3 questions to ask yourself before becoming a professional musician

Why?

I’ve found with anything in life, the best question to ask yourself in any situation is ‘why?’

Picking up an instrument is very much the same, and your motives for doing so will be a determining the factors of what you need to do to fulfil your dreams. So let me ask you:

‘Why do you want to be a professional musician?’

There is no wrong answer to this question, only motivations, and the sooner you get to that answer, the quicker you can get a plan together to realise your dreams.

For me it was ‘to feel good enough’ — something that motivates the majority of my decisions to this day! And the beauty of it was, I had control over how good I could become at it and see direct results (a lot of the time not instantly, and patience is not one of my strong suits).

For you it could be a number of things:

To be the best in the world

To belong

To become famous

To teach others

To get girls/boys

To see the world

…………..

To see how you’re going to fare depends a lot on the answer to this question, because, it’s not easy, there will be rough times, there will be (many) times you’re broke, sat in a windowless room practising, and times you just want to throw your instrument down and walk away. If you can keep your original motivations in mind when going through those rough patches, then it’ll be a lot easier to stay focused.

What?

Ok, so once you’ve got your why, it’s time to look at your what. What is a goal that once reached, will show you you’re doing it, you’re living the dream? For me it was simple:

To make a living doing what I love.

And I do, and it’s been a long old path, an exciting, devastating, wonderful, tragic, magical, heartbreaking, unique path and no-one’s been on it, and no-one will be on yours. They may intersect with someone else’s, and you may travel in tandem for a while, but this is strictly your career and life to live! Make it a good’un!

Some good examples of markers to check where you’re at would be:

Tour with your own band

Play with (insert artist/band name here)

Have 100,000 Youtube subscribers

Have your own recording studio

Start a drum school

Make a living

…………

How?

Keeping your motivations and markers in mind will help you work out exactly HOW you’re going to make this work. As a general rule for any musicians starting out, I generally give one piece of advice — play with anyone and everyone that will have you!

This will give you not just a variety of music to play, but also tons of different people to meet and hang out with and learn from. It will also make you good at retaining many different songs and material from different artists at one time, and from experience I can tell you, it makes you very good at learning quickly!

Let me add a very important bit of info from my own personal experience that I always had in my mind, even though it was hard.

Don’t do things just for the money!

Yes, everyone has to make money to live, but the first 10 years of my learning and career were DIRE financially! I was lucky enough to be able to stay at home until I was 20 so outgoings were at a minimum, and meant that I could play with as many people as I physically could before getting completely worn out (which I did, many times)!

Your focus should be on growing as a musician and heading towards that marker. For me, I would get paid very occasionally at the beginning, which then changed to being slightly more regularly, to then being able to afford to move out and rent a room, to being able to afford a house! It’s been by no means easy, and I’m certainly no overnight success (which no-one is by the way), but I’m here, I make a living from hitting things, and I’m ecstatic!

Once you’re at a place where you’re supporting yourself full time (if that’s your goal), then you can start refining what kinds of things you say yes to, to get you in line with that ‘What’ marker, and head for gold!

TELL ME YOUR WHY, WHAT AND HOW?

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