I’m JD Samson, a professor of performance and artistry at the Clive Davis Institute. I’m going to talk to you a little bit about authenticity and intention narrative and all the things it takes to put on the best live show you can in the music industry.

I’ve worked with Christina Aguilera, Kathleen Hanna, and Yuksek. I was the music director for Peaches. I also have worked with Sia on many different projects, including songwriting and performances, and some other incredible writers, performers, and producers. I love collaborating with new people.

Before we get started in this module on music education, I can’t stress enough that this journey of becoming a performer and an artist is completely nonlinear. You can choose your own adventure. You should be exploring this journey on your own unique path, which means it can ebb and flow. There can be fluidity within the process, and I’d love for you to choose your journey as you see fit.

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.

The first records were essentially documents of performances. It was essentially just a matter of sticking a microphone in front of a singer or a band and recording that performance, then preserving it and playing it back.

However, as technology began to mature and get a little more sophisticated, some record producers began to use that technology to influence and shape the way that music sounded on a record. An early pioneer was Les Paul, who worked with record cutters, record lathes, and early tape machines to do things like sound-on-sound recording and overdubbing, as he did with Mary Ford’s “How High the Moon.” This was the beginning of a whole new era for the music industry.

About 10 years later, a young record producer by the name of Phil Spector literally used the acoustics and electronics in the studio to create what he called a wall of sound in the record “Be My Baby” by The Ronettes.

The mid-1960s were when the idea of the record producer really started to mature. George Martin, working with The Beatles, used all kinds of electronic trickery to make their recordings sound really, really interesting. Whether it was the use of tape loops, interesting new musical instruments, or placement of microphones, everything was used to shape the sound of music.

Currently, music education, including online music education, offer music producers even more ways to play with sound and create new and interesting effects for recordings.

As a professional in the industry, I’ve learned that whether they’re DJs, dramatics or bands, they need the ability to communicate with a production staff and tell them what’s going on, when it’s going on and where it’s going to happen. And the stage plot is an industry device that’s critical to that communication.

It’s the visual means of communicating between parties who will work together but aren’t with each other currently. Who in the performance is going to go where? How should their equipment be laid out? Essentially, the general use of space and the technology layout inside of that space.

Better Stage Plot Knowledge in Music Education Means Better Music Show Productions

The better those stage plots are, the more accurate they are, the more information they have about the performance, and the better the overall production will be. You’re allowing the artists and the production staff who make the show happen to communicate and meet each other’s expectations effectively.

As much as I’ve used all these pioneering technologies in very different ways and spaces they weren’t really intended, I’ve drawn from VR spatial capture, 3D modeling, and old-school architectural approaches and blend those together when I make my stage plots.

They enable me to have a top-down, 2D, floor-plan-based discussion with a technical team, then take that flat thing and look in three dimensions at scale before I have a production conversation with the artist. Visually, they can see that same space rendered in front of them in real-time.

Students in Online Music Education Would Benefit From Stage Plot Knowledge

I can drop in the staging, musicians, et cetera, and I’m having an active conversation over the visual space and place for which the artist is creating their work. It becomes a very powerful tool.

When all those ideas are out of their head, I’m able to weave that back into the stage plot, flatten that back down, and share the updates with the whole squad. Everything maintains its up-to-date-ness.

Stage plots are certainly supercritical to creative, professional work. I think the new technologies and tools that are available are not usually exploited to make them as multi-dimensional and as rich as they could be. But I love doing it all the time.

One interesting piece of music industry history is the start of the phonograph. The phonograph started as a cylindrical piece of wax, and then it became a shellac disk, and then later on a vinyl disk, and so on. This was a way, by using acoustic and electric technology, to have somebody perform in front of a microphone, and get that recording onto a piece of material that could be played back in anybody’s home, using a phonograph record machine.

The principle of the record business is the same principle as the publishing business. If I were to just give you a piece of vinyl with no grooves on it, it wouldn’t be worth anything to you. What makes it worthwhile is the information that’s on it. The idea is what’s valuable. However, it’s not just the idea that’s on the record—it’s the performance of an idea.

