Why You Should Start a Blog Today

I landed my first tour because of a little blog I kept about playing keyboards on a cruise ship. I called it the Chronicles of a Cruise Ship Musician (CCSM). I’d only meant for it to be a casual way to keep in touch with people back home and at first I filled it like a diary – overindulging, maybe, in the self-absorbed drivel that I figured nobody was even reading.

Eventually, though, I stopped writing commentary on what I was eating at the buffet (thankfully) and started writing about the job itself. Maybe it’s hard to imagine now, but when I started the blog in 2004 it was hard to find useful information about what it was like to play music on a cruise ship. None of us on the gig seemed to have any idea what we were getting ourselves into before we actually arrived at the ship.

Equipment for the Cruise Ship Guitarist, Part 2

In this article I’m going to begin to layout the basics of which amplifiers you’re likely to come across when you join a ship, as well as some of the effects that I found to be useful.

Amplifiers

Cruise ships do provide a backline (amps) for the rhythm section. I have seen everything from a full-blown Marshall stack to a Peavey practice amplifier. While we have to be open and willing to work with whatever is provided, there are a few standard amps that seem to be on ships.

15 Guitar Tips for Non-Guitarists

When professional musicians set aside time to practice or take lessons, it is usually on their primary instrument. But in the world of the working musician, doubling on another instrument every once in a while is common, and there’s few instruments more common than the guitar. I’ve watched many talented musicians pick up the guitar and struggle to get comfortable with the instrument. Because of it’s popularity (and now video games with guitar-shaped controllers), a lot of people think the guitar is an easy instrument to just pick up and play, but I’m afraid that’s not the case. Perhaps it’s the guitar teacher inside of me, or the fact my friends often ask for pointers, but here are the most common guitar tips I give to non-guitarists starting to play guitar.

What’s In Your Feed Reader?

My girlfriend asked me what Google Feed Reader was the other day. I resisted the urge to launch into a lengthy discussion of how uber-geek cool RSS feeds are and the interesting details of every feed that I’m subscribed to. I was pretty sure that wasn’t the answer she was looking for. Instead, I just said that it was a way to subscribe to new posts from the blogs that you like.

However, with you, dear Reader, I will geek out for a minute. I don’t use Google Reader, I use Mac Mail. I used to just subscribe to 1 or 2 blogs in the attempt to keep my little viewer window nice and neat. Now I have a healthy core of about 20 blogs that I subscribe to, and another 10-20 that I’m trying out. As you might expect, a lot of them are musician-related, but not all of them.

Here’s a Scholarship, But Forget About Getting a Job

According to a report in the Winston-Salem Journal (North Carolina), the annual Christmas production of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker will no longer be played by the Winston-Salem Symphony. Instead, it will be played by University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA) music students.

The students will not be paid for their performances, but $80,000 will be donated to UNCSA, 70% of which will go toward scholarships for music students.

Kathryn Levy, Winston-Salem Symphony’s flutist, is quoted in the article, saying the the Nutcracker gig paid symphony musicians “over $1,000″ each December.

Musician Abroad: Making it in Europe

Okay, so you’ve had enough of the good ol’ US of A, or you’re just restless. You want to put those two years of middle school Spanish to work, or you heard that the cost of living in Berlin is really low. Whatever the reason, Europe calls.

After experiencing Europe’s enticements through international tours, many high-caliber musicians have gone on to settle down across the Atlantic. To us rank-and-file freelancers on the other hand, the idea of Tuscan villas and French girlfriends seems like a pipe dream. Villas aside though, settling down in Europe is a very realistic possibility for versatile musicians looking for a less-beaten path. In this article, I want to talk about some logistical questions that often pop up when people think about moving abroad, and offer my story as inspiration.