We all have different bodies, and they’re unique to us in many different ways. The public sees our bodies in one way, while we’ve grown up with our bodies in other ways. As you launch your career, being comfortable and feeling safe in your body are going to put you light years ahead of other people in the music industry.

Think about the way you breathe. Just like we practice with our instruments every single day, we should do breathing exercises in order to grow and expand our lungs. This will help us get to a place where we feel comfortable singing and performing at a high capacity every day.

Another thing to focus on is understanding who you are and how you fit into the world. Your anxiety, confidence, and insecurities — all these things help you to really exist in the present. These are the three pillars that will help you to become the best performer you can be.

One book I like to look at when thinking about how to exist in my body comfortably is “Deep Listening” by Pauline Oliveros. I recommend that you complete some of the practices she lays out in this book because they can help you feel comfortable in your body, comfortable in your breath, and comfortable within yourself.
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Understanding your voice and how to project it requires two different techniques. One is for speaking in a room with no amplification, and the other is for performing on stage with a microphone. You must learn not only how to enunciate but also how to project your voice so that you feel it vibrating and resonating. When you do these things, people will be able to hear and understand you.

When you’re on stage with a microphone, it’s an amazing tool. The microphone loves air. It loves breath. Because of this, we don’t have to project as hard. Many times, people “over sing” on the mic because they don’t realize that the air-to-tone ratio is incredibly important.

You can be on the mic and just barely talk. It will give you a nice, resonant sound. Artists need to spend quality time with the mic. Being in the studio on the mic is its own lesson. Being on stage with the microphone is a completely different lesson in your music education.

Every aspect of performance requires that you know and become comfortable with the inner workings of your instrument and your breath. This includes your breathing. Understand how to breathe and where your breath comes from. Understand how the diaphragm and the lungs work when you take a full breath. A complete understanding of this process is very important.

When it comes to music, one of the most important things an artist must pay attention to is vocal stamina, which starts with correct breathing. Breathing is the most important part of the entire process. My main suggestion for artists is to set a metronome to 74 BPM. Inhale for four beats, then hold your breath for four beats. Then exhale for four beats, and finally, relax for four beats.

Every part of this process occurs at four beats, except for the exhalation. The goal is to take in the inhalation and then to exhale so that you can reach about 32 beats, then 36 beats. In this way, you can feel the movement of the air as you listen to the metronome.

You want to make sure that there is a continual flow of air so you can feel the connection. You want to feel it within you, and feel your diaphragm and lungs as they expand and contract. This is a very important process.

The key to vocal longevity and vocal health is understanding that no one part of the instrument can dominate. The key to it is the same as the way the body works. The parts work together. If you’re a singer who sings in the lower register, get to know your upper register. If you sing primarily in the upper register, get to know your lower register.

That wonderful section in-between — the Italians call it the passaggio — is the passageway. This is the key. If you get the passageway right so that your voice becomes balanced, then you can go from bottom to top and vice versa.

My old vocal coach Kenneth Kamal Scott used to say that it is the top of the voice that teaches you how to sing. The top teaches the bottom and the bottom gives way to the top.

We tend to push, push, push, push, push. But we find that the singers who put us in awe, those who can sing for years and years, have voices that are balanced. They are seamless voices from top to bottom.

The front-of-house engineer is going to help you make a seamless transition between paper and live performances.

Up here at the front-of-house, the centerpiece of the sound system is the console. In smaller venues in the music industry, you’ll just have a stage box that has Wi-Fi and connects via an iPad. They can actually be controlled by a tablet and the software looks like the control surface.

For the most part, everything that would have normally existed in an analog world is all in your control tablet. In the old days and in certain older venues, you have a console. You’d have some control over the sound system in rack-mounted form. You can also control effects. This includes making enhancements to whatever is coming into the console from the stage.

The console connects to the stage via something called a “snake”. A snake in the analog world is literally a long cable that’s also called the multi-core cable. It has multiple wires in it that connect to the stage box. Nowadays, you have a digital snake. It’s still called a multi-core because it’s got multiplex digital signals coming in from a digital stage box that connects to the computer.

