Tips for the Piano-Conductor

The task of piano-conducting is a complicated skill that is often neglected during most pianists’ formal training. If you want to be a music director in theatre (or a number of other arts fields), you’ll need to learn the basics of piano-conducting. Here are some tips.

The Head Nod

Here’s the problem. You’re sitting at the piano, sending out your part of the groove – and, well, basically – you’re busy. Both hands and sometimes both of your feet are working on your instrument, and you don’t have any appendages left over to cue the band. So what do you do? Nod your head.

A good head nod is harder than it sounds, though. Major complaints from sidemen in pits usually involve some variation of “the head nod doesn’t match the hands” – that is, the head nod brings the band in before or after the piano-conductor plays the beat with their own hands.

If you only take one piece of advice away from this article, let it be this: get your head and your hands together. Practice it and get it right. Video tape yourself to make sure it’s happening the way you intend it. Don’t let this basic part of the piano-conductor skill set be the complaint you get from your band.

Preparing for Tour with an Independent Musician

Tours come in all shapes and sizes, from loading up in an old beat up van for a week to being flown around the world on a private jet for six months. Regardless of the budget or length of the tour, there are certain steps you can take to prepare yourself for life on the road. Touring can be a lot of fun, but not if you’re losing your sanity because you ran out of clean clothes five days ago! From band rehearsals to healthy eating, prepping your gear to getting along with your bandmates, I’ve compiled some tips from my own experience that will help you feel your best and play your best every show, every night.

The Savvy Musician: Review Coming

Author, blogger and professor David Cutler sent us a copy of his new book, The Savvy Musician, for review. We’ll be reading it and sending out a review…

MW Contributors in the News

Congratulations to Jeremy Yaddow, who had his article, Facebook Networking for Musicians reprinted in the Allegro, the newspaper of the New York City musicians’ union.
Be sure…

Musician History: Court Musicians

Court musician was a career path for musicians in feudal Europe from the Middle Ages to the late 18th/early 19th century. Of the gigs available to musicians during this time, court musician was the most prestigous and best paid job around. The position disappeared in the late 18th century/early 19th century when the court system itself crumbled. Certain elements of the court musicians life and career parallel modern musician careers, but for the most part, court musician is a gig that has dissolved into our past.

What can we learn about ourselves from their careers?

Dear 1999: All Participating Blogs

The past decade has introduced many changes, opportunities and surprises in the musician business. To end the decade, we asked the musician blogging community to help us answer the following question.

If you could go back to 1999 and give yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?

The participating music and musician bloggers published responses on their blogs on December 30th to mark the end of the decade. A list of all participating blogs is below. Please visit the participating sites and see what they have to say.

Learning From Our Past

As we move forward into this new era of the musician industry, maybe we should look back. What did musicians do for a living 100 years ago? 300 years ago? Who hired them? How did they get gigs? What kind of money did they make? Which of their mistakes and triumphs can we learn from?

I believe that we are moving into a new musician industry that is a hybrid of the old world (pre-recording industry) and new world (post-recording industry). We still can sell recorded music – we shouldn’t abandon everything we’ve achieved in the past century – but we also have to relearn how to make a living as musicians did before the invention of audio recording.

What if we are able to create a new, more sustainable model for the musician career by combining all of the knowledge of the two traditions? Who knows. Maybe musicians are broke, have always been broke, and that’s just the way it is. I don’t know – I think it’s worth looking into.

Make Yourself a Merry Little Christmas Album

Merry Christmas! Every November, as soon as the table is cleared after Thanksgiving dinner, many families turn on their favorite Christmas music. Holiday music is synonymous with the season, and despite a relatively small repertoire of standards, there’s never a shortage of new Christmas albums being released every year.

My wife is a huge fan of Christmas music, or at least the classics. For years, she told me I should make a Christmas album. I resisted, because I felt recording A Cameron Mizell Christmas would scream commercialism and I’d be shunned at all the hardcore jam sessions I imagined I might attend someday in the future. But a couple years ago, I made a Christmas album with some friends under a pseudonym, and after watching the album generate $2,500 in profits, I decided to start a new holiday tradition. Thus began my secret career as a Christmas Musician.

Strategic Partners: How to Find a Music Lawyer

I had my second adolescence working in the record business in the mid- late 90s. It was a time when the word “piracy” called up images of peg legs and eye patches or maybe street vendors selling CDs and DVDs of dubious quality with poor color copies of the artwork. I got a job as an intern at a major label and ultimately worked my way up to management.

I bring this up because at the time when working as an A&R Executive if I liked a band I would pick up the phone and call someone. I’d pick up the phone and call my boss, if negotiations were going well I’d call music managers I respected and asked them to check out the project or my friends and colleagues in publishing to see what their thoughts were and if they wanted to give the band a publishing deal.

It was a simpler time, I was confident in my ability to find commercial artists and my ability to help them connect with talented producers and make a great record but that was about it. I had no idea about how to go about breaking a band. When a band got signed I’d call the manager to see what his plans were and we’d discuss how best to get the attention of the promotion, publicity and marketing departments. I’d call the band and the agent and often the manager and discuss what favors the three of us could put together to help the group get on a decent tour. Similar groupings would happen with myself, management and every other strategic partner the band had – the publicist, the product manager, the sales department, the publisher, show promoters, sometimes the band’s lawyer if this was a person who did more than just contract work and had connections with someone we needed.

Musicians Locked out of New York Musical

November 7, 2009
The producers of the New York-based production of Tony ‘n Tina’s Wedding recently fired their musicians and replaced them with pre-recorded music. The musical has performed in…