Make your own song

Playing live is great, you will be able to connect with your fans. Being a great performer live can give you a lot of income opportunities as a songwriter. You will earn a lot of performance royalties as well as CD/merchandise related sales. But for any singer-songwriter wanting to become big, I observed they lack mastery of their songs.

Mastery of the songs is necessary for successful live performance. A lot of singer-songwriters lack dedication to practice on a daily basis. This is very important because you will able to know your songs very well in detail. Lots of singer-songwriters nowadays play guitar in addition to singing vocals.

This makes things a bit difficult but more advantageous to a singer-songwriter. The reason is simple, a singer-songwriter can play live without further need of a band. But more live shows and die hard fans loves artist who play instruments at the same time as it provides more inspiration to them in terms of music.

The first step to mastery is knowing your instrument on a daily basis. A lot of artist complain of practice, some may be forced to practice by their managers or mentors. Dedication is the key, once a mastery is achieved, a smooth sailing performance will follow. Knowing instrument on a daily basis such as guitar takes time to develop, so allocate a portion of your time to practice everyday and START IT NOW! Do not wait for A&R and record producers to request you play live in front of them and that is the time you start practicing guitars because there are music industry professionals knocking at your doors, it is just impossible.

The important technique is developing a working objective daily and write it on a note to monitor progress. For example, for a certain day you may want to practice the 1st stanza of song X. So devote the whole practice hours of the day just doing 1st stanza of song X. Assess progress in a daily basis, the next day you may want to do 1st stanza of song X. Once you are confident doing it, you may consider the 2nd stanza of Song X as your next working objective. When you feel 2nd stanza is easy, you may now combine 1st stanza and 2nd stanza together as your next day working objective. By doing this, day by day you will a lot of progress in mastering your own songs. Doing this in a daily basis and starting NOW, I can guarantee you will be a great live performer soon!

Success will always happen to those who are determined, dedicated, positive minded and hard-working. So if you want to master you own songs for performance you must that attitude. There are basically two major phases of sucessful performance, the 1st one is practicing and mastering your songs inside your room, the final phase is Public performance. Once you have 3 sets of songs (equivalent to about 3 hours of performance along with some mixtures of your favorite covered songs maybe), you can have make a press kit so that you can play in clubs. Playing in clubs and bars is the best way to master your songs with confidence. It gives you a total control of performance with people watching straight at you.

One of the major differences in playing in clubs and playing in your room is the microphone and your standing position. In your room , you are just concerned in mastering the songs and this could not mean great performance. Only when you also stand in your room with your guitar and fronting with a mike also (facing a mirror is fine as well as video-taping yourself), you can simulate public performance/ concert conditions. By doing this, you will start to notice your weakness, your mistakes (such as difficulty in singing along with playing guitars), any lousy performance before it can happen right to you in public performance.

As a summary, be positive and objective focused in your practice. Mastery of performance will not happen overnight! Instead it is a day to day activity powered by determination, dedication, positive mindset and hard-work. Good Luck!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 1:54 am and is filed under Guitar playing tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.