These are called DI boxes. Without getting too technical, they convert an instrument quarter-inch cable to an XLR cable. The reason is that those two kinds of signals have different impedances. That’s something that you probably want to learn about as you continue your online music education.

A lot of times, because we have a lot of signals coming from computers or audio interfaces or synthesizers or drum machines or iPads, they really want to get that data out. So we have boxes for that.

Monitors are typically speakers that you’ll find on a stage or wherever you’re performing. You need them because you’re usually not in front of the speakers when you’re performing your music.

If you look at most stages, there will be a stage and then a sound system in front of it. So you’re hearing everything coming back at you from the room. In a perfect world, that’s fine, and everything sounds good, and you’re able to perform with confidence and enjoy yourself and hear everything and play in tune.

However, that’s not always the case. So we add speakers that point at the artists in the opposite direction of the audience. This can help you to confirm that the balance between all the instruments are specific to your needs. For example, sometimes you don’t need to hear the prerecorded string symphony on your backing tracks in order to sing.

Or you’ve already heard it a million times and all you want to do is just concentrate on your vocals. That’s part of interfacing with either the monitor engineer or the house engineer, and doing that in such a way that you both can agree on it and is beneficial to the performance and hopefully to the audience. Because sometimes the audience can hear them, too.

Then you have microphones. They convert acoustic air pressure into voltage, which will go into the snake. From there, it will go where it needs to. That’s the first thing that connects a person or an amplifier or a drum to the snake.

Microphones come in different shapes and sizes. And they do different things. Usually, you can kind of tell what a microphone is going to do based on how it’s designed. But not always. There are no hard rules. But a lot of people use certain kinds of microphones for bass drum or a bass guitar amps or just something low.

The SM58 is probably one of the common mics in the world. You see it on vocals, but really, you can use it for anything. This is the kind of microphone that you usually see in front of a guitar amp because it looks kind of like an amp. Most engineers work with the band to figure out what you like or how to use what you have.

It’s really good to know ahead of time what your input list is, and specifically which parts of that input list you want to hear in your monitors.

You may not necessarily need a specific vocabulary of all the frequencies in the audio spectrum and how they apply to musical instruments, but having a general idea of what the difference between a low frequency and a high frequency is is a good start.

Using a lot of colorful adjectives doesn’t really help anybody. It sounds cool. But for the most part, bright and dark are good ways of describing things. But warm… warm means a lot of different frequencies to a lot of different people. You learn this in music education.

This can be something that you’re dealing with in the studio over a vocal, where it’s just not warm enough. And the content on the audio that is just not warm in general. It’s missing those frequencies.

So often, the pitfall of all of that is when you have a microphone and you have a speaker and you point the microphone at the speaker, you can set up a feedback loop. This is a sound that you’ll definitely hear at some point in your life. What will usually happen is that the engineer will do their best to give you exactly what you want before creating that feedback loop.

If you turn a microphone up too loud in front of a speaker, feedback is what’s going to happen and it’s not pretty. It’s usually not what you want when you’re setting up the sound system.

In your pursuit of music education or online music education, you’re going to study the successes and failures of different artists. Let’s take a look at one very successful music record example: Lady Gaga’s first big record, The Fame.

That record basically had the music industry appearance of coming out. Almost every song on there was a huge single. It seemed almost mathematically impossible that a debut record could really hit all those marks so successfully. We also didn’t know if this would work, but it did.

The truth was they actually took a very different approach. Those songs were heavily, heavily workshopped for many years before that album came out. They were releasing those on different Myspace channels and engaging feedback, then taking them down. They also went through many more songs that came out on that album.

The point that team got to with that record was that they didn’t have to guess how it would perform when it came out. They knew that all of these songs performed at a certain level from having exposed this many people to it. There were some songs we loved, but that didn’t get a good reaction, so we didn’t put them out.

You could argue that that marketing was sort of happening throughout the process. They’re getting that feedback and only putting out what they know will work.

Lady Gaga herself even said, “Whether you’re doing pop or doing rock and roll, I don’t believe that there’s any other way to do it than from the bottom up. So, you have to write records. And you have to record them yourself. And you have to play every venue you can get your hands on. And you have to fail. And then you have to get better. But you have to live and breathe your art. And if you don’t, you won’t get anywhere. That’s what The Fame is really about.”

