How
to Become a Professional Guitarist & Musician ~ Facts and
Myths – Part 1


By Tom Hess

“What does it take to become
a professional guitar player and musician?” The answer
remains a huge mystery for the vast majority of people. Traditionally,
conventional wisdom has offered three separate statements that
are supposed to be answers or explanations to the question.
I choose to call them what they are…MYTHS! Here they are in
order of greatest levels of falsehood.


MYTH number 1:
If everyone knew how to do it [become a pro] then everyone would
be doing it.

MYTH
number 2: You have to get lucky, get discovered, and
to do that you need to be in the right place at the right time.

MYTH
number 3: You have to be talented and have key connections
with important people in the industry.


Like most clueless-guitar-playing-teenagers of my generation,
my friends and I (back when we were in high school) believed
each one of these so-called answers to our own questions about
how we could make our records, tour the world, be rock stars,
etc, etc, etc,. Since we all knew absolutely nothing about how
the music industry really worked, the types of statements we
heard from the adults around us (who were also clueless about
the music industry) seemed logical enough for us.

So in addition to doing all the stuff that music
students do (take guitar lessons, read about music, listen to
music, practice our instruments, jam with friends, form bands
and dream about making it), I figured I needed to do more than
the obvious (improving as a musician) and try to discover how
to become a pro, how to create luck, how to know where the right
place and right time is (and then figure out how to get there),
how to get discovered, how become more talented faster, and
how to make key connections with people in the music industry.

Becoming more talented faster was the easiest
task since I did have a really good teacher who helped me dramatically
increase the rate of my improvement (you can check out that
story here). But all of the other things seemed out of reach
(it didn’t help that I lived far away from any of the
music centers in the United States.). My greatest perceived
challenge was that virtually everything I thought I needed to
happen for me was out of my own control (so I thought). In reality,
my truly greatest problem was I was aimlessly chasing all the
wrong things (and in the wrong order).

Lets go back to the conventional wisdom (the
myths) and we’ll see how it is all wrong.


MYTH number 1:
If everyone knew how to do it [become a pro] then everyone would
be doing it.

This could not be more false. There are millions
of guitar players in the world today who dream and desire to
be professional, successful, famous, or whatever. Now that I
actually do know (and have done) what it takes to become a professional
musician, I also know that the vast majority of people are simply
not willing to do what it takes to make it. Many talk about
it, dreams about it and some even try it, but few people have
the will to take accurate-consistent-forward-moving-intense-action
over the long term. This is also the primary reason why most
people in America who want to be wealthy are not wealthy. (the
opportunities exist for every American to be wealthy who wants
to be). The problem isn’t in knowing what to do. The main
problem for most people is that they would not choose to do
what it takes even if they did know what to do and how to do
it.

MYTH
number 2: You have to get lucky, get discovered, and
to do that you need to be in the right place at the right time.

About luck, I could talk about this one for
many hours, but instead, I’ll just say this:


“Luck is the residue of design”

and

“Luck can be created, directed, manipulated
and controlled” (at least as how it applies to our topic)

Being in the right place at the right time is
very, very, very easy to do. Have you ever heard of music industry
showcases? Or Record Label showcases? Or MobFest? These are
events (and there many of these around the world) where you
(YES YOU) could go to (for usually a very small fee) and bring
your songs, cds, etc. and give them to producers, publishers,
record company A&R people, etc.

But before you get all excited about those opportunities,
you need to know that a very tiny percentage of the musicians
that attend these events ever get anything out of it. Why? How
can this be? Certainly there are many talented people there
who are all in the right place at the right time. So why do
so few walk away with anything significant after meeting with
key people in the industry? Think about the answer before reading
any further……

Was your answer something like this?: “Perhaps
the record companies/producers, etc, are only looking for 2
people/bands. So if 100 people/bands attend the event, 98% of
those musicians will go home with nothing.” That would
seem to make sense, but is that how it really is????? No it
is NOT!

Many times it is the music industry people who
go home with nothing. They meet all of the musicians and may
choose not to work with any of them. It is also very important
to know that the music industry is starving for new talent,
with great music. Many of the musicians attending these events
are very talented and do have excellent-marketable music. So
it would seem that everything matches and deals could be made.
But it doesn’t generally work like that, its not that
simple. Music industry companies aren’t going to invest
hundreds of thousands of dollars into an artist/bands career
unless these companies are TOTALLY CERTAIN they are going to
make a lot of money (and not lose their huge financial and time
investments). So now, the truth comes out. And that truth is
this: Investing large sums of money on Human Beings is extremely
risky. When music companies work with you, they are investing
in YOU – not just your music. They need to be convinced that
an investment in YOU is going to make them tons of money with
the least amount of risk. Yes, publishers want good songs and
record companies want good music and musicians, but they want
to find the “right people”. That does not necessarily
mean only someone with a name.

