BLOGS
The following blogs are an attempt to make sense of it all – the bigger picture with insight from hindsight and experience. And what better time than now?
THE 10,000-HOUR RULE FULLY EXPLAINED
"Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less" by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Anders Ericsson, Ralf Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer interpreted a study of violin students at a conservatory in Berlin in the 1980s. The three were interested in what sets outstanding students apart from merely good ones. After interviewing music students and their teachers and having students keep track of their time, they found that several things separated the best students from the rest.
First, the great students didn't just practice more than the average, they practiced more deliberately. During deliberate practice, Ericsson explained, you're "engaging with full concentration in a special activity to improve [your] performance." You're not just doing reps, lobbing balls, or playing scales. Deliberate practice is focused, structured, and offers clear goals and feedback; it requires paying attention to what you're doing and observing how you can improve.
Second, you need a reason to keep at it, day after day. Deliberate practice isn't a lot of fun, and it's not immediately profitable. It means being in the pool before sunrise, working on your swing or stride when you could be hanging out with friends, spending hours perfecting details that only a few other people will ever notice. There's little that's inherently or immediately pleasurable in deliberate practice, so you need a strong sense that these long hours will pay off, and that you're not just improving your career prospects but also crafting a professional and personal identity. You don't just do it for the fat stacks.
Ericsson's study is a foundation for Malcolm Gladwell's argument (laid out most fully in his book Outliers) that 10,000 hours of practice are necessary to become world-class in anything, and that everyone from chess legend Bobby Fischer to Microsoft founder Bill Gates to the Beatles put in their 10,000 hours before anyone heard of them. For coaches, music teachers, and ambitious parents, the number promises a golden road to the NFL or Juilliard or MIT: Just start them young, keep them busy, and don't let them give up.
But there was something else that Ericsson and his colleagues noted in their study, something that almost everyone has overlooked. "Deliberate practice," they observed, "is an effortful activity that can be sustained only for a limited time each day." Practice too little and you never become world-class. Practice too much, though, and you increase the odds of being struck down by injury, draining yourself mentally, or burning out.
How do students marked for greatness make the most of limited practice time? The rhythm of their practice follows a distinctive pattern. They put in more hours per week, but they don't do it by making each practice longer. Instead, they have more frequent, shorter sessions, each lasting about 80 to 90 minutes, with half-hour breaks in between.
Add these several practices up, and what do you get? About four hours a day. About the same amount of time Darwin spent every day doing his hardest work.
This upper limit, Ericsson concluded, is defined "not by available time, but by available [mental and physical] resources for effortful practice." The students weren't just practicing four hours and calling it a day; lectures, rehearsals, homework, and other things kept them busy the rest of the day. In interviews, the students said: "it was primarily their ability to sustain the concentration necessary for deliberate practice that limited their hours of practice." This is why it takes a decade to get Gladwell's 10,000 hours: If you can only sustain that level of concentrated practice for four hours a day, that works out to 20 hours a week (assuming weekends off), or 1,000 hours a year (assuming a two-week vacation).
Ericsson and his colleagues observed another thing, in addition to practicing more, that separated the great students at the Berlin conservatory from the good, something that has been almost completely ignored since: how they rested.
The top performers actually slept about an hour a day more than the average performers. They didn't sleep late. They got more sleep because they napped during the day. Of course there was lots of variability, but the best students generally followed a pattern of practicing hardest and longest in the morning, taking a nap in the afternoon, and then having a second practice in the late afternoon or evening.
For all the attention the Berlin conservatory study has received, this part of the top students' experiences — their sleep patterns, their attention to leisure, their cultivation of deliberate rest as a necessary complement of demanding, deliberate practice — goes unmentioned. In Outliers, Gladwell focuses on the number of hours exceptional performers practice and says nothing about the fact that those students also slept an hour more, on average, than their less accomplished peers, or that they took naps and long breaks.
This is not to say that Gladwell misread Ericsson's study; he just glossed over that part. And he has lots of company. Everybody speed-reads through the discussion of sleep and leisure and argues about the 10,000 hours.
This illustrates a blind spot that scientists, scholars, and almost all of us share: a tendency to fixate on focused work, to assume that the road to greater creativity is paved by life hacks, propped up by eccentric habits, or smoothed by Adderall or LSD. Those who research world-class performance look only at what students do in the gym or practice room. Everybody concentrates on the most obvious, measurable forms of work and tries to make those more productive. They don't ask whether there are other ways to improve performance and your life.
