5 Common Mistakes Most Musicians Make
Intro
When you just decide to step into the music world as a creator, you surely are likely to make tons of mistakes that you’ll regret later. It actually happens to all of us but making mistake isn’t really a bad thing. It helps you learn but there are cheaper ways to do that.
Thankfully it’s 2019 and I suppose there are more than enough ways out there to gain your knowledge in your craft. The internet would be the biggest option. Knowing how to find the reliable information on it, is crucial as the internet itself.
Be sure to listen carefully to people who’ve been where you’re trying to be for a long time, but still you have to see if those information can match with your logic.
Since I started my music career as a sound engineer and producer, I have been learning a lot, by making my own or the others’ mistakes. Today I wanna share 5 of the most common mistakes that a lot of musicians make these days.
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Rushing and Expecting Things to Happen Fast.
You have to believe that for any types of job you wanna do, you need enough amount of experience. If you ask the professionals and read some articles by them, you’ll realize that this one career you’ve chosen does really need a big amount of that.
Learning musical techniques is sort of like learning a new language. Once you stop practising for a while, you’re so likely to forget the information you’ve previously learnt. Thus as well as getting upgraded with new technical information, you got to be sure to use what you’ve acknowledged so far.
A lot of musicians worry about quickly becoming a pro more than the things they have to learn. Especially when it comes to making money out of it. The Truth is that it will not happen any time soon even when you’re 100 percent sure that you can call yourself a pro musician.
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Not trying to solve things by yourself but expecting it from others.
It’s perfectly normal to be in touch with some professionals and get help from them, but if be dependent on them, you won’t really stay happy. All the professional people are busy most of the time, and they can’t really keep helping others out all the time.
If you have an issue with your DAW while making an instrumental for instance, you don’t have to call your producer friend while he’s in a session just to ask! Open up the browser and keep searching till you find the solution. The more you search about different issues on the internet, the more easy it gets so you always have access to all the answers you need.
That way you won’t seem annoying to your musician connections and that small issues wouldn’t make distance between you in your relationship. Only get help from the others when you realize that it’s certainly needed.
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Creating a bad image of yourself with your first songs.
Once you think you’re able to make a song or something, I know how excited you’d get to put something out and get feedback from the others. You make a single track and may think it’s fire!
All right, now let’s get that shit on Spotify or Apple Music!
Think of the next couple years when you search your name on Google and that “Booty Life” Single track pops up and you’re just like… shit.
Nothing but regret, then you have to spend a lot of time removing it from every single platform or website or blog… which is a pain in the ass.
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Not knowing how to use your social media platforms.
I’ve been running a big social media Instagram page for years and I do help others build theirs. Most of the Instagram accounts of the producers I see on Instagram have almost the same pattern.
Phone videos of their songs getting played in their home-studio… shitty quality selfies in front of their studio monitors… A photo shot of the steak they cooked the other day. This just seems stupid as hell to me! Social media is almost the most important place for you to show yourself to the world these days. You need to make sure you create a very professional image of you on it.
It is not so hard to do that as you can use the very professional musicians’ Instagram pages as reference while being creative at the same time, in order to build up yours. Of course not the celebrity ones cause that’s another story. A celebrity musician can post a picture of her lipstick or a piece of cake and still be called professional but you shoudln’t! Unless you’re already a celebrity with millions of followers reading this.
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Nothing is free, so be open to invest on yourself.
Having an income is so essential for you as a musician. If you believe in you, the thing that you’re doing and your future, paying $500 to your chosen producer or engineer wouldn’t bother you.
You have to focus on quality, not quantity. A hit single track is worth more than five 14 song albums that don’t really get heard by many. Though I see most of musicians rather to choose those five 14 song albums getting produced by producers charging $20 a song… and mixed by themselves as they say that ain’t matter!
It’s a competition, so you have to consider every single aspect. For example when you’re a rapper, you definitely need to consider, your rapping skills (flow, lyrics, delivery…etc), the production, recording equipment, editing, the mix, mastering, management and promotion.. And so on. I’d say if you believe it’s never enough, then you have the chance to make it!