When you talk about revenue streams, the biggest source of revenue for the majority of major artists these days is live performances and touring. Compared to traditional spins or record sales, you may sell a million records as an artist, which could take a year to sell. Or, maybe you get a million spins, and it could take 10, 11, or 12 months to reach that point.

An artist who is getting that level of sales and performance royalties is most likely able to sell out Madison Square Garden. An artist will make more in one night at Madison Square Garden than they will in the first six months of releasing a song. Every big artist realizes music is the business card that gets you in the door to touring and really generating income. At the end of the day, an artist will end up making more money in one month of good, strong touring than they will in a year of spins and performances on the radio and likewise.

The best advice that I could give to any aspiring artist is to make your live show great. The way that you make a live show great is to play live. There’s no secret — that’s how you do it. The old adage in the music industry is a band that plays 100 shows live is a completely different band than the one that plays their first live show. A lot of times when big artists tour, you’ll find that within the first couple of weeks of the tour, they’re playing secondary or tertiary markets. You may ask yourself, “Why is Rihanna in West Palm Beach and San Antonio as opposed to New York, Dallas, Boston, Los Angeles — the major media mecca centers?” That’s because artists always want to gather steam, get the machine running smoothly, get the kinks out of a show, and really make it run well. With today’s shows, that’s no small feat. Between the pyrotechnics, the sound, the lighting, the staging, and all the things that go on, it’s really important that all pistons are firing at the same time to make the show great.

Online Music Education: How to Build Your Fan Base

I understand that you guys aren’t all going to sell out Madison Square Garden like Drake. You need to make your live show compelling on the club level. It doesn’t matter if there’s five people there, 50 people there, or 500 people there. That means you rehearse. That means you build your following. That means you slowly build your audience outside the epicenter of your home base. For example, if you’re a New York-based band, you shouldn’t overplay New York. You should play a show in Brooklyn, maybe a show in Manhattan, then take a little break. Do you play a show in Westchester? Yes. Maybe try and hit Philly. Maybe you go to Hartford. Maybe you go into Boston, and slowly build your center out. That’s how you build your fan base.

Build a Base at Home First

A great story that I love to tell is a friend of mine has been a manager in Chicago for many years. They’re a very big manager and have managed a lot of really great acts. Artists would call him all the time in Chicago and say, “Hey, we’re looking for a manager.” And he would say, “Can you sell out the Metro?”

Those who don’t know, the Metro is a historic club in Chicago. Every great artist has come through the Metro. It doesn’t matter if you’re the Smashing Pumpkins or Kanye. It’s about a 900-person capacity room and very famous. And every great artist that has come to Chicago has sold out the Metro. More often than not, the artists say, “Well, no, I can’t sell out the Metro. I can sell like 300 tickets.” And he would say, “Well, when you sell out the Metro, give me a call again.”

You’re not going to be the biggest band in the world if you’re not the biggest band in your hometown. Build your fan base locally. Build those fans, the real fans who are going to stick with you through thick and thin before you try and take over the world. Everybody starts with 1,000 real fans and builds out from there. You need to do the exact same thing.

Get critical feedback about your show. Make sure your show’s great. When you play, make sure it’s an event. If you overplay, nobody’s going to want to see you anymore. On a long-term basis, that’s how you’re going to make a significant amount of money in the music industry if you’re a performer. If you’re a manager, that’s also how you’re going to make commission.

When we talk about utilizing social media in the music industry, one of the really important things to think about is something that social media is really good at: spreading stories. A lot of times, especially in the music world, we look at it from a different lens. We’re focusing too much on just what we’ve made and not the story around it.

I’m sure everyone reading this has a friend who worked really hard on a song, was excited to put it out, and posted a link to the SoundCloud on Facebook. They think, “Watch it go; it’s going to be huge.” They post it, and then nothing happens. That’s because the existence of your content is not, in itself, interesting, and not something that will spread in social media. A story around it that’s truthful absolutely can.

