These are guidelines that I developed over the decades. Will every rule apply to you? Probably not, especially if you are opening for Cher in Vegas. But for most basic gigs, these precepts tend to make the night go smoother than bumpier.
The first five were: Gig Rule #1: The client is always right – in real time. Gig Rule #2: Gently smile – not grin - at all times. Gig Rule #3: You were hired to play music – not to be funny, tell stories, teach or be therapeutic. Gig Rule #4: Have a set list with more songs prepared than you will need. Gig Rule #5: Get the venue’s wifi password and log on before you start to play so you can look up a requested song’s lyrics on the fly. Onward to #6! Gig Rule #6: If you have never played the venue before, bring extra extension cords as well as a few ground lifts in case of sixty-cycle hum issues. New venues are always fun. The biggest problems that I have ever run into are power outlets that are far away and 60 cycle hum in the electrical system. Gig Rule #7: Pack an emergency bag with extra strings, extra bridge pins, an extra XLR cord, nine volt batteries, and _______________. I bring the above . . . plus another Shure SM58, many extra cables, a flashlight, a “guit-tool”, cough drops, extra business cards, promotional material, black drapes to cover cases if there is no closet space, and often a second guitar. Gig Rule #8: Start on time and play an extra song at the end. I always play a little extra unless the venue is anxious to close and clean-up. Tip: I always start and end on two of my strongest songs. Gig Rule #9: Before you finish a song, know what the next song will be and start it as quickly as possible. You have to be able to simultaneously hold at least three thoughts with the two most important being the song you are preforming and the next song you will perform. Nothing says “unprepared amateur” like excessive fumbling around, looking for the next song. Gig Rule #10: The only person you are allowed to make a joke about when the mic is live is yourself. Anything else is an unnecessary risk. Nine out of ten attempts at humor that performing musicians make are feeble at best and a total buzz kill at worst. You’ve trained to be a musician, not a comedian. Remember, every successful comedian has spent thousands of hours getting their material to the place where they can present it on a gig. Unless you’ve done the same, be very careful when you try to be funny – primarily because the effect that will come across is that you ARE trying and not convincingly funny. Next time: rules #11 through 15. These are guidelines that I developed over the decades. Will every rule apply to you? Probably not, especially if you are opening for Clapton at the Royal Albert Hall. But for most basic gigs, these precepts tend to make the night go smoother than bumpier. Gig Rule #1: The client is always right – in real time. Do everything possible to not get into a contentious situation with the person paying you. If you do, there is no winning, especially if you get your way. If the person paying you feels like they “lost”, they will hold it against you in a myriad of ways for a long time to come. Deal with issues AFTER the gig and think "win-win". Gig Rule #2: Gently smile – not grin - at all times. When I am asked what to wear to a concert or a gig, my first response is usually “A smile and a good attitude”. A musician’s attitude is infinitely more important than their aptitude. Once you walk under the transom, the gig has started. It doesn’t matter if you’re setting up, playing your first or last set, or waving good-bye as you walk out the door after you’ve done your "idiot check", the gig is on-going. Your smile says you are there to be positive and make things better, not worse. If there are any variables about the job that stop you from smiling before the gig starts or while you are still booking it, you’ll probably be conflicted during the gig. If that is the case, don’t take the gig. That in includes if you think the compensation is too low, the travel is too far, or the hours are too long. If the juice isn’t worth the squeeze, walk away and leave that gig for someone else. Take comfort that while you are walking away without a gig, you are walking away with a smile still on your face. Gig Rule #3: You were hired to play music – not to be funny, tell stories, teach, or be therapeutic. Once you start playing, don’t preface every tune with a story, nervous breakdown, skit, or wax poetic how you felt the first time you heard it. Play the material. You’re a musician. Gig Rule #4: Have a set list with more songs prepared than you will need. Don’t think you are so good and have done it for so long that you don’t need a set list. We all benefit from a set list. You always want more options than fewer when it comes to tunes you’re ready to perform. Gig Rule #5: Get the venue’s wifi password and log on before you start to play so you can look up a requested song’s lyrics on the fly. I’ve loaded about 1,700 pdfs of lyrics into my lyric app. The music to the songs are not that much of a problem but things like the second verse of “The Tennessee Waltz” are not residing in my hippocampus. Even so, there are times when someone requests a tune that I don’t have the words for.That’s when I open a browser tab for “Lyrics AZ” and find the words for the song. It can be a real “tune saver”. Tip: make sure you adjust your screen time-out setting to something larger than five minutes. Gig Rules #6 through #10 are next up. As music educators, not much of our college experience is aimed at songwriting.