This is how we've come to believe that world-class performance comes after 10,000 hours of practice. But that's wrong. It comes after 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, 12,500 hours of deliberate rest, and 30,000 hours of sleep.
WHAT DO TAYLOR SWIFT
AND ED SHEERAN
HAVE IN COMMON WITH
WILL ROGERS, W.C. FIELDS, SONNY AND CHER, AND THE SMOTHERS BROTHERS?
EVERYTHING.
Even in this fractured world of entertainment, most people are aware of Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran, two singer/songwriter/entertainers that are carrying on a tradition of show business that dates back centuries. But surely they didn’t invent their popular presentation of music and song and storytelling nor are they the sole practitioners. So what is it that sets them apart?
Let’s go back a hundred years to Vaudeville. During the early part of the 1900s, there was a circuit of theaters around America that hosted touring variety show companies, which consisted of ten to fifteen individual unrelated acts, featuring magicians, acrobats, comedians, trained animals, jugglers, singers, and dancers. The name given to this form of entertainment was Vaudeville, which was originally a 19th century French genre of theatrical entertainment. (There is no definitive explanation for the derivation of the word, in case you were wondering.)
Two of the stars of American Vaudeville were Will Rogers and W.C. Fields. Relatively unknown in today’s world, Will Rogers was by the end of the 1920s a national institution and Fields was a movie star. Google them both. But the reason I bring these two men to your attention (as well as others in a minute) is that they were originally not necessarily entertainers, but rather very good performers. Rogers did rope tricks and Fields was a juggler, both skilled in those areas, but that was as far as it went. What they both did, however, was to start talking and telling jokes to the audiences as they went about their performances. The juggling and rope tricks were their vehicles to get the attention of the audience, so that they could then entertain by telling stories that made the audiences laugh. Soon they were both headlining and taking advantage of the era’s new forms of entertainment – radio and movies.
Stay with me. This will all come together as a lesson in how you, the singer/songwriter, should use your performing skills as a vehicle to actual audience entertainment.
Fast forward to the 1960s. Two different genres of musical entertainment surfaced in the forms of folk songs and Top 40 radio. The Smothers Brothers were a folk music duo working the coffee houses of the era. They were good at it, but not great. Quite naturally, as brothers would do, they would have conversations between songs, often disguised as disagreements about the choice of songs, their performances, and their sibling rivalry (“Mom liked you better!”), which delighted audiences. Soon they had the most popular variety show on TV.
Fairly simultaneously, Sonny Bono and Cher Sarkisian figured out how to walk the thin line between the new counterculture and Top 40 radio. But their live show was just okay until they started their between-song put-down routines, which audiences found just as entertaining (if not more so) than the songs. Soon, they, too, had the most popular variety show on TV.
The lesson here is rather obvious, but I’ll say it anyway. Before you can entertain an audience, it would be beneficial to have a performance skill. However, just the presentation of that skill (i.e., singing and playing your songs, solo on a stage) is not all that entertaining in and of itself. (Your mother may think so, but she probably doesn’t represent a clear picture of the cross-section of the American club/coffee house/bar crowd.)
Take a lesson from Will Rogers, W.C. Fields, the Smothers Brothers, and Sonny and Cher. Taylor and Ed did. TALK to your audience between songs about the songs and your life, and more importantly, the lives of the audience members.
Epilogue: There’s no reason to tell jokes. In fact, you should avoid telling jokes; but humorous stories with punch lines work. However, you do need to know how to tell a joke first. Work on that.
HOW SINGER/SONGWRITERS CAN SAVE $100,000 RIGHT AWAY
$100 K. I thought that would get everyone’s attention. And it’s the first thing I say when I meet with young singer/songwriters and their parents as we start the educational process of moving up from the basic performance skills of singing their own songs and playing guitar or piano to the rarefied air of the art of entertaining. That’s what live music performance staging coaches do.
Usually, the budding singer/songwriter has spent a few years mastering those skills and his or her parents are dutifully impressed enough to begin to support (and finance) the next steps in their aspiring offspring’s musical career. But I almost always find that once the passable performance plateau is reached, the student assumes (and somehow has convinced the parents) that the next goals are to record and release an album, make a video or two, and then go on tour.
That’s where I step in and save them the $100K (at least for now) as well as the time spent doing all of those things too soon. First, we need to discover IF the son or daughter is READY for those things or not. My experience is they're NOT.
Let’s start by doing the math behind the $100K figure.
