10 skills for a 21st Century musician

10 essential skills for the 21st century musician.

I don’t expect another musician to agree with my list!  It is based only on my experience.  In much of the online discussions about being a musician in the digital age, there is an assumption that you are either an artist trying to sell your songs or you are a composer.
In reality, there are many musicians who are neither but are active in the music business and that’s the standpoint I’m coming from.

Play an instrument. An instrument gives you access to making music so what you play heavily influences your musical identity.  It is the medium that carries your most personal musical voice.

Record music on a computer. All those college courses that offer either music tech or music performance – bollocks.  You need both.

Read notation. Music is a language and notation is its written form.  It comes in really handy when communicating with other musicians and coping with complex ideas yourself.

Know some theory.  Sure, we all feel music, it’s all about the sound, but if you understand how all those notes fit together you give yourself the chance to make more than just an instinctive use of them.

Compose. Even if you don’t class yourself as a composer, music is a creative business; dabble.

Arrange. So you have some musical ideas to say.  Arrangement is the ability to present them; to communicate them in a way that a listener can access.

Publish online. Life exists online, so don’t miss out.  Blogs, videos, podcasts, tweets, social networks, forums – these are the places you build your online identity and where you connect with the collaborators and customers.

Know the technology.  In order to publish more than just text online, get some skills in digital tech – video, audio, images, website construction.  Really, it’s not complicated.

Be a learner. I think there is a need to constantly update my skills and knowledge.

Evolve and adapt. If there is one surety about our world, it’s that it is ever changing – socially, culturally, economically.   If we can’t adapt to change we won’t evolve.

So, what have I missed?  What do you disagree with?

Digital Skills For Musicians

Digital skills for musicians; I’m not thinking of the core tools of recording, sequencing and notating, but the apps and services that let you take your music further, to connect with others, to promote your talents, to project your identity and to continually learn.

How’s this: there are 5 main areas of digital skills for musicians (I know my apps and services suggestions are not comprehensive).
Digital Sound. This includes editing, compressing, hosting, embedding, sharing, transferring and presenting.
Apps and services like Audacity, Garageband, Soundcloud, iTunes, YouSendIt, FTP, idisk.

Digital Images. Video, photography and graphics. This includes creating, editing, compressing, hosting, embedding, sharing, transferring and presenting.
Apps and services like iMovie, iPhoto,  Flickr, Photobucket, Slideshare, YouTube, Animoto, OneTrueMedia, Xtranormal, Vimeo, Quicktime, Kyte.tv

Have your say (self publishing).  Blogging, micro blogging, podcasts, wikis, buying a url.  Apps and services like Twitter, WordPress, Blogger, wikispaces, iTunes and audio hosting services.

Make connections  (social networks and communications). This is about being part of the global music community. Twitter (again),  Myspace, Facebook, Ning, Imeem, LastFM, forums, commenting, Skype, iChat.

Information (finding, organising and using).  RSS, social bookmarking.  Apps and services like delicious, google.

I have a nagging urge to create an online course; Digital Skills for Musicians.  Throughout my working life I’ve had some connection with education and in recent years my passion has been centred round digital technologies and the web.  In my experience, current music courses don’t offer convincing curriculum content for the things that I see as central to learning and working in the creative industries – the social web, self publishing, and all the openness and connections that exist because of Web 2.0.

Much of the discussion around musicians and the web assumes that ‘musician’ means band or songwriter, looking to win fans and sell music.  My own experience shows that ‘musician’ can be interpreted far more broadly to cover a range of work.
In fact, if I survey 100 of my colleagues making a living from music, only a small proportion are artists/bands directly promoting themselves to fans; the rest are composers, performers, producers, engineers and arrangers.  So I’d expect the content of the course to reflect this.

I’m not starting entirely from scratch with this; I’d want to build on the content and community at www.manchestermusician.co.uk

I am not an expert in web tools for musicians but therein lies one of the many benefits of the social web – expertise is readily available and shared.  Through my own learning and development with digital tools and services I believe I am well placed to facilitate learning. The course will require each individual learner to personalise their development for their own needs and interests, and demonstrate learning with practical uses of the apps and services.  Getting such a course up and running (funded and validated) is a huge task!