So here are some thoughts for teachers who want to get started, either writing songs for themselves or for their students. The first thing is learn as many songs written by others as possible. I’m talking about songs where you sing and accompany yourself. The more songs you know – and I mean REALLY know – the easier it will be to progress as a songwriter. So set a goal and aim for a number, say, learn at least one song a day. In a year, you’ll have a pretty extensive repertoire. From jump street, start cataloging your song data. Stay away from paper and create PDFs. Gone are the days when I carried a milk crate with FOUR three-inch-three-ring binders with tons of music. Now I just have my tablet. Get an app where you can keep all these PDFs organized. I’m an Android kind of guy and have been using Zubersoft’s “MobileSheetsPro” and love it. Keep an ever growing list of songs and the artists who popularized them. Create PDFs of the lyrics, including the song title, the composers, and thee year it was composed. I start with creating a Word doc and then import it as a PDF. I keep two folders, one of Word doc lyrics and the other as a PDF folder. If you need the music to play the songs, find a lead sheet and create a PDF of that too – but have a doc title ending with “music” so you won’t confuse it with the lyric pdf. Find the best key for your voice and work hard at nailing the song down in that key. It might not be in the lead sheet’s key but learn how to transpose it into YOUR key. Transposing is a key skill for songwriters and you might as well start bolstering that skill. With every song you learn, learn the song in at least three other keys. Eventually, you want to play any song in any key. This is not just some kind of macho music chops thing. As a songwriter, you need the flexibility to shift into any key that a song pulls you, even if just for a few measures. Without a strong knowledge of keys and transposing, you’ll always be ruled by the song. You need the upper hand to be able to put any song into any key on a second’s notice. We are taught that life is a series of beginnings, middles, and ends. But it is not always that way in music. As elementary music teachers, it is about beginnings and middles. Ends are something way down the road. I know what you might be thinking. “Yo, Holmes, there has to be an arc of beginnings, middles, and ends for directors and performance ensembles when focusing on preparing for a concert. And every class has a beginning, middle, and end, right?” True. And monetizing music requires that the product be complete, too. But the idea of making music is much more open ended in the elementary general music classroom. I’m always amazed at general music lesson plans that on the surface embrace the beginning, middle, and end of a collegiate concept in such a neat, tight, tidy fashion. Nothing could be further from real life or truth. It gets even more stupefying when the end product of the lesson plan is a musical composition. Times that by two if the teacher has spent no time in their career actually pursuing composition but believes that they are enough of an an authority to teach it. So many of these contrived lessons and curriculums have all the charm of a neglected ficus. They are like verbose cook book recipes that promise if followed them, The result will be a beautifully finished musical soufflé in a 45-minute class. Bon apitite! But diners beware: the main course may be a little under-cooked. Music teachers who perseverate with their elementary school students on musical concepts like music history, vocabulary, or the dreaded musical game, approach “teaching” with an “I know something that you don’t and you need to learn it” attitude. The act of producing musical sounds works under a different set of realities. When little kids look up to you, are they looking for more words or for music? Authentic musicians share little sequential techniques with kids and then provide them with the time and opportunity to play with these ideas, free of any ersatz requirement for a timed finished product. Just because we plant the seed doesn’t mean that we will be around to see the tree grow or revel in the fruit the fully mature tree produces. We have to trust our instincts that what we start will continue to grow over the life of the student. The seeds we plant can’t be dependent on what direction the next music teachers take either. Hopefully their next teachers will assess kids, take them as they find them, and encourage them in their next steps and explorations. Some music teachers bitch that the students they receive from Teacher X don’t know “important things” like how to write a major scale or the definitions of Italian and French tempo markings. Don’t be that teacher. Be thankful you have a student and you know what next to model. More times than not, those whinny teachers are complaining about knowledge and not skills. Why? Because their careers are an ex cathedra house of cards built on a handful of random musical facts they learned in college: words, concept, methods, vocabulary, techno talk – everything but actually making and producing music. If they feel less than confident or successful creating or playing music on a variety of instruments, it’s much safer for them pontificating about music, codifying vocabulary, coloring pages, music word finds, all with hopes of dodging the piano-playing elephant in the room. Heraclitus wrote in “Fragments”, “Time is a game played beautifully by children.” The same can be said about music and children. When kids play, they are never in a hurry. Time is limitless to them. They haven’t learned the adult rules of the