ALBUM: To do things right as far as creating a well-produced album of 12 songs (assuming the songs are ready to be recorded at all): $25K. Yes, you can do it cheaper, but if you’re not going to do it well, why do it at all? Then there is the matter of the sales, marketing, promotion, advertising, publicity, etc. (which can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars). But for the sake of argument, we’ll go low budget here: $25K.
So, there’s $50K right there. The track record for professional marketing, promotion, sales, and publicity people working a new artist with no fan base and only $25K is spotty at best. So since you have no fan base, the album goes nowhere. Money down a rat hole.
VIDEO: Pretty much the same deal. You can do it cheaply, but why? Do it professionally and correctly or else it’s a total waste of time and money. One relatively inexpensive professional video: $25K. I know because I recently was asked to keep track of budding artist’s video costs for her parents. Since there was no fan base, nothing happened.
TOURING: Given that the young artist has no fan base in his or her hometown, let alone regionally or nationally, the only hope is a buyout as third/fourth/fifth on a bill with some friends headlining. The cost of that buyout, once you include travel and lodging at any level, food, gear, band, crew, whatever - let’s call it another $25K. Don’t think so? Have you budgeted any tours recently at the level we’re talking about here? I have. That’s a fair number to do a four-week tour as a buyout with no income. And at then end of the day, you’re an unfamiliar artist performing your unfamiliar songs to an unfamiliar audience. How do you think that's going to work out?
So there’s your $100K. Now it must be pretty obvious that there’s no sense in spending all that money when you’re just starting out. What’s the potential ROI? Easy answer: None. Here’s why.
YOU’RE NOT READY. The precursor to making an album and a video and going out on tour isn’t the fact that you have written your own songs and that you have some modicum of experience of singing and playing for open-mic-nights for your family and friends. The mandatory thing you need to accomplish first is to learn how to not just perform for an audience, but to ENTERTAIN an audience. Just standing center stage behind a stationary mic stand and singing your mid-tempo songs, one at a time, is NOT ENTERTAINING.
If, instead, the novice were to spend the time (and a lot less money) to learn the craft and art of entertaining an audience from a stage on a regular basis, many things would/could/should happen. First of all, gradually the singer/songwriter would learn which songs work and which ones don’t just from audience response. That would make it way easier to decide which songs to record.
Then the subsequent lessons taught and learned about how to enter a stage, how to move around, and how to use visuals and your physical presence to convey emotion in the delivery of your songs will all go a long way toward deciding how to look, act, and behave when it comes time to invest in the making of a video of the song that gets the best response.
But mostly, the knowledge and experience of being able to genuinely entertain an audience of complete strangers will prepare you for the proper time when you leave your comfortable hometown crowd and be called upon to do so on a nightly basis for people who couldn’t care less about you or your hometown crowd.
In fact, if you’re successful in the pursuit of knowing how to entertain an audience and draw ever-increasing numbers of ticket buyers to your shows, perhaps the parents won’t have to shell out the $100K after all. There are plenty of record companies, managers, agents, attorneys, promoters, publicists, publishers, and all other forms of artist support out there, all looking for promising successful singer/songwriters. But they aren’t just looking for talent – there’s talent everywhere. They’re looking for ENTERTAINMENT and for artists who have worked hard to attain those goals. Those are the attributes you need to have to attract the attention of the industry.
Oh, did I mention that none of this can be accomplished in a weekend or a month and maybe not even a year? It takes consistent, concentrated effort to achieve all of this. And just as you probably had instruction in learning how to play guitar and piano and to sing properly and write songs, you’re going to need instruction from a live performance staging coach in order to get up to the next level – that of an ENTERTAINER! Be sure to find a coach who’s going to save you $100K right off the bat. Go to my website - www.diditmusic.com - to learn more.
THE FEAR OF FAILURE & THE FEAR OF SUCCESS
THE SINGER/SONGWRITER’S DILEMMA
In my years of teaching young singer/songwriters my 101 Ways to get ready for opportunities, I’ve often been amazed (and appalled) at the lengths to which many students would go to sabotage their own career progress – or, in the vernacular, by shooting themselves in the foot. I found that much of that behavior was based on two fears – the fear of failure and the fear of success.
True, no one can predict success for you as a singer/songwriter/performer. No one. There are no surefire rules or tips or paths that can guarantee you’re going to succeed in your endeavor to actually become an entertainer, well-paid or otherwise. None. And there are only theories as to how you can avoid failure but no real universal truths. Either one can happen to anyone.
However, there are many proven ways you can AVOID SUCCESS. What follows is an incomplete list of 20 ways you can sabotage your career without going out of your way to do so. In fact, most of these suggestions involve things you’re probably already doing on your own, assuming you’re not taking the advice of experienced industry professionals. They're all just distractions.
