How to get a gig

[Biggs]

Well, not everyone who pursues a music performance plans on trying to use that education to seek employment as a player.

I'm not trying to dispute your point that some institutions and some professors have no business producing "performers," but I consider myself a 'performance' major who will not seek employment as a player. I'm pursuing a tuba degree for my own satisfaction, not because I think I have professional potential.

I agree that there are delusional performance majors with no chance of becoming professional players; I just don't think you can discount the idea of a competent, casual performance major.

[MileMarkerZero]

Set a goal to make a sample tape or cd that you can give out as a marketing tool. Make the best tape you possibly can, to include investing a modest amount of money in studio time.

Then comes the leg work of getting the tape/your business card into the hands of potential customers-think wedding conventions, bridal shops, church organists, PR people for larger corporations and places that have concert series(retirement communities, museums, etc.).

The best way to do this: CD-r Printable Cards

qty. price per unit
100 39.00 [$0.39]
200 76.00 [$0.38]
500 185.00 [$0.37]

Features

Free Vinyl Sleeves! *
Media Type: Business Card Silver on Silver CDR Disc
Capacity: 50MB / 5 Minutes
Recording Speed: 2X/4X/8X/12X/16X/32X Certified
Top Surface: Silver
Dimension: Rounded Edge (Hockey Ring), 80 +/- 0.2mm in Length, 61 +/- 0.1mm in Width
Center Hole Size: Standard "22mm" Center Hole
Life: 100 years with proper care / read more than 1,000,000 times.

50MB should get you plenty of MP3's of your stuff on it. Or, if you'd rather, you could just do half a dozen 30 second full audio samples to get your target customers interested. When they call, you can offer them a minidisc or a full CD to listen to.

Also...get yourself a 2 or 4 GB flash drive and put all of your best stuff on it and keep it with you. You never know when you can plug it into someone's PC and get a gig. Make sure you have a web site with samples too.

Another tip: if you have a quintet, just get ONE GIG. Charge enough for the gig to hire some studio time. Then get your recording made. Figure $100/hr for demo recordings, more for full masters (Nashville Rates). If you charge $1200 for a wedding, you should be able to plow that into a good start on your marketing.

As long as your group can competently play at a good level, it all comes down to marketing and follow-through.

[tubatooter1940]

Things have changed regarding booking gigs recently.
Used to be you had to have a good c.d. out to claim any legitamacy as a pro group. Now, booking agents demand a video to go with the c.d. Groups with no video to show are relegated to any work that might be left over after the videos do much of the the selling job for the agent.

[lgb&dtuba]

Well, not everyone who pursues a music performance plans on trying to use that education to seek employment as a player.

I'm not trying to dispute your point that some institutions and some professors have no business producing "performers," but I consider myself a 'performance' major who will not seek employment as a player. I'm pursuing a tuba degree for my own satisfaction, not because I think I have professional potential.

I agree that there are delusional performance majors with no chance of becoming professional players; I just don't think you can discount the idea of a competent, casual performance major.

I've heard this type of statement many times (I work at a university now), so don't take this personally, but I have to wonder just why someone would waste 4 years or more in college to get a degree that they don't plan on using to earn their way in this world.

Unless you are planning on living on Mummy and Daddy's money for the rest of your life you're going to have to have a marketable skill. If you don't learn one in college, then you'll have to spend more time learning one. Having wasted time in college you'll then be automatically behind your age group and behind in earnings.

Education is a fine thing, but unless you're independently wealthy you'd better be learning something that will help you earn a living.

[tubeast]

lgbdtuba,

I sure agree with you. I might add (not being an instructor myself): if I were an instructor and heard of something like this, I´d get VERY angry at someone who´s not only wasting THEIR time, but MINE as well, and kick somebody´s *** (physically as well as metaphorically speaking) really hard in the process.
After all, I want to build up / maintain a good name of my studio. I´m interested in talented and eager students soaking up all they can and maybe throw in whatever THEY may be able to come up with.

One more thing seems strange here:
There should be standards as to who´ll get a degree and who won´t. Mastering ALL major and minor keys (and probably a whole lot of other scales) would be the least I´d expect from someone who spent YEARS of studying music, no matter what their motivation was.