An Online Music Education Assessment of Social Media Success

In the music video for “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X featuring Billy Ray Cyrus, they jump in the air and transform into cowboys.

What about that song made it perfect for a meme? Music education will show you there’s usually one line or something strange in the song. In this particular song, it’s the phrase, “I got the horses in the back.” For some reason, that’s what people latched on to.

Social media was one of the biggest factors in the song’s success. Social media is the biggest factor in every song’s success nowadays.

The Proof in the Practice

I used social media to my advantage, and it worked. I produced a record a few years ago that I was really proud of, and I did that exact same thing I say above. I was really excited the day it came out. I was like, “Watch it go, it’s going to be huge.” I posted a link to it, and nothing really happened.

Fortunately for me, at the exact same time, someone else related to the record took a very different approach. The artist’s little brother, actually, went on Reddit and not only posted a link to the album on Bandcamp, but also started telling the story around the album. And the album had an interesting story.

We had recorded all these different musicians in different places, different locations, 30 different studios. It was interesting, inherently, and the little brother just started talking about that story and linking to the album. Lots of people started asking questions about that on these music threads, and people started linking to the album. By the end of the week, it was the number one album on Bandcamp, all from him posting the stories on Reddit versus me just posting a link. No one cared when it was just the link itself.

That was an amazing lesson for me: it’s context that leads us to the content. The content alone will not be enough to get us hooked in first. You need to think about the story around what you’re doing.

When looking to build your career in the music industry and thinking about gaining a fan base, it can be really difficult and stressful to be thinking that the sky’s the limit. Obviously, you want to attain as many fans as possible. But it’s really hard to reverse engineer a strategy for an unlimited number of them. But, what we can do is make a very specific plan to find enough fans, up to a certain number. In fact, we can literally find which places have that audience size and go get them.

There’s also another element to this that’s really important. For those of you that want to make the transition into making your living from music, you need to define a starting dollar amount goal. Then, you need to just figure out how many fans you actually need to provide you with the financial support to reach that goal.

This comes from a concept called “1,000 True Fans”, from a great thinker named Kevin Kelly. And basically what it states is this: Let’s say that I was able to charge a fan, for example, $100 over the course of a year—whether this person is coming to a couple of concerts, or buying a t-shirt of mine for $20 or $30, or maybe they support me on Patreon or Kickstarter.

Now, if I had 1,000 fans worldwide, and I was getting $100 in a year from each of them, that would be a six-figure salary. That’s a life-changing amount of money for a lot of artists that are just getting started. The really important thing there is that you’re getting that life-changing amount of money without having to have millions of fans. Instead, it’s just about your 1,000 being really true fans. And that number can be as low or as high as you want, based on where you’re at in your career.

I believe it’s good to ask yourself when you’re just starting out, how do you get those first 50 true fans? Everyone’s goals are different, and for you, they might be that you want to make one third of your regular day job salary this year from music, and maybe that means you need your first 50 fans to each spend at least $75. Once you figure that out, you start coming up with ways you can make that happen.

Looking at it this way really lowers the stakes and makes these transitions into being a professional person in music a lot more doable. This whole idea that you need millions of fans on Spotify right now is just not true, particularly if you’re giving the fans you do have an opportunity to financially support you as well.

To learn more about these concepts and other lessons for success in the music industry, think about exploring online music education. If you’re looking for a music education, you’ll find that there’s no more affordable, accessible, or convenient way to achieve it.

Even though people like Barry Gordy helped to invent artist development in the music industry, he was not primarily a manager of artists. The task of the artist manager is a role that’s a little bit different when all is said and done.

The artist manager emerges as the person who is primarily responsible for the development and the curation of an artist’s career. There are a number of examples we can look at.

Brian Epstein was the person who discovered the Beatles in the early 1960s. Through curating the way that they dressed and the manner in which they presented on stage, he helped to create a new archetype, not just for the Beatles, but for the entire music industry. The Beatles became this hugely iconic part of music history thanks in part to the work Epstein did with them.

Fifteen years later, another entrepreneur, Malcolm McLaren, would help to shape the images and music of punk artists like the Sex Pistols.

