When you find your calling, there’s little you can do against submitting yourself into it. You start seeing the notes everywhere you go, you become inspired by every little thing you see and do. It starts taking over every aspect of your life not that you’d have it any other way.
As beautiful as it feels to succumb to your deepest desire, building a career in music isn’t quite easy. Art is all about beauty and inspiration, but becoming an artist is all about the hard work you put into your art until it becomes so.
So, for all aspiring musicians, here’s an ultimate guide to getting you through the long journey you have ahead of you.
1. Getting To Know Your Pick
The first step, obviously, concerns the core of your career. It’s the musical instrument that you’ve chosen out of everything else. You need to become a master of your art, and it all starts with mastering your chosen instrument. Aspiring musicians benefit a lot from going through resources collected by The Musician Picks that cover all aspects concerning different instruments. They read reviews about different instruments, learn from comprehensive articles that guide them on how to play those instruments, and they also have fun going through listings of accessories that fit their personas. Such resources are invaluable for artists to get them started and keep their development progressing throughout the journey.
To take the first step toward mastering your instrument, you should build comprehensive knowledge about the following:
- Different types of your instrument of choice. For instance, learning the difference between Acoustic and Electric Guitars, and deciding on your reasons for choosing one over the other. Perhaps you’ll end up using both for creating different styles of work.
- Once you settle on a type, you start getting familiar with its parts and how to use each one correctly.
- Next comes the learning process; how do you operate the instrument? You start looking through online and offline resources to help you with learning and practicing.
- You can never ignore the need to have good knowledge about caring for your instrument. To keep it in its best shape, make sure you learn how to use it properly and how to maintain it regularly.
2. Practice Makes Perfect
It’s a rule of thumb for a reason, practice does make perfect. Every day you practice, you’re a step closer to mastering your instrument, perfecting your skills, and being able to innovate in your own unique way. It doesn’t matter if you’re still missing upon your beats. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t got the hang of it yet. Start by finding an idol and try to copy their work. Practice the same piece every day, and take as long as you need to nail it, then move on to the next one. No matter how demotivated you might feel at first, the key is to keep practicing.
3. Setting Goals
While you’re taking steps to perfect your art, you need to have a plan so you won’t be taking random steps. This plan will concentrate your efforts in such a way that everything you do connects together down the road; building your career. To build this plan, you start by setting your goals, and your goal-setting process will go as follows:
a. Listing Your Focus Areas
You’ll list down all of the areas that you want to focus on and strengthen. Your focus areas can be any or all of the following:
- Marketing yourself
- Social Networking
- Booking
- Profit
- Advancing Your Learning
- Personal Health
- Upgrading Your Instruments
- Gathering a Team
- Expanding
b. Appointing Goals For Each Focus Area
By listing down your focus areas, you’ll start getting an idea about what needs to be done. But that’s not enough; you need to appoint goals for every focus area. Your goals should be realistic, measurable, specific, time-bound, and achievable.
c. Break It Down To Everyday Tasks
Next, you’ll break down your goals until you reach solid tasks you can do every day. You’ll create a to-do list that helps you remember these tasks. These tasks are the little steps you’ll take every day toward achieving your dreams. They may seem little and the progress might seem slow at first, but you’ll be surprised at how much you’ll accomplish by creating a routine and sticking to your list.
d. Track Your Progress
The final step in goal-setting is to track your progress to keep sure you’re taking a step closer to your goal every day. There are days when you’ll fail to keep up with everything, and there will be days when you ace your list. By tracking your progress, you’ll have a measuring tool to tell you how well you’re doing.
4. Promoting Yourself
Once you feel confident about your art, it’s time to take active steps to get it out to the public. Think of your art as your business project. You need to promote yourself first before anyone else can know about you. To promote yourself, you’ll need to take a few steps:
- Build a brand that speaks about your art. It should convey an image of professionalism and a unique persona.
- Set up different social media accounts. A YouTube Channel is a must, and so is Twitter and Instagram.
- How will you market yourself? You do that by creating a marketing strategy that covers all the platforms you’ll be using for your brand.
When you get started, you’ll feel lost at first. You’ll start by taking little steps, and they’ll add up gradually. You’ll practice every day, and you’ll wake up one day to find that you’ve mastered so much. You’ll have little knowledge when it comes to creating music videos of your art. That’s completely normal. You’ll start by finding advice online and trying to implement it, but gradually you’ll get the hang of it. You can ask for help from family members and friends who have experience in composing music videos and you’ll get to build upon knowledge. But it all starts with a serious step you take toward achieving your dream. It’s a lot of hard work; you put your soul into your art, and this art will speak volumes to all listeners.