Don´t get me wrong here: I think it´s perfectly OK to study something simply out of interest, but not out of professional necessity. That´s what academic freedom is all about.
But if I do, I´ll either find "hobbyist´s class" if there is one, or I´ll work my butt off like everybody else, to prove that I´m worth the professor´s time and effort.

[MartyNeilan]

On the flip side, instead of getting a performance degree, there are now many other options. Living in the Nashville area, most of the schools here with good music programs offer a "Music Business" degree. This would definitely be one of the few areas of the country where you could get that degree and start working right away. Exclusively playing the horn? Probably not. But, working an entry level job in the music industry, with plenty of opportunities for advancement, sure beats flipping burgers using your performance diploma for a spatula.

[Mojo workin']

and behind in earnings.

Heavens! Say it isn't so! You just might have to forget that trip to Bermuda that you as an American are entitled to. A catastrophe indeed.

and kick somebody´s *** (physically

Are the brown shirts still marching over there?

to prove that I´m worth the professor´s time and effort

General points previously made taken, still isn't the professor the hired help? He/she's the one going home with the paycheck.

[Dean]

While professors are not the "hired help," they are compensated for their time. Studio teachers, more than other professors, are a resource for the students. Its up to the students as to whether they utilize that resource to their fullest potential. IT'S NOT UP TO THE TEACHER.

There are 168 hours in a week. ONE of those hours is spent in a lesson. Maybe you have studio class for 1 or 2 hours to learn a few tricks there. Maybe your teacher coaches your tuba quartet or brass quintet for an hour. Still, that leaves you with 164 hours for the rest of the week. THAT'S where you "get er' done." Any student who fumbles around all week (or doesn't practice at all) and expects their teacher to "fix it" in that one hour is fooling themselves. It's not about how much you practice either. I've heard students play and play and play and not get much better. One person, a friend of mine, really stands out in my memory. I'd hear him very often throughout my undergrad in the next room (we had adjacent "favorite" practice rooms). He was there much more than I. He'd be there when I got there, and still be there when I left. But he was just playing, he wasn't working--wasn't thinking--wasn't using what his teacher gave him.

Performance degrees don't matter. So to say that schools should or shouldn't be giving so many out is pointless. I say let's give one to everyone in the country--send em in the mail like those $600 checks.

This is pretty off-topic, like most every other post on Tubenet. But, I think the topic creator has been properly answered. The rest of it, I do find interesting. Colleges and universities don't have a "responsibility" to "make" job-winners. They only have to provide the tools so those students are able to succeed. Whether the student succeeds is up to them and them alone.

[Dan Castillo]

I know a fair number of people who were/are performance majors for the scholarship money. They are double majors pursuing other fields, but these other departments may not have funding to put these people through school. They double in music so that they can get a scholarship from the music school at said university. Usually they can do all requirements for a performance degree (which, c'mon....is not very hard), but once they get their degree, they're off to become an orthodontist, or molecular biologist, etc.

I don't see anything wrong with that. They fulfilled their duty to the school and played in the band or orchestra, but once they graduated the contract is over. You can find many of these people hanging around your local community band or orchestra. Probably making way more money than the "pros".

[Rick Denney]

Colleges and universities don't have a "responsibility" to "make" job-winners. They only have to provide the tools so those students are able to succeed. Whether the student succeeds is up to them and them alone.

I would go even further, and say that colleges should not be concerned about job training in their undergraduate degrees. They should be concerned about education. A broadly educated person should know a lot about a lot of subjects, and that broad knowledge can provide the basis for making a decent living doing something or other.

Lots of people study languages, or mathematics, or history, or even science and end up in a completely different field. But they succeed because in addition to language, history, or science, they also learned language, mathematics, history, AND science.

A master's degree is another matter. That's a job-training degree.

You learn how to do a job by being trained by one who is a master at doing that job. That's just as true for engineers as it is for musicians.

90% of the engineering calculations I used in daily work I learned post-grad. But that 90% would not have been possible without the 10% I learned in school. And much of what makes me a competent engineer is the non-engineering stuff or engineering stuff in other fields that I learned. I have no use for engineers who can only calculate.