If you jump forward another 10 years, you have Def Jam, which was not just a record company but also had a management company associated with it. They fostered the careers of artists like LL Cool J, Run-DMC, and Public Enemy.

What founders Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons did was encourage these artists to be themselves. They helped them create an image for themselves in the way that they dressed and in their music to reflect a certain street credibility. That’s one of the things that helped turn hip hop into a huge business because it was a market difference from what had come before. Anyone interested in music education or online music education needs to know where that change came from, how these managers influenced the music industry in ways that became part of history.

Basically, a synchronization license is what it sounds like. You’re syncing one form of media with another form of media. In this case, it means visual media. It can also mean syncing live media with music media. So that means taking this file here that’s a music file, this file here that’s a video file and manipulating them so that they sync up.

So that’s what it means from a technical point of view. There is a particular license, called a synchronization license, that is representative of that technical experience. When people talk about sync licenses, that’s what they’re talking about. And just like there’s a sync license for sound recordings or masters, there’s a sync license for publishing. We’ll get back to that later on.

The stems are the heart of what we need in a lot of music licensing. Because there are instances, and trailers in video games, but also in film, TV, and ads. Creative people in the music industry may not want to hear this, but where people are going to want to take your music, and they’re going to slice and dice it a little bit so that they can customize it for that particular commercial, television show or film.

Because when it comes to luxury, it’s as much about where it’s from as who it’s for. Now, we’re from America, but this isn’t New York City or the Windy City. You’re seeing the city. And we’re certainly no one’s Emerald City.

If you really want to succeed in sync, you have to be somewhat flexible. You need to be able to rise to the occasion. If they say, “You know what? We need an instrumental version. Can you do that? Can you compress cadence down to 60 seconds? Can you give us just the horn section and the bass drum right now?” You need to deliver. And that means they want you to give them the stems.

Those things are really important, because unfortunately in sync, it’s not really a subjective portion of the business as much as it is a combination of subjective and objective. That means that when people think about their music, they think about it as a chapter in a book. It’s a story. It’s a thing. It’s an entity that exists. And you don’t slice and dice it or chop it up. It’s an expression. It’s meant to say something. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. That’s a really creative, subjective point of view. And people will either like it or not like it, you’ll come to learn as you continue your online music education.

From the sync point of view, you have something that is certainly subjective. The music is great. It has to be of really great quality. But on the other hand, your music is being used to fulfill an objective that is particular to that project.

So your music is being used to enhance a Coca-Cola commercial, or to enhance a story on a TV show, or a particular moment in a film, or to accentuate the excitement of a trailer. So you also have to look at that, in terms of how the music is being used. And because they’re using it in an objective way, they’re sometimes going to ask for it not to be in its full story form. That’s why the stems are important. That’s an important lesson to learn in music education.

If we want to talk about stems for a moment from a practical point of view, you need to have vocals. You need to have the rhythm, maybe the baseline, maybe a guitar line. Just break it out into its components.

What will happen won’t sound as horrific as it sounds, because there’s going to be a dialogue at that point. If they’re really into what you’re doing, they’re going to work with you. They want it to sound really good, too. After all, they’re not just coming to you because they want some generic stuff. They want you and your sound. So it’s going to be probably more fun than it sounds. You just have to have your music ready.

Everybody says metadata is extremely important. But I’m going to say that mastering and mixing come first. The second aspect to look at is metadata. You’ve got to make sure that you have the basic information available to anyone who is listening to your music so they know what it is.

Most importantly, they need to know how to contact you if they want to. There are so many stories that every music supervisor can give you about how they loved a piece of music, but they just couldn’t get in touch with the artist, and they had to move on to something else because their deadlines were tight, and they didn’t have time to spend their days just researching somebody who didn’t take the time to present themselves properly. An important part of music education is knowing how to market yourself.

So what is good basic metadata? It’s actually fairly simple. What you’ve got to do is you’ve got to put down the artist name, the writers’ names, and your performance rights organization. So BMI, ASCAP, SESAC are the organizations in the US. Let us know which one it is. Let us have a contact, email, and phone number if possible. But at least an email or a phone number, probably an email is the most efficient. But just do both. That’s the best advice you’ll get as far as online music education goes.