I’ve started a wiki to develop some content (it will necessarily never cease to evolve). For each topic there are technical and creative elements;  how do you use the app or service and how can you exploit it for your own development?  So, what have I missed?

Here’s a slideshare presentation by Jane Hart; it focuses on organisations (business and education) rather than individuals, though the concepts translate to  an individual, managing his own development.

soundcloud

One of the great challenges for us working with audio is communicating ideas with words.  It just leads to so much confusion, partly because music expresses emotions beyond words, but also because we struggle to describe specific points in the music.

Soundcloud.com is a cool new web service for anyone dealing with audio. You really have to sign up and play around with it to get a feel for what it is! As well as being able to upload large audio files and share them, you can attach comments to the wave form.  It won’t  embed here, but try looking at it on the soundcloud website.
Roll your cursor over the little avatars under the waveform to see comments, attached to specific points in the music.

Here’s a screen shot; click to go to the site.

Noteflight

When I was heavily involved in music education I longed for a tool to create music notation in a browser.  I even started a little development with a colleague but we never got anywhere near the service now offered by Noteflight.  Here’s a basic example  (I can’t embed it with WordPress, only link to it.)

It’s in beta at the moment but my simple 4 bars were easy to create with intuitive tools.  As a demonstration tool of musical examples (chord movement, melodic shapes – many things related to music language) it is invaluable.  The sounds are basic and playback lacks any finesse, but that is true of notation packages, where the look is the priority and the sound provides the bare essentials of pitch and rhythm.

Teeth and Claws – an analysis

It’s summer and I feel I’ve earned a bit of me time, so I’m pursuing a few ideas that have been kicking around for a while. Roots and influences are coming soon, but here’s something else – an analysis of a song I worked on several years ago. I can’t get hold of the writer, I don’t know whether he still makes music but I believe this is the greatest song NEVER released. Teeth and Claws by Sean Booth. I found away of adding annotations to YouTube video (a hugely impressive tool that will have implications in music education).
The annotations feature in YouTube is in beta I believe, so annotations only show up on the original YouTube page, so not embedded. Click in the video image to go to YouTube.

Inyaniso – Official Music Video

I wish I could say I taught him everything he knows, but I bloody well can not, he was Mr Motivation when I met him and was going to get every last drop out of his time at City College Manchester, regardless of me (his course tutor!

John Blaylock already had his band International One going when I interviewed him for the NC Music course.  He had good A level grades and I suggested he should be looking at Uni – he nearly decked me.  He was totally focused on studying music and making his passion his career.  International One are now signed, on the brink of releasing their 1st album and the material sounds fantastic – John is a Manc indie kind of guy and that’s what his music sounds like!

This video is a song to honour Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday – I saw the letter from Desmond Tutu inviting the band to write this song.  That’s a piece of history and I’m totally thrilled for John and the band.

the roodies

The Roodies rock! Well, I’m heavily biased of course, because my son Dominic is the drummer in a band he has formed with 3 friends. They are all currently aged 7 or 8 and they did their first gig at a Beavers night as part of the singer’s music badge. They just did the one song – Funkytown. It has a couple of shaky moments but the boys did good!

I don’t think I’m a pushy dad, but I can’t help but be enthusiastic about my own passions of music and digital technology, so Dominic gets a nudge towards these. I bought him a violin; he’s not interested yet!. Grade 1 drum exam next week too.

I can’t embed Ning videos in wordpress, so click this picture to go to the video page.

concert camera director

I’m always up for learning some new skills.  And as I regularly harp on about the need to diverge with skills, as the creative industries converge, I spent a day as a camera director for a concert shoot in Preston.  The gig was a choir and orchestra concert at Preston Minster, directing 5 cameras.  I had the scores to read and needed to have cameras pointing at the right place at the right time basically!  Think it went well, though the editing will be the judge.  The job made me focus on how a music performance can be visualised.  Shots of the right performer at the right time is one thing, but pan, zoom and registration all have to respond to the emotion and passion of the performers, as well as the texture, flow and character of the music – in this case, Handel, Vivaldi and Puccini.  This job came through blast-from-the=past Bob Christie at Langdale Productions.