What it's really like to be a professional musician

hey guys saying the word professional makes you sound very important but you quickly realize that that's not really the case no one ever really sat me down and told me exactly what you do it's a professional musician so I kind of like made it up in my head I thought that if you're a professional musician you practice all day every day but then there's also another part of me that was thinking well if you're a professional musician then you will already know how to play everything so you don't have to practice you just magically know how to play everything someone pushes your play music button and then you're like some walking human iTunes or something you could just spit out anything that people want you to play I thought that being a professional musician was just sparkles and rainbows and dancing in the moonlight I thought that the music peasants of the world would worship your feet not worship at your feet they would worship your feet they're like those little pedicure fish that like nom on your feet and you wouldn't even notice them I went to my graduation for both my bachelor's and my masters but in terms of really feeling like I graduated into becoming a professional musician I have actually never felt that and I've never heard of anyone ever saying that they reached that one point where they like leveled up into professional musician it was more of a gradual realization even now I actually still have trouble calling myself a professional musician I do think it has to do with my imposter syndrome I never had the schedule that I thought I would have a lot of people think that professional musicians practice every day all the time but the thing is you actually can't most professional musicians also teach you end up texting your students or your students parents a lot you end up emailing back and forth a lot of your time is actually taken up by scheduling and the fact that each lesson is at least half an hour to one hour long so say you have three or four students in one day that is three to four hours of your day completely gone and on top of that you still need you eat you still need to cook you still need to do your own chores around the house you need to pay your bills dealing with gigs also is not just like the hour or two that you're playing in the gig it also requires a hell of a lot of scheduling for example like when I did the collaboration with David Erik Ramos I'll put a little card there for you guys when we made those two videos we actually had two meetings for it and each meeting lasted way longer than an hour a lot of the product that you see a musician put out there's a lot more time that was spent producing that thing that happened behind the scenes that you just don't know about most professional musicians don't actually have their own managers honestly we can't afford it we're already in debt because of our instruments when you do end up having time to practice you end up doing what I like to call prac craft ination it's when you are procrastinating but you are trying to tell yourself that you are practicing so in my case I will figure out themes from film soundtracks and video games and stuff like that I will use that as my tone warm up sometimes if it's a difficult like I might actually use it as a technique warm up and then I end up warming up the entire time that I had allotted myself to practice and then I don't end up practicing what I'm supposed to be practicing I do know I have a couple of professional musicians watching this channel don't lie to me you also practiced innate I just wanted to tell the rest of you guys who are not professionals yet that those of us who are professionals are really just like you we've just been doing this a lot longer that's all the human mind gets used to everything it's kind of like how people in their own towns never visit the beautiful places that are in their towns I think the entire time that I lived in Vancouver I never went to Whistler and I never went to the capital on a bridge it was like the last week that I was living in Vancouver I finally went to Stanley Park in the same way when you become a professional musician everything you do becomes really normal so playing in an orchestra actually becomes really normal for me even making videos becomes really normal practicing is a very normal thing there's nothing sparkly or rainbowy or moonlight II about it it actually feels really mundane for me personally oh just a sec guys literally just now what you just heard sweet center of New York sleeps just came in the mail oh yes so anyway you can be doing the most amazing job in the world and you will get used to it it will start to feel boring personally there having enough things in my life that have happened that are borderline traumatic that I actually appreciate the boring life it means that nothing crazy in a bad way is happening to me you will get used to being a musician it's gonna feel really normal and that's okay you have to remember that that's okay even if you don't feel it the music that you play when you become professional also does not stop being difficult granted yes a lot of it is a lot easier because one you did it while you were in school or two you know a lot more music theory you know a lot more music history so when you see a new piece of music but you can recognize the theoretical concepts behind it you can recognize the historical context it's actually very easy for you to pull off how it's supposed to sound but the thing is composers in the 21st century if they know the range of the current modern metal flute they don't actually care about the fingerings mm they will do things like make you trill low B to a low C stuff like that that they don't actually know is kind of impossible this low B trill was actually written into music that my friend Paul and I were playing when we were in school together we didn't tell anyone we're gonna do this but