Drum heads can be punctured. Pianos keys can crack. But it’s the guitarist whose instrument is always a heartbeat away from total destruction...
You can quickly replace a key on a piano or a head on a drum without too much trouble. But the neck on an electric guitar is like the blade on a sword. Once it’s broken, it may never be the same. Here, we’ll tell you how to prevent tragedy, so listen up – before your oafish bass player drops your Les Paul Custom on the concrete basement floor.
1. Leave your case unzipped
You think your best axe is safe in that gig bag or buckled up inside a hard case. Then someone picks it up by the handle. Surprise! The case wasn’t latched or zipped and the guitar spills out. As I write this, my foot is resting on a coffee table with a guitar-shaped gouge in the wood because somebody dropped a six-string on it. And you should see the guitar!
2. Allow people to trip on cables
Get in the habit of unplugging and rolling up those guitar cords when you’re done playing. Your instrument may be sitting snug on a nice guitar stand, but all it takes is one stray foot to trip on a cable. Then you may be facing an unhappy triad of consequences: your guitar got whipped across the studio, the jack the cord was plugged into probably needs to be replaced, and your lead singer has a broken nose – all because of your trippy, loose cable. Leaving cables plugged in is also draining the batteries in your row of stomp-boxes. Plus, we already told you to put your guitar in the case.
3. Let beginners borrow your instrument It’s wonderful that your 12-year-old cousin Brad wants to learn guitar. You should encourage him to get his own. Or, if anything, let him borrow the beat-up older one that you forgot to put on Craigslist. People tend to be careless with stuff they didn’t pay for. Rookies are also known to never hand a guitar back in tune, and there will often be a snapped string or two since they twisted the tuning pegs too far in the wrong direction.
4. Leave your instrument in humid conditions
The best way to destroy a guitar without violence is by exposing it to extreme changes in humidity. So many people play in basements and let their guitars stay there. The problem is, basements get very wet in warm weather. As the outdoor temperature increases, the indoor humidity goes up… a lot. When it rises above 70 percent, your instruments are in jeopardy. This is because woods expand and contract with humidity changes, and different woods do this at different rates. Your guitar is almost certainly made of more than one species of tree. With extreme humidity and differing expansion rates, necks bend and glued pieces begin to separate. If you heat your home using hot water pipes, watch out in the summer when those pipes start to sweat. If there’s a row of water droplets hanging from those copper pipes, get your guitars out of there! A little digital hygrometer is cheap to buy, highly accurate, and will tell you temperature and humidity. And of course, if you can, store your instruments upstairs.
5. Make sure everyone in town knows where you keep your guitar
It’s their friends, or the friends of their friends. I’m talking about theft. Guitar-napping. Losing a guitar to theft is worse than having a car stolen. The guitar has more sentimental value, and the car will probably be found by the police (without the radio or rims, but still). The guitar is probably gone for good.
The greatest hazard to your instruments in terms of felonious action is letting your practice space become a party space. Let a lot of strange people into your rehearsals to hang out, and one of them might turn up shady. The lone bright side? You can be compensated by your renter’s or homeowner’s insurance. Insurance companies still operate largely on the honor system for small claims, but it doesn’t hurt to have a bill of sale, or at least photographs of your instruments on file, so you can prove you had them. However, your 1970 Martin Dreadnought should never be left any place from which it can be easily heisted. Keep in mind that a well-maintained guitar can last virtually forever. So be careful with those instruments if you want your great-grandchildren to strum a few chords.
Jesse Sterling Harrison is an author, recording artist, and part-time farmer. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, three daughters, and a herd of ducks.
Tip #1). Work on the basics
"Practise, practise, practise, practise and then my fifth tip is practise, as well. You need to put the hours in to get the rewards.
"You need to know the basics. I've played with a lot of different people. I've played with Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Les Paul, and I've learned that you've got to have the basics down.
