things for me a bit and so I just focused on learning about these companies from looking at their websites, reading market reports and just getting a sense of how they operate. To make sure I took action here and not just follow an intellectual masturbation exercise, I then resolved to identify people who work for these three companies to see if I could have a conversation with someone about specific roles that the companies offered, what type of experience you needed to work there, and what the actual job is focused on (as sadly, I don’t think it will involve kicking back and listening to music all day).
One tactic I used here was to look for people who have similar backgrounds to myself, to see if this could be used as an ‘in’ (or, if we had any shared connections on LinkedIn) – and, after much spamming and no responses, I finally got in contact with one person who recently had joined Sony and we set a time to have a call so he could provide an overview on the music industry (from a record label perspective) as well as what a corporate role could look like for one of the big players. This was actually super informative and so I’ll share a detailed download of what I found out in a later blog post.
Connecting with people in the industry
Now I had some grounding in the facts of the “business”, I then wanted to get some insights from professionals who were working in the space, but thought it would be valuable to understand what it’s like working with artists during music production, rather than the corporate activities of maximising value for their publishing library. Here I started small, my assumption being that if I contacted producers at Abbey Road to see if they want to meet for a coffee I would be told, in no uncertain terms, exactly where to go.
To start small, I began with a search on google maps for recording studios in my local area; this turned out to be quite a revelation about my little pocket of North West London as I quickly found about 10 recording studios that were located within about a mile of my flat. Winner.
I then took a look into each of these studios’ websites and identified people who I thought would be interesting to talk to (ideally producers who worked directly with artists, but if I couldn’t find their direct contact details, anyone who was involved with running the studio, artist management etc.). Once again, hard spamming occurred, to lay out who I was and my interest in learning more about their experience and journey in the industry, with limited expectations of response. But, to my surprise, two people got back to me within a few days and were open to meeting for coffee. Good result so far and quite unexpected, but you don’t ask, you don’t get I suppose?
These meetings, as they turned out, had a number of interesting elements to them and gave me some new insights to chew on, and so I’ll detail these and the Sony conversation more in a follow-up blog post.
3) Creating music
This was always going to be the most challenging part of my musical exploration, not least because this is going to require moving away from a results-based, linear effort vs. returns approach, to one which is inherently more exploratory and experimental (read: high proportion of failure). However, I still think a structured approach can be applied here, at least initially, to build up my technical expertise and allow me to learn the fundamentals, enabling me to progress to the more expressive/creative stage.
So in my previous life of limited time, patience and high stress to achieve, my approach would look something like this:
- Dive into playing with the software straightaway
- Come up with something basic which I think sounds really good
- Mess around with it a lot and realise I don’t know what I’m doing
- Get stuck, lose motivation and throw my proverbial toys out of the pram
I didn’t fancy this approach this time. I mean, I’ve tried it before and it wasn’t much fun or very productive, so now that I have some actual time and freedom I thought I’d do it in a way which would actually build some skills using Ableton’s software for the long term. Sensible, I hope.
One thing I did want to maintain though, was the fun aspect of music and ensure it didn’t turn into a chore, so I made sure to embed this principle into the process and ensure I have multiple ways of learning to keep things fresh as well as have some simple ways to procrastinate in a productive way:
- Reading the whole Ableton manual (I KNOW!)
- Watching YouTube videos on music production in Ableton
- Using Ableton for experimentation and dedicated learning of features and tools
The way I see it, reading the manual will be a long slog, and hard to dress it up as fun (it’s a very long manual!), so I plan to allocate 30-60 min blocks in my day to reading this, but then when my interest wains, I can switch over to tutorial videos (as a way to procrastinate on reading the manual!) or to experimentation which will be a bit more relaxed and fun. But the key, like all of what I am doing, is to stay consistent and make a little progress every day and also to treat this like a real study exercise, and not just to get through the manual as quick as possible or skips section so I can get to the fun part of making music. The closest parallel I can think of as this stage to learning to create music is, weirdly, cooking: you need to learn the fundamentals but you also need to experiment and try new recipes to see what works well and what tastes like garbage, so this is the model I am going to try to apply.
Process wise, I bookmarked the online Ableton manual so I could easily return to it, and started to work through section by section (and ensure I noted down which part I had reached after each session). In terms of tutorial videos on Ableton – it turns out there are a lot! And so I spent some time looking around for someone who had put together an end-to-end course that was pitched at people who had zero knowledge of the program and didn’t have a strong musical background; luckily I found a superb (free) course* which provided the right level of depth and breadth to help get me familiar with the software initially while getting a bit deeper into the principles of production.
Finally, for the experimentation part, I just needed to ensure I bucketed adequate time (i.e. not 15-20 mins) to just f*ck around, be playful with it and have no real agenda or pressure to maximise the “productivity” of this time in terms of outputs. I think this was, and is, the hardest part personally in moving from a very results-focused career, to then try to be happy with 2 hours spent on messing around with the settings of a synthesiser and not much to show for it! However, it is a LOT of fun so far, so at least there’s that! Still a work in progress here but you need to invest the time to get good, so I will update on this periodically.
*Shoutout to Taetro for his amazing Ableton Live for beginners series which was a huge help to get started and learn the basics of the platform.
In Summary
So to recap I covered my initial plans and processes put in place for learning music, researching the music industry and creating music. I feel like I’ve set the wheels in motion now so I can start connecting with people, collect more information about different types of roles and career paths which may be exciting/viable for me and also to ‘learn by doing’ by experimenting with my own music creation. All of which, I hope, should be self-reinforcing and help me understand what it’s really like to work in music as a career and also what aspects of the space appeal to me the most (important!).
I feel a few key learnings have come out of the process so far:
- Explore locally: there may be a lot of avenues to explore and people to speak to in your chosen field in your local area, and they may be more responsive than some of the “big name” organisations when trying to have coffees/initial conversations when you don’t know much about the space.
- Results will come, as will procrastination: from what I have learnt so far, the hardest part of any creative work seems to be getting your arse in the chair and getting down to work. If you can do this, and not beat yourself up when you get distracted or don’t make huge “progress” every time, you may actually achieve something in the long run.
- Being creative means being ok with being vulnerable: not a ground-breaking insight but, for me, I’ve had to try hard to overcome my fear of being vulnerable when expressing myself creatively. If you’re presenting numbers you can only be exposed so much, but if you’re singing or writing about something deeply personal to you, it’s going to sting much more if someone doesn’t like it, so you need to find a way to be ok with that, as you will have to share your work with others!
- Leverage your background: of the people that responded to my emails, a number of them said that my prior career experience was what made them interested to talk to me and it set me apart from other people who contact them. So I’d say to not underplay this when moving into a new career area, and think in advance what you could offer the people you reach out to from your existing expertise in quid-pro-quo fashion.
The last one seemingly is a good way to open doors and new avenues that I didn’t think were possible, but I’ll leave it here for now and I’ll share more insights on this in the next post.