I’ll give you a very simplistic example.
Lets say there exists a great musician with a great band and
great songs. In addition the band has already established a
strong fan base on a regional level and sold a respectable amount
of records (for a band without a record company behind it).
Now lets say the primary songwriter and lead singer are unstable,
drug addicts. Put yourself in the shoes of the manger, record
company, etc. Would you be willing to invest your $450,000 into
a talented band with great-marketable songs and an established
local fan base if the primary people in the band did not have
their %&#@ together mentally? I wouldn’t and most
companies nowadays won’t either. In decades past, some
record companies did invest in these types of people and sooner
or later they usually got burned and lost lots of money when
the walls around the people in the band came tumbling down.
This was an extreme example, but serves to illustrate how the
risks associated with the people (musicians) can kill an opportunity.

For many reasons, the music industry in general
has become harder and harder for record companies to make money.
(This is a worth going into detail about for your understanding,
but is too huge a topic to get into here and now.) The bottom
line is this, In searching for musicians to work with, music
businesses will be looking for things that go WAY BEYOND the
musician’s musical skills, bands, songs or recordings.
Many musicians can’t understand why their latest CD won’t
attract the interests of the industry (even if the songs and
the recordings are amazingly great).

Producers, publishers, record companies and
managers are starving for great new talented bands, songwriters
and singers. And if all 100 musicians had everything about them
that was ideal in the music industries eyes, all 100 of them
would have been offered many opportunities.

The fallacy is that the competition is too great,
there are simply way too many musicians out there trying to
become rock stars. The reality is NOT that record companies
have “too many musicians out there to choose from”.
The reality is there are not nearly enough of musicians out
there that have “the total package together”. That
total package goes far beyond music, far beyond your band and
far beyond your songs. The secret to what is missing in most
musicians, is what is (or is not) in their minds. Joan of Arc
once said, “All battles are first won or lost in the mind.”
This is perhaps even more true today than it was in her time.


MYTH
number 3: You have to be talented and have key connections
with important people in the industry.

My reply to this is basically the same as my
response to myth number 2. I’ll simply add this thought
about connections: Record company A&R guys, executives,
managers, producers and publishers know thousands of musicians
(and have met thousands more throughout their lifetime). Just
because somebody “knows” somebody else doesn’t
count for anything – unless two primary things are intact:

You
have a high quality relationship with that person (knowing someone
is not enough – since they already know tons of other
people).


You are the “right person”. Yes, that implies that
you must have some musical talent, but as implied above, being
the “right person” goes way beyond music. It must
be obvious to the-powers-that-be that an investment in YOU is
a safe, secure and very profitable one.

It
took me many years to come to these understandings, and they
are true. Certainly we could point out some exceptions to what
I’m writing here. The further back in time we look, the
more likely we are to discover such exceptions. But the music
industry is extremely different now than it was in the 1970’s,
1980’s, 1990’s and even the first 2-4 years of this
decade. It has evolved quickly and the nature of how the game
is played has changed dramatically. As a musician, the most
fundamental change that you need to understand that has taken
place in the industry is this: Companies are increasingly reluctant
to take on significant risk than they once were.

Any
companies greatest risk is in investing in the people (musicians
and bands). This is the primary reason why in my Music Careers
Mentoring Program my first priority is in developing the musicians
mind to becoming the “right person”. Then (and only
then) do we begin to work on developing the additional skills
and tools to advance the musicians future (or current) career
in music.

So…my advice to you (those seeking a music
career) is:

Focus
on your mind and look at the value you have to offer the industry
as well as any possible areas where parts of your personality,
habits, actions, or situation may be a liability in the eyes
of the-powers-that-be.

Continuously
work on your songwriting.

Learn
about the industry that you are seeking to enter into and don’t
listen to anyone that hasn’t actually “lived in
the industry”. If you want to tour the world, don’t
take advice from anyone who has not done that. If you want to
sell records worldwide, don’t take advice from anyone
who has not done it himself/herself. This is why going to college
to learn about the music industry is usually (but not always)
a bad idea since most university professors are not (nor have
ever been) professional musicians (that why they teach at the
college and are not out in Europe or South America or anywhere
else, out there “living” what they are talking about.
(Yes there are some rare exceptions to this and you might find
someone that has done things in the past).

Be
certain you know exactly WHY you want to become a professional
musician. This might seem like a pointless piece of advice,
as we all think we know why we want what we want. However, on
a deeper human level, people generally want more than what is
on the surface. To read more about this final point, read my
previous article called Take the Test.

Copyright
2006 by Tom Hess. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

See
Tom Hess on the HolyHell world tour in 2006. Tour dates posted
here: http://tomhess.net/tour.php