"It's like a guy that wanted to play drums telling me he wanted to play like the guy in Metallica or Pantera, and it's like, 'Go listen to Charlie Watts and Phil Rudd first.' You need to play for an hour, and then for the second hour, bring a cymbal in, and then bring in a tom, just play the basics.
"Look at Keith Richards: he plays the basics. Sure, he can play the leads, but it's the basics that are the important thing."
Tip #2). Play What You Feel
"You need to think about the feel. For me, I think of myself as more of a songwriter rather than a guitar player, so for me the song is what is key. It's not like, 'Okay guys, we've got this song, but just wait until I play this middle guitar part.' No.
"I would be a terrible studio musician, because I honestly can't play the same thing over and over. Even with our own songs, I'm like that. Sometimes I make mistakes that are better than what I should be playing, so I just go by the feel of it.
"That's why when I worked with John Lennon on the song I'm Losing You, while I was playing the solo he was in the booth with Yoko and Jack Douglas, and he looked at Jack and said, 'I wish I'd had him on Cold Turkey; Clapton choked up.' I think he just liked that I wasn't a studio guy; I was playing for the song.
"What a compliment that was. I'm not the best studio musician, but if John Lennon thinks that, who cares what anybody else thinks?"
Tip #3). Think About Your Solos
"When it comes to solos, I always try to somehow incorporate the melody of the song, or a variation of the melody, into the solo.
"I also try to think of the attitude that needs to go with the song, or come up with something that brings a different dimension to the song – maybe that could be a different rhythm.
"The attitude is important: not every song needs to have a flying solo with as many notes as you can; some need a little more depth and some air."
Tip #4). Follow Your Own Path "Nobody ever gave me any advice about what to do other than maybe, 'That stinks.' I try to just be my own barometer. I try to do what I can do, and that doesn't mean that I don't have any goals. I've never been afraid to attempt anything, but at the same time, I play in a rock band with 12 notes and that's enough.
"I always like it when I do some commercial work and someone gives you an idea, like they say, 'Play something cool.' That's all I ever try to do! If someone can give you an idea, maybe they want something slow or fast, 4/4 or whatever, that gives a creative person a destination.
"I wrote the international song for Pepsi and I was up against 70 other writers. I didn't need that job, so I just tried to work with what they gave me and I beat 70 other commercial writers – not because I wanted their job; I just listened to what they said.
"Same thing with the Colbert Report. Stephen Colbert called me about his show and said his character was like our song I Want You To Want Me, so I took the melody and turned it around and that was it. I did what he said: I didn't try to copy what I had done, I went in a new direction and it worked pretty good because it was used on TV for nine years in a row."
Tip #5). Play with other musicians... and show them respect
You should take every opportunity to go play with other musicians.
"I knew BB King since 1968 and I played with him - the last time I played with him was about six months before he died - and he would always say, 'Hey Mr Rick.' I never tried to be something that I wasn't; I was never a, 'Hey, wait until you hear what I'm playing.' Everyone else would get up and try to run circles around him, and he could kill you with one note... and he appreciated that I only knew one note! Playing with other people is so important.
"I played with Les Paul a number of times, and I played a couple of his birthday parties. I went there and I followed the leader - I followed him. All of the other guitar players that got up and played were trying to show off; they were all trying to outdo the last guy. Give me a break.
"I think that's why Les Paul liked me, because I wasn't showing off - probably because I couldn't show off! But you need to play behind people when it's not your show. It was an honour to meet and play with Les Paul."
How financially reasonable a career in music is depends entirely on which part of the industry you're devoting your time to...
Below, we break down the numbers from Berklee College of Music's 2016 report on the salary ranges of music industry jobs, which you can read in full here. It contains all the hard data on a wide variety of jobs in the music industry, and features helpful comments on most of the jobs as well. Read on to discover eight of the highest paying jobs in the music industry right now.
1. Orchestral musician Salary: $28,000 - $143,000
A career as an orchestral musician isn't an easy one, but done right, it can yield a great salary. The biggest factor in your pay as an orchestral musician is what orchestra you're playing with. Playing with a full-time orchestra, with a season of about 40 weeks, a member of the Alabama Symphony earns about $37,000 a year. A member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra earns about $132,000 a year. A variety of factors play into the payout from different orchestras, including the cost of living in the area in which the job is located.
