Pragmatic Musician

I’m a working musician who started piano late, but already had a pretty solid background in trumpet.  My odd history has given me a fairly unique perspective on musical pedagogy and and my years as a working musician in a huge variety of styles has given me some passion views on musical academia and the skills I have found to be important for working musicians both through personal experience and observation.

This will mostly be a blog about practice strategies and things to keep in mind.  While piano is central to a lot of it, as someone who plays several other instruments to varying degrees of success, many of the ideas will apply very broadly to practice in general.

I’ve been a full-time freelance musician for 10 years. I would now consider piano my primary instrument, but I didn’t even start playing it seriously until after college (where my primary instrument was trumpet). I was tossed into my current career as a stop gap due to unforeseen circumstances and it ended up sticking.

My gigging has pushed me to learn a great many skills I was unfortunately not taught during my music degree. I’ve had to learn some pretty serious realities about the working musician landscape that seem to rarely get talked about in most academic institutions and have practically had to unlearn certain things to broaden my musical scope.

I’m not fantastic and unlike so many pianists, I didn’t start when I was 5. I had to learn a lot from failure and just getting tossed into work where I found out the skills that were expected of me and had to learn on the fly. Having had years of success and active gigging on trumpet only to find myself playing an instrument that I was not as technically proficient at forced me to re-evaluate the pedagogical process from the beginning.

I feel that the odd combination of my background with a mostly classical training in trumpet followed by a mostly self-taught and non-classical approach to piano has led me to have a fairly unique perspective.  I’m now keenly aware of a common problem with very experienced players often taking certain skills for granted when trying to teach other how to improve.  Those who have years of practice, and particularly those who started when they were young literally can’t remember a time when certain concepts were hard.

Well, with piano I can remember when almost everything was hard and can also juxtapose it with trumpet being easy.  Understanding how it feels to be potentially fluent at one instrument really sheds light on what the end goal can be for another.

My experiences have led me to have a very no BS stance on the realities of working in music and about what and how we, as musicians, tend to practice. I don’t tell people to follow their dreams and I’m keenly aware of survivorship bias and that my particular combination of circumstances have allowed me to do what most cannot.

I don’t give empty motivation, but I will give a harsh reality check. For those who want to improve or are thinking about music as a career, maybe you you can find something useful here.