game, namely that time is finite and has a nasty habit of dictating when the game is over. If you watch kids play any game, you’ll notice a constant that runs through all their play: they change and modify the rules to the situation at hand. They don’t look at the rules of the game as a constitutional scholar looks at the Constitution.If the rules don’t work – Shazaam! - the game is afoot with a new set of rules. Kids need this freedom to modify and mollify the rules when they play with instruments. As modeling musicians, we need to step back after we show them a few things. Let them play – and learn - on their terms. We’ll always be there for guidance for those that get confused and stray a bit but our real calling is in encouraging and praising those who take the seeds we give them and start their own garden. The following video is over twenty minutes long but it encapsulates the work I did with the New Castle Elementary School students, K through 5, on piano in 2015. 2015 was incredible time of immensely positive convergences at NCE. Nikki Jones, one of the best educators ever, was principal, Rich Bryson was a confident and resourceful student advisor, I was sharing music duties with one of the finest, Fred Higgins, and from top to bottom, we had an solid group of teachers who knew how to support each other and pull for the common good of the kids and their families. For over eighty percent of these kids, it was the first year in music that they had ever touched or played a piano. There are three threads you’ll notice through all six grades as you watch the video. First, the kids approach piano like play. Second, they are always modifying the rules and ideas I lay out for them. And third, the kids excel at teaching one another. Seven years have passed since these kids played piano in our music room video. I was at New Castle Elementary only one more year before being transferred to Wilbur Elementary. I think about those NCE kids a lot, still laugh at the question they ask at the end of the video, and hope they are still making music every chance they get. I’ve learned that piano is a lot like that quote by Maya Angelou. Kids may forget what they played on the piano. They may forget what they learned on the piano. But they will never forget how they felt playing the piano when they were young. And that feeling will always draw them back to the piano and other instruments. That feeling will allow that seed to grow a bit more, as Bobby “Blue” Bland sang, “further on up the road”. So you are or were in high school and pursuing a career as a music educator.
The focus of your time in college is to become adept in all areas that you will need as an educator of music. That means you're going to be working on your strengths as well as your weaknesses, but primarily relying upon (and mightily compensating) your instructors on helping you strengthen your weaknesses. The idea is so that when you leave college, you are self-sufficient and it's hard for people to tell what your strengths are because there is an high level of evenness about your presentation. Caveat: you and your instructors might disagree on what is a “weakness” or an “asset” in your portfolio of skills. I know I did. Never forget – this is YOUR career. They’ve had their opportunity to craft their professional path and now it’s your turn. College and improving your weaknesses is a little bit like applying compression to an audio track. You're bringing up those low spots to look and sound more convincing next to your strengths. When you get to your 7.5 hour job, your goal is to have all your strengths and weaknesses evened out. As far as your 16.5 hour business goes, that is the time to really focus on your strengths and not your weaknesses. It's where you are going to make your most substantial gains personally, professionally, and financially because the sky's the limit in your 16.5 hour business. There's always going to be a financial lid on how much you can achieve within a school. The nice part about having a teaching a 7.5 hour job in a school is that everything is laid out for you. If you just connect the dots, you will end up with a horizontal straight line. Compensation might be a flat straight line, but at least it'll be a straight line infinitesimally drifting north-northeast. Unless you are pursuing a leadership degree at the graduate level, there are few opportunities to develop your leadership abilities and even fewer opportunities to make any money off of them for a typical music educator gig outside of your classroom within the district. Lucky for you, you have a 16.5 hour business, right? I mean, you have your own business, correct? While leadership is not a job requirement as a music teacher in a school, learning how to be a leader in your 16.5 hour business is crucial for your business’ success. You will be the boss of you. You will own the failures but you also own the successes and reap the financial rewards of their successes. But, back to college. College is the prime time to develop your entrepreneurial persona. That is, unless you did that when you were in high school. There is a ton of free time in a music education college schedule if you plan your hours correctly. I chose to get my school work done as quickly as possible and experiment on lots of projects. I endeavored to be the guy who read the text book before the first class. These are some of the opportunities I pursued while still in college that were the beginnings of my 16.5 hour business. If you’ve never considered the idea of your 16.5 hour business, consider these as story starters: Gigging - I actually started gigging in earnest in high