The job market for orchestral musicians is extremely competitive. The members of the orchestras have often held their respective job title for many years and are some of the best classically trained musicians in the world. If you can make it, this is a great career to be in!
2. Video game sound designer Salary: $40,000 - $120,000+
Video game audio is a large and very promising industry to be involved in. Video game sound designers provide detailed plans of how the performance’s sound will occur, and often create voice and sound effects that integrate into the game as well. Titles like this one, as well as a director of audio or audio tool developer, can all earn well above $100,000 annually. Other lucrative positions within the video game audio industry include recording and mix engineers, and even score composers.
3. Recording engineer Salary: $25,000 - $150,000+
A timeless and irreplaceable position in music, the recording engineer is the most important person to a song after the composer and musicians. A career as a recording engineer is often a freelance career that can translate to large payouts when done right.
If you're just starting out, try to get into a studio as an assistant. Do whatever you can to keep learning and build your resume, and more importantly, your skill set. As you get more successful, you'll find that there's no limit to what a recording engineer can make on a job. As your reputability slowly increases, so will your salary!
4. Music therapist Salary: $20,000 - $135,000
Music therapy is an exciting field that's pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Therapists use music in settings such as nursing homes, preschools, and prisons to help patients work through issues, or simply promote well-being. A job as a music therapist requires completion of clearly defined academic qualifications, including completion of the American Music Therapy Association academic program.
Once you're in the field, most jobs start at around $25,000 a year, and can get up to over $100,000 a year. Not bad for the opportunity to make a positive difference in people lives every day with music, coupled with the job security of a therapist career.
5. Road manager
Salary: $25,000 - $125,000+
Back to the wild stuff, being a road manager is another lucrative career in the music industry. Road managers go on tour with touring acts and make sure everything goes according to plan. This is no easy feat, as the act of organizing and scheduling musicians is often referred to using the expression "herding cats." A road manager can expect to work with travel plans, tour budgeting, merchandise sales, fan interaction, and press requests. In addition, the tour manger will \ enforce contract rider requirements, and involve themselves with sound systems and lighting setups with the venue.
While no set salary exists and all deals are individually negotiated, managers of smaller tours can receive about $30,000, whereas the biggest tours may pay their managers upwards of $125,000.
6. Booking agent Salary: $20,000 - $3,000,000
A booking agent is a professional who secures engagements for musical groups. There's no formal education required for becoming a booking agent. You've got to know what you're doing, as booking can be a very high-pressure job, but everything you need to know you learn yourself on the job. The position is achieved by slowly building relationships with talent buyers, promoters, festival organizers, venue owners, and performing arts centers.
Typically, booking agents are paid on commission, usually 10-20 percent of the act's gross income per show. This can lead to a variety of annual salaries based on the level of the act, with some agents earning millions of dollars a year.
7. Session musician Salary: $100 - $2,500 per day or up to $100,000+
A career as a session musician can be one of the most lucrative careers in the industry, although, like many others, its pay range varies greatly. Much like a career as an orchestral musician, perfection is mandatory as a studio musician. This field is incredibly competitive and features some of the best musicians in the world for their instrument. Practice long and hard, and be sure to build up your resume if you're looking for a sustainable career as a session musician.
8. Music attorney Salary: $70,000 - $150,000+
Probably the furthest removed from any musicality, but certainly one of the most lucrative careers in music, music attorneys can make a lot of money. Just like any attorney, you'll need to go to law school and receive the proper certification. Once you're officially licensed, you can expect to make about $70,000 annually and work your way up from there. Some salaries rise well above the $150,000 mark. If you're interested in evaluating legal issues, particularly those concerning copyright, trademark, and contract negotiation, a career as a music attorney might just be right for you!
Max Monahan is a bassist and a writer living in Los Angeles. He spends his time working for an audio licensing website and shredding sweet bass riffs.