Any undergraduate degree in music performance should include wide-ranging topics in languages, mathematics, history, and science, sufficient to provide a well-rounded education. If it does, and if the student takes that breadth seriously, they'll come out of it with far more than major and minor scales. Most of what they learn in terms of music performance they'll get in their studio and lessons, and those can be had outside college. In fact, if performing professionally was my goal, I might choose a university near a city where there is a really high-end professional who could teach me, and then get a good general education at college while studying and practicing my butt off with the pro. Whether the pro is on the faculty or not almost doesn't matter.

Someone close to me has a recent undergraduate degree in music performance, and is working on a master's in performance. It's unlikely that a pro career is in the cards, but the kid has learned to be self-sufficient and that's what counts. I am surely not worried about the kid being successful in life.

Rick "not confusing trade schools with universities" Denney

[MileMarkerZero]

Too many people think that college is where you learn your job. But that isn't the case. College is where you acquire a skill set that makes you marketable for any number of career paths.

And as an aside to Marty, U of Oklahoma offers a Fine Arts degree that is about 1/2 your fine arts discipline and 1/2 another discipline. So if you want, you can "major" in tuba perf and secondary in journalism and become a music critic. Or major in tuba perf and secondary in accounting or business or whatever. You could even secondary in metallurgy and come up with a radical new tuba design that is perfectly in tune with a gorgeous sound and only weighs 1-1/2 lbs.

It's like a music ed degree, except instead of taking the ed major core sequence, you take the core sequence from another major and graft it into the degree. My wife went that route with flute and is happy as a clam designing newspaper front pages.

[NDSPTuba]

There is one thing about the Dallas area that put an end to my playing in the local (paying) regional orchestras. The union head for the Dallas chapter plays hardball with all the large paying ensembles, if you want to gig with one, you HAVE TO be in the union, he has seen to that. Which for someone like me, that was barely getting enough gigs to actually pay the dues for one year, isn't something I want to do. That and my chop problems put an end to my playing career for good.

[Eupharitone]

Rick said pretty much what I was going to say as I read this thread.

Music Performance is a pretty worthless degree in and of itself, but not much more worthless than a degree in say Psychology, History, Art, Business or General Education....you don't have to have an Education degree to know how to teach, you don't have to have a Business degree to start a business etc.....and of course there are plenty of smart individuals who simply study something as a hobby their entire lives and by the time they're in High School they know more about the subject than someone who studied it for 4 years at a college or university but yet aren't considered "knowledgeable" bout a subject until they pay $100,000 for a piece of paper.

I think people look at a Music Performance degree in the same way they look at a regular "Music" degree; the person holding said degree was a music major in school and therefore studied the art of music. It's just another academic major (a liberal arts degree) and it's still a "college degree", which makes them better off than people without one. Especially considering only like 60-something percent of people actually end up doing something that's remotely similar to their field of specialty when they get out of school.

Me: So what's your major?
Random person: Latin
Me: So what do you plan to do with this degree in "Latin"
Random person: I don't know, but I like Latin, and it's having the degree that's important because I'll still end up with a better job than if I'd never gone to college

It's the same with Music Performance I think.....

[lgb&dtuba]

Me: So what's your major?
Random person: Latin
Me: So what do you plan to do with this degree in "Latin"
Random person: I don't know, but I like Latin, and it's having the degree that's important because I'll still end up with a better job than if I'd never gone to college

It's the same with Music Performance I think.....

Admittedly my opinions on this (and they are certainly only opinions) are colored by the profession I'm in; computer programming.

My version of the above conversation during an interview:

Me: So what's your major?
Random person: Latin
Me: So what do you plan to do with this degree in "Latin"
Random person: I don't know, but I like Latin, and it's having the degree that's important because I'll still end up with a better job than if I'd never gone to college. Will you hire me?
Me: Do you know any computer languages?
Random person: Well, no. But I went to college and Latin is a language.
Me: Thanks for coming in. Next!

[tuneitup]

Admittedly my opinions on this (and they are certainly only opinions) are colored by the profession I'm in; computer programming.