SUCCESS AVOIDANCE – WAY #1
If there’s something else you’d rather be doing than writing songs, singing and practicing guitar or piano, do those other things instead. Your career can wait until you’re ready.
SUCCESS AVOIDANCE – WAY #2
Sleep is way overrated. You’re young and healthy, so who needs sleep? There are so many other things to do after midnight than sleep and, besides, you can catch up on your missed sleep next week sometime.
SUCCESS AVOIDANCE – WAY #3
Why take all that extra time and money to buy, prepare and eat supposed “healthy” foods? If you’re going to spend the evening hanging out with some friends, fruits and vegetables are just not going to cut it. Order in some pizzas and beer. Way easier. And way more fun!
SUCCESS AVOIDANCE – WAY #4
You should spend as much time as you’d like playing amateur sports and yelling a lot at each other. Even if you sprain a thumb or an ankle or lose your voice, they’ll heal up fast. You’ll be back singing and playing in no time at all.
SUCCESS AVOIDANCE – WAY #5
The best thing about having a smart phone hooked up to your TV is that you can keep up on your fantasy sports teams while watching all of the real games in real time. And if there aren’t any games on, you can binge watch an entire season of some made-for-cable TV series. That’s what couches are for!
SUCCESS AVOIDANCE – WAY #6
Take everything everyone tells you about your music and talent seriously, particularly if they’ve never actually done it themselves in their own lives, and especially if the advice is coming from a family member, friend or purported fan. They know best. By the same token, you should take any and all suggestions from experienced industry professionals with a grain of salt. They’re just a bunch of old know-it-all’s anyway.
SUCCESS AVOIDANCE – WAY #7
You need to gather a team around you to do all of the stuff you don’t want to deal with because, you know, you’re the creative type, right? The best people to use are the friends you used to hang out with after school and on weekends. Be sure to enlist the ones who haven’t done anything since school – they will have the most time available to work on whatever it is that you don’t want to do. There’s no need to show them how to do it. They’ll figure it out.
SUCCESS AVOIDANCE – WAY #8
Now that you’re a potentially famous singer/songwriter, the pool of available members of the opposite sex will fill up considerably. You should take advantage of this amazing opportunity right away. Date multiple people and pretty soon one will invite you to move in – free rent, food and sex! All you have to put up with is their behavior (generally worse than yours) and their constant stream of advice about your career. Watch out though. Marriage may be in the offing! And kids!
SUCCESS AVOIDANCE – WAY #9
Whoever you move in with will probably have a dog, a cat, and a lot of plants. You should offer to walk the dog, clean the cat box and water plants several times a day. After all, what else do you have to do that’s more important?
SUCCESS AVOIDANCE – WAY #10
If you’re in college, it’s probably taking up a lot of the time you’d rather spend doing something more fun. So, you might want to consider dropping out. None of your idols went to college and they did okay, right? If you do leave school, though, don’t tell your parents. Just do it. C’mon, it’s YOUR life!
SUCCESS AVOIDANCE – WAY #11
Pay attention to that voice inside your head that’s telling you that you’re better than everyone else, that all of the experienced industry professionals are stupid, and that whatever you decide to do about your career is your choice and you know what’s best for you.
SUCCESS AVOIDANCE – WAY #12
Buy the flashiest, most colorful and expensive guitar in the store – the one that you think looks the best but not one that necessarily sounds or plays the best. There’s no need to learn much music theory or proper fingering – just the basic four chords and you’re good to go.
SUCCESS AVOIDANCE – WAY #13
Don’t waste your time listening to artists in your chosen genre that were popular before you were born. Study what’s big on the radio and the streaming services now and write stuff that sounds like that. Stick to the hits.
SUCCESS AVOIDANCE – WAY #14
Don’t fall into the trap of having to perform as a solo artist. It’s a lot of work. Where’s the fun in that? You need to form a band and the more people in the band the better. Jam!
SUCCESS AVOIDANCE – WAY #15
As soon as you’ve written twelve songs that you can more or less sing and play at the same time, you should go ahead and record an album. Get that guy you met in a bar last week to produce it and the sooner the better. Put it up on Soundcloud and see what happens.
SUCCESS AVOIDANCE – WAY #16
Don’t plan anything out for your shows – no set lists or things to say between songs. Just stick with the tried-and-true stuff like, “How y’all doin’ tonight?” and “Everybody havin’ a good time?” and “Thanks for being here!”