The Dorian mode (and all the other modes) can be viewed in two ways. They can be seen in relationship to the major scale that they come from. Or, they can be looked at in a parallel manner to the scale of the same tonic and same tonality.
Once a musician understands both of these perspectives, they can apply their mode in the way that they would prefer.
In this lesson, I'm going to break down these two ideas theoretically. I will clarify the concept of the #6. Plus, I'll demonstrate a Dorian mode single-string melody, and I'll also play through a set of rock chord changes that promotes and supports the, "Dorian Mode," sound. Enjoy!
As part of finding the best tone, guitar players are constantly juggling the order of their effects pedals to find the best combination of low noise and great sound.
It's a never-ending search, but there are some guidelines that come from come from pedal-board experts like Bob Bradshaw.
Here's an excerpt from my Ultimate Guitar Tone Handbook (written with the great Rich Tozzoli) that looks at the two basic schools of thought on pedal order.
There are two things that will directly affect how your effects interface with your amp: the effects order and gain staging. Effects order means the order that each pedal appears in the the signal chain between the guitar and amplifier. There are several schools of thought on effects order, and they each have a different result."
School of thought #1
This effects chain is the order generally recommended by most of the pedal gurus. There are several rules that make up this order:
Any distortion pedal must come first right after the guitar. The exception is if you’re using a compressor pedal, which will be first in the chain. Do not put a volume pedal first, as this can alter the way a compressor or distortion pedal sounds. Any modulation or tone devices like wahs should come next. This enables you to keep the sustain coming from your distortion or overdrive devices and alter an already harmonically rich signal.
Delays come almost last in the chain, since you want to be delaying your already effected signal. A volume pedal comes either last in the chain, or directly in front of any delay. In situations where a pedal is providing a lot of clean gain, that will come last in the chain so as not to overload any of the other pedals.
So, a typical effects order might go something like compressor -- distortion -- wah -- chorus -- delay -- volume pedal (see the graphic below). While this might not be the quietest order, it does sound really good because any distortion, overdrive, or sustain is being affected by the effects that come behind it.
School of thought #2
If we’re talking about recording, we may want the least amount of noise going into the amp. With that in mind, there are two rules:
- The noisiest pedal goes last in the chain before the amp. - The one with the most gain goes last before the amp. The reason for both of the above is simple: if the noisiest pedal is first in the chain, that noise will be affected and amplified further by every other pedal in the chain that you switch on. Same with the pedal with the most gain; if it’s at the beginning of the chain, it could possibly overload any other effect that comes after it, since most pedals only want to see a typical guitar signal and nothing greater (see the graphic below). Also, any noise caused by increasing the gain on a pedal will be amplified downstream by any other pedal switched on.
Generally, you’ll try to keep the basic order as in school of thought #1 in order to be sure that any distortion or sustain is affected by the effects placed later in the chain. That being said, this order won’t sound the same as order #1, especially if a distortion pedal is placed last in the chain (which isn’t recommended) because of its gain, so it might not be for everyone.
Producer/engineer Bobby Owsinski is one of the best selling authors in the music industry with 23 books that are now staples in audio recording, music, and music business programs in colleges around the world, including The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook, Social Media Promotion for Musicians, Music 4.0: A Survival Guide for Making Music in the Internet Age, and more. He’s also a contributor to Forbes writing on the new music business, and he’s appeared on CNN and ABC News as a music branding and audio expert.
This Micro Lesson explores an open-sounding piece in, "A Minor," that applies the unique open string sounds of playing Guitar with open chord voicings.
This, "open-string," sound uses chord patterns located all over the neck, yet still fits in open string tones around the chords. These open strings act to enhance the chord ideas with; 7th's, extended, or suspended chord colors.
The melody performed in this Micro Lesson begins from off of the 7th position at the 4th guitar string. It takes a fairly popular 4th string root, "A Power-chord," and applies a broken effect to it's sound using the open 5th string under a suspended 2nd and an extension of a 6th. The effect resonates with a long sustain across into measure two.
