It's Never A Waste Of Time

The next time someone comes up to you and suggests that you are wasting your time with your music, be polite, but don't take their opinion to heart. Any decent motivational book will tell you that anything you do towards your goals, no matter how small that thing may seem, will always help you in the long run. I don't think there is a single musician who is happy with the timeline of their career--we all would like to make things happen faster and bigger. Just because you have yet to pay all your bills with just your music income doesn't mean you are wasting your time...did anyone say that to you when you were going to grade school? I doubt it. I'm hardly perfect, and I'll be the first to admit it, and I had a very rough year. Here is how I "wasted" my time this year, and hopefully you can learn a bit from the way I handled things and how I hope to handle them in the next year.

WHEN IT RAINS, IT POURS

My "day job" is being a self-employed jeweler, and you can read any paper and see how the retail industry fared this year--it wasn't good. As a result, I had to beg off of several open mics and tryouts in order to put in more hours working, missed several deadlines for music contests that didn't even have entry fees, and put off my album for another year. With such horrid sales figures, I ended the year by putting all my remaining musical instruments, decent mics and sequencers in hock just to make the rent.

To make things more fun, MSWord won't load on my computer, now, and I can't access all my lead sheets I did in that format. I've had to do my last two articles for Suite101 on Notepad, and yet Norton and McAfee claim I don't have any viruses. I've really learned how to defrag my computer, though, and how to troubleshoot computer problems, since I can't afford to have someone come by and fix it for me. Sure it's inconvenient, but I'm learning a lot as a result--not really a waste of time, and I will soon have my lead sheets in a number of formats to choose from.

Am I upset? You bet. Am I sick of folks asking me where my next album is? Yes, but by explaining what happened, I was able to sell a few copies of my last two albums. I also made quite a bit this year in tips and had no real expenses because of a lack of funds to spend on studio and copyright expenses, so I am actually still in the black as a musician. I've forced myself to learn how to use several freeware programs as well as the ones my Dad put on this computer he gave me, and I am doing arrangements that way--to heck with not having my instruments! The important thing is that I didn't whine in my coffee--I found a way to keep working on the arrangements that are holding my album up without the need for a studio, and will probably save a lot of money in the long run with all this preproduction. I might even try my hand at producing some friends' demos, since they are interested in what I've learned in the meantime.

Go To Page: 1 2 3