Teaching music is a rewarding career path for a lot of musicians due to its flexibility with time as well as its financial advantages. Moreover, teaching also makes you a better musician and also has further benefits that can enhance your musicianship. Teaching makes you a better musician in more than one way. In this article we are going to talk about four of them:
Making music isn’t easy even under ideal conditions. If you’ve been a serious songwriter for years or even if you’re just starting out, it can be tempting to let doubt, fear, and even shame get in the way of your writing process when you inevitably run into challenges. Positivity might seem like nothing more than a self-help buzzword, but embracing it really can help you write better songs more often. When you allow yourself to step back from your process and let go of the burdens of expectation and ego, you’ll realize just how hopeful and positive making music is. You’re an artist putting something unique, human, and relatable into the world. What you do can truly make the lives of your listeners better. Here are four ways to bring positive change to your writing process:
Whether it’s a talkative roommate or the constant desire to be on your phone, distractions can be one of the most significant barriers standing between you and your full potential as a songwriter. If you’re serious about making the best music you can and sharing it with the world, you’re going to need to identify what distracts you the most when you write. Then comes the hard work of consciously removing distractions from your writing practice. While this gets easier the more we work at it, it’s a job we’re never finished doing. Distractions will always make writing music harder than it has to be unless we do the constant work of addressing and removing them.
When you hear the word “discipline,” you might think of the work it takes for a bodybuilder to build and maintain muscle, or someone saying no to certain foods because they’re on a diet. But as music-makers, discipline often means the difference of being able to write great music or not. It’s one of the most important attributes we can embrace if we want to be productive and meaningfully engaged.
Anyone who’s been holed up in a music studio with the mission of writing a new album knows how hard it can be to focus on the task at hand. Distractions come in all shapes and sizes, whether it’s a smartphone notification, pet, bandmate, or our own internal boredom or impulsivity. To get the most of your life as a music-maker, you’ll have to learn to devote deep focus when you create or perform music. Here are four huge benefits you’ll experience when you apply focus to your music:
We don’t need much other than an instrument and our desire to make music during the writing process, but we do need some things. What you have in the room with you while you write can absolutely have a big impact on the music you end up creating. Some of the items on this list might seem obvious, but their importance and benefit to your writing process really can’t be overstated. Nothing on this list should be too hard to get your hands on, and if you make sure to have these items out and ready when you write, your musical life will be a lot easier and more productive.
Whether you make folk music or EDM, technology is now an unavoidable part of your daily life as a musician. From DAWs and sophisticated recording equipment to smartphones and computers being ever-present while we write, it’s now virtually impossible to separate technology during the music creation process.
Sometimes (okay, a lot of times) being an introvert is exhausting. Everything going on in the world around us drains us, and when we can’t get that alone time to regroup and recharge, it can cause us to shut down, making it impossible to be productive. And that’s kind of the last thing you want when you’re trying to create your next masterpiece, am I right?
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