SUCCESS AVOIDANCE – WAY #17
Only sing and play songs to entertain yourself. Eventually the audience will have a good time because YOU'RE having a good time.
SUCCESS AVOIDANCE – WAY #18
Your sets should be as long or as short as you like. Pay no attention to the club owner or the audience. It’s YOUR show!
SUCCESS AVOIDANCE – WAY #19
There’s no need to go to the trouble of providing merch. Most fans only want an autograph on a piece of paper or an arm. The only thing you’ll need is a Sharpie. Any color – doesn’t matter.
SUCCESS AVOIDANCE – WAY #20
Have someone shoot live videos on a handheld smartphone of you and your band playing your songs at a club and put them up on YouTube and see what happens.
These are just some of the many seemingly harmless shortcuts and common distractions that provide career success avoidance on a daily basis for the average singer/songwriter.
Remember though: How you spend each day is how you spend your life.
QUICK LIVE PERFORMANCE QUIZ
There are a lot of things we all know (or think we know) about the in’s and out’s of live performance, since most of us have been dealing with it professionally for years. But do we? Take the Quick Live Performance Quiz and see! We’ll start with some stuff most of us already know.
IT’S FAIRLY COMMON KNOWLEDGE THAT…
…developing a great live show and building a live show fan base are essential to entice the attention of a manager, agent, record company or investor these days. If you don’t have a great live act to back up your music, the odds are decidedly against you.
…the ability to sing and play your songs at the same time is a craft that can be taught and learned by rote. But to entertain? That is an art, and it can only be realized by taking the learned craft up one level into experimental rehearsal.
…the first two things a performer needs to do in order to win over an audience are the same two things you need to do when meeting people for the first time. Make eye contact and smile – and do so frequently during the entire time you’re on stage.
…when a performer is uncomfortable on stage, the audience is uncomfortable as well.
…most recorded songs should be moved up a key or two for live performances in order to project more emotion.
BUT DID YOU KNOW THAT…
…90% of singer/songwriters make 90% of their income from live performances? The rest generally comes from publishing and merch, particularly if you look at music sales as merch. And you should.
…most members of an audience make up their minds whether they like you or not within the first ten seconds you enter the stage, even before you get to the microphone?
…your “snazzy” outfit, jewelry, hair style and even showing skin can work against the effectiveness of your performance?
…most live performers today are blocking out a third of their visual communication with their audiences by bad mic technique?
…a set list needs to be constructed according to feel, beat and tone, with a pattern to attract, entice, hold and excite an audience? And that a set of four songs may be a wholly different list of songs than a set of eight?
WHAT IF I TOLD YOU THAT…
…there are three ways to entertain an audience musically (melody, lyrics and rhythm) and you should aim for at least two of the three with every song?
…in addition to planning a set so that everything goes right, a performing artist should have a secondary plan for when everything goes wrong?
…the logos and wrong colors on your wardrobe, instruments, amplifiers, and backdrop can provide unnecessary distractions to the audience?
…a note-for-note duplication of the recorded versions of your songs may not be best suited for live performance?
...a visual representation of your name on stage helps the audience remember you?
AND DID YOU REALIZE THAT…
…performing artists need to commit their songs and patter to memory so that they will stop thinking about themselves and start thinking about entertaining the audience?
…when all of the songs in a set are performed from the same place on a stage, they all seem to sound the same to an audience?
…what happens between the last note of one song and the first note of the next is as important as the songs themselves?
…practicing is not the same as rehearsing?
…how a performer exits the stage is almost as important as the entrance?
AND FINALLY THERE'S...
…probably 90% of the audience knows nothing about how music is created, played or performed. Therefore, since the audience doesn’t know a verse from a chorus from a bridge, you as the performing artist have to visually let them know when you’re transitioning from one to another.
…an effective way to get the attention of an audience is to briefly get very soft or real loud.
…familiarity should dictate set length. If the audience is completely familiar with you and your songs, you should play for at least an hour; however if they don’t know you or your songs, you should play no more than a half hour TOPS.
…an audience member will be more likely to buy your music after the show if the song that really moved them during the set is available at the merch table.
…a performing artist should do things on stage that the audience could never do or would never think of doing anywhere, let alone in front of other people.
How’d you do?
15 - 20: Come on. You've done this before.
10 - 15: A little refresher course might be in order.
5 - 10: You need a good Live Performance Coach.
0 - 5: You need a great Live Performance Coach.
A Live Performance Coach is aware of all of these things and more. All the more reason for musicians and performing artists to work with one before embarking on a stage career