My version of the above conversation during an interview:

Me: So what's your major?
Random person: Latin
Me: So what do you plan to do with this degree in "Latin"
Random person: I don't know, but I like Latin, and it's having the degree that's important because I'll still end up with a better job than if I'd never gone to college. Will you hire me?
Me: Do you know any computer languages?
Random person: Well, no. But I went to college and Latin is a language.
Me: Thanks for coming in. Next!

The problem in your analogy is that previous poster said you can get a "Better" job, and not any job. There are tons of occupations that need special training in college setting, and computer programing might be one of those. Of course, you can study computer language in high schools and trade schools as well.

[lgb&dtuba]

My version of the above conversation during an interview:

Me: So what's your major?
Random person: Latin

etc.

The problem in your analogy is that previous poster said you can get a "Better" job, and not any job. There are tons of occupations that need special training in college setting, and computer programing might be one of those. Of course, you can study computer language in high schools and trade schools as well.

Care to come up with a real world example of this better job this Latin major might land over someone with only a high school diploma?

I have nothing against studying Latin, by the way. Took a couple of years of it in high school myself and I even recommended that my daughter take it in high school and college since she was pursuing a biochem degree with an eye towards medical school at the time. (She's got her master's in forensics and is a forensic scientist now.) But I can't really imagine a job outside of academia where an undergraduate Latin degree by itself would give an advantage. There may be one somewhere, just like there may be an orchestral position for a tubist somewhere

Jim "Getting that tuba reference in just in time." Wagner

[tuneitup]

Just go to Monster and type "college degree." You will see bunch of non-specialized jobs that require a college degree in any major.

[MaryAnn]

Weeeelllllll...........
My music degree did not land me a music job. IIRC the job I got right after my music degree was in retail at minimum wage. No matter that I did eventually end up with a union job in a regional orchestra; it was my skill at my instrument that landed me that, not my music degree. My advice to people who really just want to play for a living is to go study with the very best teacher they can find, putting all available time into that study, and don't even worry about the degree. But if it's an education you want, like Rick says, go get that education. It is a good thing to have, and much easier to get when you are young and not supporting a family.

Now, my engineering degree was a whole different ball o' wax. On graduating I had six reasonably lucrative job offers from a variety of places, including Bell Labs in New Joisey, Knolls Atomic Power Lab in Schenectady, IBM in Minnesota, and a some public utilities (just as an example of the difference immediately post-degree between music and engineering.) I took a utility job based on location, and while I haven't been entirely happy I have stayed here reasonably satisfied and made several zillion times more $$ than I would have as a fiddle player.

Even in my short decade of professional music/freelancing/private studio teaching, I found that, for me, playing the violin became just another job like when I was a graveyard shift dishwasher while in music school. BUT....it was the music lesson business that I finally got going successfully that allowed me to return to school for the engineering degree, and the scholarship to play in the orchestra that paid the tuition for the first couple of years.

If I could give myself advice back then from my vantage point now, I'd tell myself to forget my math fear and get my rear off to Berkely in Boston and major in studio recording engineering. I'da been pretty damn good at that. Whether I would have been any better at the necessary politicking is a different question with an unknown answer.

MA

[Mark]

Any undergraduate degree in music performance should include wide-ranging topics in languages, mathematics, history, and science, sufficient to provide a well-rounded education.

... including remedial spelling and grammar when necessary ...

[lgb&dtuba]

Just go to Monster and type "college degree." You will see bunch of non-specialized jobs that require a college degree in any major.

Depends on where you are, my friend.

Doing exactly what you said, using Raleigh, NC and a 200 mile radius it pulled up 12 jobs. 8 of which required specific engineering degrees. The other 4 were sales jobs.

Now, I know there are certainly more than 12 open jobs in a 200 mile radius of Raleigh, but since I'm not personally looking for one I'm not going to waste my time any further with Monster and your little challenge.

Bottom line, I didn't see all those jobs you think are there for college graduates with no specific skills. I'm not arguing that there aren't companies out there with that as a minumum requirement before they'll even talk to you. Clearly there are.

But generally speaking you are certainly going to land a better (higher paying) job with some kind of technical or engineering degree.

And after a certain number of years have passed experience trumps most degrees. Not in fields like medicine where you aren't going to practice without the degree in the first place, though.