In measure three, the open 5th string, "A," continues under a, "D Minor," color. Even though there is no minor 3rd to promote the minor quality off of the, "D," root, we still have the effect due to the previously applied, "F," chord tone in the progression. The open string effect of measure three also includes the third string, "G," tone. While the 5th of the, "D," chord is strong, the bulk of the tones are suspended, (4th's and 2nd's).
The final measure applies use of wide interval three-note chord ideas that influence both, "E Minor," and, "D Minor," sounds. This occurs on the chords by way of, "Root - Octave - 5th," intervals. The lowest note is best played using, "Thumb in the Bass," technique.
Work across the changes slowly, and be careful with your fretting hand technique so as to give each chord good clarity. Enjoy the lesson!
Making a band work is a balancing act. The recipe for success in a group music setting is a very delicate one that requires a good attitude from everyone involved.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of musicians out there who can single-handedly drag your beloved project straight into the mud. Even a slightly abrasive habit can build into a horrible burden to your musical project and seriously threaten its success. To ensure a long, happy life for your band, it's in your best interest to avoid these five types of musicians at all costs.
1. The terrible listener
The blaring stereotype of the unfortunate band member and the brunt of endless subtle jokes, when you have a band member who just can't listen and figure out what's going on, there's little help for improvement without serious intervention. Good listening is the cornerstone of any musician's success. Every musical teacher you've had has told you to use your ears, and if your guitar player still can't seem to do that, then it's time to find a new one, plain and simple.
2. The over- or under-confident one
This is where personalities start to play into the game. Have you ever had a conversation with someone who talks loudly or can only talk about themselves? It's overbearing, unpleasant, and pretty horrible. On the other hand, have you ever had a conversation with someone especially skittish, someone who seems afraid to open his or her mouth whether or not he or she actually has anything interesting to say?
Both of these experiences are agonizing ones that you would never want to subject your beloved fans to... right? If your drummer is playing massive fills every four bars or your guitar player is scared of anything but root notes, then it's not going to work. A good musician is comfortable in his or her own skin and knows his or her role in the song, so don't settle for anything less!
3. The overly obsessive gear-head
We're all familiar with the stereotype of the crazy little man endlessly tinkering with knobs and wires to form the perfect contraption. Sadly, this persona takes on a much less endearing form as a real-life band member. What you end up with is more like a person who hides behind unnecessary equipment that they had to take out a lease on their car for, who really just ends up taking away from the focus of the band.
When any occupation becomes more about the tools than the job itself, quality falls. Don't let a delusional gear junkie clutter up your band.
4. The stubborn one
There's just no getting through to the stubborn one. Even worse than the terrible listener, the stubborn one's fault is that there's absolutely no getting through, essentially rendering him or her the ultimate lost cause depending on the severity of the situation.
This stubbornness can manifest in different ways. As mentioned before, it could just be that this band member isn't right for the genre you have him or her playing. If you've got a country singer in your shoe-gaze band, that's your fault. This stubbornness could also be more of a personal issue; someone who, for one reason or another, just cannot mentally bring themselves to compromise. Which brings us to the most colorful hindrance to any band.
5. The one with personal problems
This topic addresses problems found far and wide, issues from as far as the eye can see. It could be anything: always late, always "tired," irritable, or unprepared, just to name a few. A group is only as strong as its weakest link, and if your singer is showing up late to every gig, the whole band is late. Of course, when you care about your art, the band shares a relationship with your personal feelings, and this can be extremely frustrating. Failures in band logistics can ripple into your creative habits and the rest of your life.
For this reason, it's important to thoroughly screen band members you plan on becoming closely integrated with. Find musicians who don't have the kinds of problems that will spill over into your band and your life. Take your time, find the right musicians for the job, and don't let anybody slow down your dream.
Max Monahan is a bassist and a writer living in Los Angeles. He spends his time working for an audio licensing website and shredding sweet bass riffs.
