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Finding the Right Music Teacher
By Matt BaldoniOf all the education a guitar player can get, I really believe that the most important relationship we encounter is between us and our private teacher. It goes way beyond a purely musical relationship, when the right teacher is sought out it’s almost like a combination between a coach, a sensei, a mentor, and a close personal friend.
There are a lot of disappointing private instructors out there. Many guitarists don’t really have much of an investment in being teachers and just use it as a way to make money. Let’s be frank here, you don’t really have to be all that accomplished on your instrument to teach young kids and beginners at the local neighborhood music store. Me and many others I know started out that way, but a lot of us have moved on since then to more intensive levels of teaching.
The really, truly good private guitar teachers care deeply for their students and make a serious investment in them. They start and end lessons on time, they have all the necessary materials needed to present what they teach, and they get results from their students. This is why when you’re exploring your options for instructors you should try and communicate with some of their other students if you can, to get a sense as to how the learning process goes before you invest your hard-earned money.
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Learning Music Quickly And Efficiently
By Matt BaldoniThis here is a subject that was never discussed, and I had to learn through a lot of trial and error. When working as a sideman, there are so many situations that come about where you’ll get called for a gig and have little time to prepare for it. This could be anything from a one-time hit at a club for an artist, an entire tour, or say playing in the house band for an awards show or festival and backing up several people.
The first things to do when you get the call are to make sure you have the CDs of the material (or in some cases mp3s) and charts if there are any. As to the recordings, sometimes they’ll be FedEx’d or messengered to you along with the charts and perhaps a travel itinerary, other times they’ll be emailed to you in a .zip file of some sort, or they’ll be posted somewhere online for you to download yourself. As to the charts, the same applies. Sometimes they’ll be emailed to you as adobe files, or finale or sibelius files, or delivered to you by hand. So, now you have all the stuff you need to prepare, here’s how to begin.
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Job Profile: Guitarist Matt Baldoni on Working in Las Vegas
By Matt BaldoniFirst of all, let me say what a wonderful idea this website it, and how pleased I am to be able to contribute. Congrats to the guys who created it, I’m glad we all have a place to share information with one another and also to hopefully pass along the artform and the tools to some younger players perhaps.
I am a guitar player, it is the love of my life and my life’s work, and I happen to make my living working in Sin City. To set the circumstances, let me first offer just a small bit of relevant information. National and international tours, live television as both an MD on a show and as a guest on others, endorsements, a lecturer position at GIT, broadway productions, and everything else discussed here by our friends and colleagues have all been part of my life for the last 10 years, and in the last two I have been spending personal and professional time in Las Vegas.
Let me just say this right of the bat, this is a strange place. Not in a bad way at all, but well…y’know … it’s, well, Vegas. I was in LA for several years before I came here, and I have friends in many major metropolitan areas making music, have visited a lot of these places many times, and talk often to musicians in other cities that I know, like all of us. Based on these experiences and indexing them, I can still say that Las Vegas, musically/professionally and otherwise, is certainly not a microcosm of the business in general, no more than living here is a microcosm of living in other areas of America. It’s just different, really different.