To outline the difference, there is the idea that’s fixed in form with paper and ink, and then there is the actual performance of that idea, which is then fixed on the vinyl record. So, the two parts of the music business become the idea and the performance of the idea. And in the record business, you’re not only paying the performer who’s on the record, but you’re also paying the author of the idea that’s being performed.

Sometimes, when we talk about the music industry and say that there are two sides to a record, we aren’t literally talking about the two sides of a record. We’re talking about the publishing side, which is the initial idea, and we’re talking about the master side, which is the actual performance of the idea and the person or people behind it.

Just as it is with sheet music, a performer is not necessarily going to know where to buy vinyl, where to press it, where to create the little pieces of paper that go inside of it, or the names of all the stores that sell records across the country. Because of this, we need record executives, who are able to take care of those things. So, the record business, just like the sheet music business before it, becomes a partnership between musicians and entrepreneurs—between artists and business people.

A record producer has two entities to pay. The first is the publisher and songwriter, who are the owners of that song. The second entity is the performing artist, who usually gets a royalty per record for the distribution of the performance. That’s how the music business operates; you either own the song, or you can own the performance of that song in fixed form.

The music industry today operates on those same principles. The only main difference is that today, in many cases, the performance of the song is not fixed in physical form, but instead available digitally.

Performances started in much the same way that songs did: in the oral tradition. A performance wasn’t something to be bought and sold. But then came the idea of modern theater, and the modern venue. The idea behind it was very simple: there’s a performer in a room. People are outside the room, and there’s a person at the door who’s going to take $5 from you. If you pay the $5, you gain entry to the room, and you’re going to hear the performance.

That is essentially the core of the business of being a performing artist. Of course, that artist can also record things on vinyl, or a CD, or on a digital file, and that’s worth something as well.

If you’re interested in learning more about how performing artists monetize themselves and their performances, as well as many other concepts regarding the music industry, think about exploring online music education. It is by far the most accessible and convenient way to access the lessons that come with a solid music education.

“A few decades after the start of Tin Pan Alley and the sheet music business, an entrepreneur comes along with another invention — essentially another way to fix a musical idea in form,” explains Dan Charnas. “And that entrepreneur was Thomas Edison. And in addition to inventing the light bulb, he also invented the phonograph or gramophone.”

John Carlin adds, “Thomas Edison was a true genius, maybe one of the greatest geniuses of the 20th century. He invented a way to record music and commercialize it, and that’s really the key. Now, the interesting thing about Thomas Edison is that he was deaf when he was a young man. Someone had cuffed him on the ears, and he had lost his hearing. And not only did he have bad hearing, but he also was thought to have very bad taste in music. However, he was a mechanical engineering genius, the equivalent Bill Gates or Steve Wozniak in our world.

“Edison created this machine, the phonograph, which utilized a wax cylinder. It was a round device, and a needle would etch the sound into the wax. To use it for recording, people would push their heads or their instruments into a big horn, and the horn would record on the wax. Then, when you played it back through the machine, the sound was amplified through the horn.”

Carlin describes Edison’s early efforts as “somewhat of a niche business. He would sell the wax cylinders, but he was mainly interested in selling the machines to people. So, in the early days of the recording industry, the music was essentially given away to sell the machines to musicians and get them into people’s homes.”

With music education, you can learn more about the music industry’s roots and many other useful and interesting concepts. With online music education, you can learn all these things without having to leave home.

One of the catchphrases I use with students in many of my classes is “Make sure you’re possessed by your music every time you step on stage.” I kind of coined that term while watching “Stop Making Sense” by the Talking Heads, which is a 1984 live music performance film that features The Talking Heads.

David Byrne from the very first song is really just possessed by the music. You can see it in his body movements, facial expressions, voice performance and instrumentation. Every part of his performance reveals a person who is completely embedded in their music and their process.

Music Education

I use that film as a teaching tool in not only the persona class but in classes throughout the semester because it really focuses well on stage setup, instrumentation, sequencing and collaboration. The film displays literally every aspect of the music industry and associated careers that we cover in classes. An online music education can reveal to you more about opportunities in the music industry beyond this topic. A formal education can help you narrow down your career choice and consider everything required of you to achieve success.