Of course, you’ve got to have the name of the track. There’s an album attached to it. There should be an album name to it. If you have a label, the label. If you have a publisher, publisher. If you don’t, just say you’re independent. But make sure all of that information is there. Those are the real basics.

If you really want to get into things, you can start to put in the genre. You can put in beats per minute. You can put in French horn in the chorus if you feel like it. But those are really secondary things so don’t go crazy stuffing too much info if it’s not really necessary.

The most important thing is making sure that there is a way to get in touch with you as an artist. So that’s number one. Metadata is very important to remember. And then the next thing is to just make sure that alongside the mastering and mixing, the quality of the sound file that you’re sending is high. You don’t have to send an AIFF or a wave file. But if you’re going to send an MP3, make sure it’s at least 192 kbps. It simply cannot be a low-quality file. Because they’re going to want to listen to it at least with the same quality that you’re listening to music on your headphones on a phone.

The music publishing and record businesses really resisted rock and roll and rhythm and blues for quite a while. There were some events that happened in the 1960s, however, that really turned the tables and put rock and soul front and center.

Music had became more sophisticated, leading rhythm and blues to morph into something called “soul music.” In a simpler sense, soul music was rhythm and blues merged with the harmonies, rhythms, and cadences of the Black church. Some of the early specialists in soul music were Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, and Jackie Wilson.

The Father of Soul

There was a very important entrepreneur in the early soul music industry. A man named Berry Gordy owned a jazz record store in Detroit. It went out of business because kids were not buying jazz records anymore, so he decided to create rhythm and blues records.

Berry Gordy, however, did something that no record entrepreneur had ever done before. He created an assembly line, much like the auto plants in Detroit. He had teams of songwriters writing songs and teams of producers working with performers to get the songs onto records. He had a world-class band of in-house musicians called the Funk Brothers. He had his own management and publishing companies, and even his own charm school and choreography school.

Motown was a one-stop shop. It was the birth of something music producers now call “artist development,” with Berry Gordy as its father.

Assembling a Mowtown Track

“I think during the Motown era, the wonderful thing about the entire music company was that artists had an opportunity to develop in so many areas,” comments vocal music professor and record producer Marlon Saunders. Indeed, artists had the ability to rehearse and work through harmonies. They learned how to sing together, be in the recording studio, go on the road, and perform on stage. They also had time to develop as artists.

Motown was a different era, so artists had tremendous hands-on experience happening quickly and in the moment. “So in the midst of everybody being in the room, and everything happening at the same time, your game has to really, really, really be focused. Because, you think about it, if everyone’s in the room and they’re hitting the button to record, one mistake, you got to start over,” Saunders says. “So that means the level of concentration was different.”

We live in a world where people can access on-demand online music education and work towards everything being perfect. It is amazing that we have gotten to that ability. But, as a singer, your subconscious mind may tell you that you can always re-record the song or tune the recording. “If you don’t have that, if that was never something that you could envision, even how you practiced was different,” says Saunders. Singers practiced for perfection, making the skill level different.

The Appeal of Soul

Smokey Robinson wrote “The Tracks of My Tears” for his Motown band, The Miracles. “Take a good look at my face. You’ll see my smile looks out of place,” reads the chorus. “If you look closer it’s easy to track the tracks of my tears.”

“Who writes like that?” asks Kerry Gordy, fourth-generation record producer and the son of Berry Gordy. “You know, it’s like that’s some amazing, amazing writing.” When producers at Motown would receive songs, they would break them down, listen to them, and make sure that they really said something. “And that’s the reason why our songs, 50 years later, are still doing well and still amazing,” he opines.

Gordy takes awe in that he can sit with young people and sing “I guess you say, what can make me feel this way?” Everyone will respond singing “my girl,” the refrain of a now 50-year-old song. “So think about that,” he says. “That is the concept of how we wrote our songs at Motown.”

Gordy is a passionate person when it comes to both the song and to the artist. People in marketing will say that a song is nothing without the marketing. “I say, you’re correct, but it’s nothing without that song that actually inspires the feeling, and the thought, and the passion,” he responds.