school. I joined the union. By the time I got to college, I had played close to 1,000 gigs. They were low paying but were an academy where I learned my instruments and theory as well as the rules of the road. The union band gigs that I played at the shore or at state parks were instrumental in landing my first full-time teaching gig. The first flutist in the Delaware Symphony and many of the union gigs was a woman in her fifties who I met on these college year gigs. We became friends and through a number of fortuitous circumstances, she created a flight path for me to take over her private school elementary teacher gig when she retired at the end of my senior year. Again, many of these summer gigs were not high paying but they opened a very crucial door. Substitute Teaching – One of the older men that I started playing jazz gigs with in high school had a wife who was a full time general music gig in a beautiful public elementary school. During college, I used to hang out at their house. One night, Lois asked if I was interested in subbing for her and the rest was history. I also subbed for several of the teachers I met on the summer union gigs. As a “class B” substitute, the money was good but the experience was priceless. Private Teaching – My junior year, I stepped into a director’s gig for a Saturday morning diocesan music program. We had up to 100 kids and I oversaw a staff of half a dozen teachers, including working on the payroll. I learned more in that job about teaching and myself than 90% of college. That summer, I made a connection with a local school district that had a summer school private lesson program four days a week for six week. The pay was decent but the real dividend was having forty students a week – brass, woodwind, percussion – I saw every bad embrasure and compromised technique under the sun and had to come up with remedies. Theater – As much as I hated marching band, I loved playing in pit orchestras. I got a few gigs playing in college and community pit bands and was the assistant conductor for a college production of Sondheim’s “Company” where I had to coach the cast with their singing. Arranging/Composing – One summer, I worked with a classmate of mine, Terry Stewart, selling halftime marching band arrangements to local high schools. It was a hooky premise: we would arrange their school song or alma mater four different ways through the ages: Middle Ages, Classical, Dixieland, and rock. Our secret selling weapon: we would tailor the arrangements to the strengths, not the weaknesses, of the band. The trick was it engaged the band directors in opening up and talking about their band (something all band directors like to do) – and anytime you are trying to sell something to someone and you can get them engaged in conversation is always good. We sold the package to about six or seven band directors. I think we spent everything we made on paper, ink, pencils, and fast food on the way to the different schools as we traveled up and down the state. I was also doing lead sheets for campus kids who were writing songs but didn’t know how to notate them. At $25 a song, it kept me in cigarettes and fast food. Consulting – This is a weird one. I didn’t really make any money but I developed a hell of a lot of gravitas in the eyes of many of the music department faculty that created momentum in my own eyes. The head of the theory department, Dr. Robert Hogenson, approached me as well as my classmate, Craig Smith, at the beginning of our senior year to design the university’s first electronic music studio and put a bid list together. We had to work within a limited budget. We did the homework, helped our department chair order the equipment, and set it up on arrival. We were also enlisted by the department chair to do a demonstration presentation for the deans and financial department to pitch for additional purchases the year after we would graduate. All this snowballed to the department deciding to hire an instructor of electronic music for the coming school year. Craig and I were chosen to interview all the candidates because we frankly knew more about the state of computer music than most of the music department members. We had private interviews with all the candidates. We sat in on faculty meetings and our opinions and observations were actually appreciated by our teachers. The candidate we supported, Dr. Fred T. Hoffstetter, was brilliant and the department agreed with our choice. The studio was simple but powerful. I ended up composing a sonata for tuba and synthesizer that a classmate, Jim Murphy, performed at his senior recital. In hindsight, I realized this changed the way I looked at myself. While I wasn’t the best in anything musical in my music education department, I had developed a confidence walking through any door or on to any stage that money couldn’t buy. So there you have it. I pursued many of these threads after receiving my bachelor’s degree. They were the falling dominoes that led me to new beginnings like computer programming. The key here is this: When I signed a contract for my first 7.5 job teaching position May first of my senior year, I had already logged hundreds of hours and invested many dollars developing my 16.5 hour business. So if you are still an undergrad, it’s time to get crackin’. Even if you graduated years ago and have been working a while, today is always a good day to make more of the hours that are available to us. Kick around those ideas for your 16.6 hour business and entrepreneurial persona. You’ll be happy you did. |
AuthorBoyd Holmes, the Writer Archives
February 2025
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