Everything you learn in life is used sooner or later

Everything you learn in life is used sooner or later

When I was growing up in Lima, Peru in the 70’s, I was just a rocker bass player, and only wanted to play rock (Led Zeppelin, Beatles, Cream), but when I needed to make money to study music, I had to learn to play every single style of music that made people dance in parties: Salsa, Cumbia, Brazilian Samba, Disco, etc, so I can play in paying Show Bands. I was lucky that I saved enough money to travel to Berklee in Boston and study for only one year.

At the end of that year, I met the woman that I have been married for over 33 years now and she made me realize that I would need to go back to Lima unless I applied to a scholarship that could help me pay for the rest of my education.

To get that scholarship, I needed to audition for a large orchestra called “The Studio Orchestra”, conducted by a new director called Donny Nolan, that played film scoring themes and had over 60 players. This meant that I needed to compete with the best players in school, some of them in fourth year, and read music a lot better than me!

So the day of the audition, I had my bass on my shoulder, and I was in line outside the office, behind all these monster players, thinking to myself: “What am I doing here? I have no chance to compete with these musicians”.

When it came to my turn, I went in to the audition room and met the Director. He greeted me and handed me a very elaborate bass part, with a lot of funky phrases and sixteen notes. He sat on the piano and started counting. Thank God to my musical ear, I started playing with him, only recognizing 25% of what was written, but I never stopped. After a while I recognized the patterns in the music and started to play easier. When we were done, he told me that it was a very creative and musical performance, but it was not entirely what he wrote. 

When I heard that, I though that I was done with the audition, but then he handed me a new Chord Chart and asked me if I played Brazilian Samba. I said: “Of course”, and we started playing right away! He suddenly started smiling and said: “You are in, you are in!”.

When we were done I asked him about my lack of reading and the fact that all the other players were some much more experienced than me. He told me: “ You can easily learn how to read better, but right now they cannot play Samba the way you do!”.

The situation of needing to make money in music gave me an advantage that I never though I had.

“Everything you learn in life is used sooner or later”

Basics for a successful music album, Part 2.

About 20 years ago, when I used to be hired by corporate record companies, like Sony Music, Universal, Fonovisa and Wea Latina, to produce albums for their artists, I realized that their talent did not need to know much about the music business to sell their music. They were assigned a executive producer thinking about the total cost of the project, a music producer taking care of the audio part of it, an art director for the photography and images, and a marketing director taking care of radio, magazines and TV appearances. Nowadays, it is not a corporate market anymore, it is a independent artist market, and all those roles fall into the artist themselves.

Luckily, today we have so many tools in our hands that we did not have then. First, we can experiment on writing songs and hearing demos with a quality that only people with expensive studios back then were able to accomplish. Second, we have an incredible freedom to deliver the honest messages that we want to present, without the filtering of a corporate company telling us what to record, since they though it would sell more records. And third, we can use all the marketing tools in the internet: Social media, iTunes and digital music stores, Video distribution of our performances (YouTube, Vimeo, etc). Even the sales of our music is presented internationally, without much effort.

Now, what we need to focus as independent artists, is to deliver true quality in the products we create. As I said before, the quality of the song itself has to be the best (talking about melody and lyrics), then the production and the style has to be tuned to our audience, and the image of the artist (pictures, videos, reviews) has to match with the music and the message we present. 

Back then when an artist was signed by a corporate label, the contract offered close to $1 per record sold, after the expenses were covered. Unfortunately, many times that not, the sales never covered the original expenses (production, manufacturing, marketing and promotional tour), so the artist ended their contract owing money to the company, instead of making money.

The independent artist now has to have smaller expectations for the sales of his or her albums, but the reality is that they can actually make more money than before. Now the artists have to invest in the production and marketing of their albums, but at the end THEY OWN IT, meaning that instead of making $1 per CD, they can make $8 to $10 after their costs. So if in the past you needed to sell 30,000 Cds to make $30,000, now you only need to sell 3,000 to get the same amount!

I think that the independent artist today is in a better position than before, and the public is exposed to a better variety of music and possibilities.

We will get into the live performances in future blogs. See you soon!

Basics for a successful music album, Part1.

I briefly met Quincy Jones (Multi Grammy Arranger/Producer) in Boston, 1983, days before my graduation from Berklee College of Music. He had a meeting with a group of graduating producers, and in a very relaxed environment, he told us many important facts about the Music Business. The one that stuck the most is this: To have a successful Music Album, you need 3 things: A great song, a great song and a great song. He explained that through history, after a great album, usually the next one is either a better one or a flop, even though the artist is the same, and usually the producers are the same. What is the only thing that changed? THE SONGS.

After this eye opening statement, I started focusing on finding the right songs for the artists that I would eventually produce myself. I also started polishing my songwriting, and collaborating with different songwriters and the artists themselves. When the artists I was working with did not have the right songs, we would either write them, or find them from a pool of songwriters that I was involved with.

If you are either an aspiring recording artist or an experienced one, and you are working on a new album, I would recommend you to review your songs and check if they are connected to the audience that eventually will see you perform live. I find this small detail overlooked the majority of the time, and really makes a big difference in the audience response.

In my opinion, the artist should check the songs to be recorded in front of an audience first, to get a real reaction of the people that eventually will buy the music. Sometimes a slight chance of pace in the music makes a big difference.

Also the instrumentation used in the production of the music should be realistic. Make sure that you can easily reproduce the album experience live. If you use a symphonic orchestra in your album, you won’t be able to play those songs live, unless you either hire the orchestra, or you use a “ Performance Track” along with live musicians. I will explain the types of performance tracks in the next blogs.