Skills, talent and experience:

I have been playing guitar for roughly 9 years and so i have spent that time trying to perfect my technique in all areas that I can to try and expand my playing ability, i work on as many genres as I can even if I don’t like the genre I will still learn it and the how the musicians perform the songs they do. My talent is fairly average and I have branched out from guitar to bass as a second instrument to try and understand the techniques and get better understanding of the instrument and how it coordinates with the rest of the band, I also branched to drumming at one point to improve my rhythm keeping and timings to tighten it as much as possible and to keyboard/piano to try and get a better understanding of music theory and how the chords are formed. My experience is mainly through my secondary school as part of completing my GCSE course I had to perform 2 songs, the first one I performed as a solo which was The Handler by Muse and the second one was as an ensemble with a full band as we performed Sweet Child O’ Mine by Guns ‘n’ Roses.

Ambitions:

My ambitions for the future in this course are to eventually have as much understanding of the music industry that I can, I have a fair amount of links into the industry so it can help me in pursuing my career however most of it will be me on my own making what I hope will be a great and promising future in music. One of the things I want to have is a band that that can play amazingly together and has a great chemistry when it comes to choosing songs to perform or even writing in order for us to try and go big in the industry. I want to have perfected my guitar playing as much as I can in one genre so that I’ll be a jack of all trades but a master of one as well which would most likely be my most passionate genre as it’s the one that inspired me to play the guitar in the first place, rock.

Skills to develop:

I feel as if the main skill that I need to develop is my technique in terms of hand placement and the way my fingers flow across the fret-board as I find quite often that I get wrist pains from very long term playing in odd chord shaped so I should try to find an alternative to them. Another skill to develop is my playing speed, I can’t tremolo pick that well so to increase that speed and reliability I can do exercises like alternate picking every note when running down every string in 4 by using each finger too to increase my small finger strength. I have also decided to work on improving my fixing of equipment so that I can save some money when one of my pieces of equipment breaks.

Who to work with:

The people who you mainly need to work with are music lawyers and producers as they can help you within your career. The law side of it can help protect you from copyright issues that may occur if another band decide to claim right for something you used in a song like a sample without them knowing or buying the rights to using it. The producer is useful to help showing you or producing music for you, they help you record music and add effects onto your work so that you can improve the sound and quality of your work to your liking.

What I need to know:

A good start in the music industry requires a good knowledge of software and equipment along side composition skills. The best things that you can do to enter the industry is attend events that producers might go to and then talk to them make friends with them and get their contacts to widen your branch within the industry, you can attend networking events and gain contacts that way too or even use some in your family if you have them. I used a website for this which you can find here.

 

Month	Goal	How to achieve this	Additional notes
September	Improve performing technique	Focus more on hand positioning	Use warm ups on the guitar too
October	Learn and listen to more genres to understand structures better	Use Spotify more frequently
November	Add to WordPress		Preferably weekly
December	Start recording myself practicing	When I go to rehearsals film the session	Work on improvising too
January	Improve composition techniques	Get a better understanding of music theory	Use logic pro x
February	Start branching out to new instruments like bass	Learn bass riffs and techniques
March	Play at a venue	Find local bars and perform there with some other people on my course
April	Make an EP	Use some of my composition techniques and knowledge of other genres to make about 5 – 6 songs, possibly more
May	Perform with as many people as I can and try and get links	Get any job I can in the industry even if it’s something small like working in a repair shop for equipment

 

This is my blog post about how I will be progressing in music, each week there will be updates about the songs that we are given to learn and perform in a different band each time. For example the first song we were made to perform was Ain’t No Sunshine – Bill Withers.

“As soon as you pick up a guitar, you’re up against the legends of rock.” – Matt Bellamy