when we got to the low B trill I put down my flute because I was his second flutist and then I like reached over and I wiggled his B key for him while he was holding a low C every one just broke down and could not keep playing because they saw what we were doing composers in the 21st century they will push your limits dr. Bob pushed my limits with rebirth stuff does not get easier it gets harder it's just that now you know how to practice you'd have more musical knowledge and you are more able to apply that musical knowledge like you're more used to it again it's normal but at the same time that feeling of like wow this is hard am I going to get this right by the time I need to perform it when I was in school I thought that that feeling would go away when I became a professional musician but I realize now that no that feeling never goes away and it's okay right because it means that you are a human being it means that you can still grow it means that you can still learn which of course means that life can still get more interesting for you even when you feel like it's boring with regards to the play music button that everyone on earth seems to think that musicians have even if they request something and you can do it by ear there's always that feeling that you don't know if you can pull it off there's always a bit a little bit of anxiety there and if you are like me and you started out not knowing how to improvise and you're very classically trained it feels bad to say no I can't play that because I am NOT good enough to do it by ear now I realize I am actually good enough to do things by ear but I think that's just because I've taken so many ear training courses so what I ended up doing was because I would take forever during my own craft ination sessions to figure out beings from like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and Narnia and stuff like that I was able to bust out a few select tunes for people so I wouldn't let them choose I would say no well I can play this instead so in that way I was able to trick people into thinking that I had and play music button I would say for most professional musicians we do not actually feel like we have a play music button we can be tired we can just not feel like it just because you're a professional musician it doesn't mean that you owe anyone a musical performance unless you personally want to give that performance when you are a music student and you're not at the professional level yet you kind of see the professionals as sort of this small group of people that you are trying to be a part of reign but once you get there you realize it's huge there are lots of people thousands hundreds of thousands of people on this earth who can play at the same level as you so really you're still normal there's still nothing special about you yes I do understand that that is very depressing to think about and I was starting to realize this when I graduated from my bachelor's so I ended up taking a lot of my professors out for coffee or meeting them in their offices and asking them I'm graduating now so what do I do I'm realizing now that there are so many other people out there who are at the same level as me and better without talking to each other all of them gave me the same answer they said just be you just be nice that's it it took me a while but I realized that what they meant was no one can be exactly like you you can't feel like anyone else in that regard you are actually special you inherently will work better with certain personality types than others your personality is actually what dictates how your professional career goes once you start seeing your career from that perspective that's when you start to realize that it's not actually about how well you play your instrument it's about what you make of yourself your career actually has surprisingly very little to do with the instrument aside from the fact that it is an extension of your body the thing that makes you special is already inside of you before you ever touch the instrument in the first place now that is a topic for a whole nother video so I thought I would split this video into two parts next week I will talk about this whole idea of finding your identity with regards to music I don't think I've ever made a video with an actual cliffhanger but I figured that this video would go way too long if I did both topics in one so stay tuned for that as usual if you guys like this video make sure you give me a big thumbs up and hit subscribe for new videos every Saturday my last video is over there and if you want to catch me during the week my social media networks are down there but otherwise I will see you guys next week bye I do know that one of you commented and said that I should check the white balance I did that for the last couple of videos yes it's a little bit on the yellow side but all of my lights are actually a little bit yellow and I actually kind of like how soft it makes everything look tell me if you guys really hate it if you guys really hate it then I'll change it back and I'll white balance it again and then we'll just make sure that this thing is actually my arm is not actually long enough so I actually have to use this pen it's a Microsoft pen that my boyfriend gave me since I am talking about this pen which you guys might have seen me kind of wave around in one of my previous videos my boyfriend does work for Microsoft so there you go you

Channel: JustAnotherFlutist

Views: 20,580

Rating: 4.9424086 out of 5

Keywords: professional, musician, classical, flutist, flute, performance, teaching, lesson, teacher, student, instructor, scheduling, texting, emailing, meetings, gigs, recording, composer, 21st century, practice, procrastinate, pracrastination, human mind, normal, boring, mundane, graduation, education, level, orchestra, rehearsal, concert

Id: 8r57hyM4v7E

Length: 12min 40sec (760 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 03 2016