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If you've been playing guitar for more than 5 years you still only know one strumming pattern, do yourself a favour and either don't play live or resolve to get better and start taking lessons (or try justinguitar.com).
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Are you improving at your musical craft?
If you play an instrument, do you practise? If so, do you practise at least weekly (if not daily)?
If you are a sound engineer (or a hobbyist home studio enthusiast), do you hoan your skills regularly by working on new material?
If your answers to any of those questions is "no", you are in danger of putting a hard limit on how far you will be able to take your skills. You might also be giving yourself a one-way ticket to irrelevancy if your skill as a musician is directly linked with some sort of live performing arts.
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| What are all of those?? If you don't know, maybe it's time to learn! |
My problem has always been that I'm interested in way too many things. I enjoy writing, recording, mixing, mastering, live mixing, and I dabble in graphic design, plus I'm a teacher by trade so I have a full time day job.
I also play guitar. I sing. I play bass. I kind of play piano and kind of play drums. I lead a worship band, I write music. And I
love it!
But what started to happen in the middle of doing all that stuff I love doing is I began to 'kind of' just do everything. I wasn't becoming highly skilled in any one thing. So, recently I decided to let some of my skills coast and really focus in on singing and playing electric guitar. Luckily, the guitar playing has a side benefit of searching for tone ... which lets me keep my chops up a bit in mixing. Plus, I still lead the sound team at Church so I get to sit back every so often and manage the big picture of mixing the band, which I do enjoy quite a lot.
There's something special about the feeling of taking the band from sounding out of focus and off-balance to sounding tight, focused, deep, clear and .... full. There's a lot of adjusting which goes into making a band's sound jive. Often I'll go up and fiddle with the settings on one of the guitarist's amps until it sounds right rather than fiddle with the limited EQ knobs on the sound board. "get it right at the source" is my motto.
Anyway that was a bunny trail.
You need to practise, or you won't get better. It's that simple.
And if you want to get a LOT better, on top of practising you really need to learn (and then practise)
new things. For example, if you play guitar, learn some new licks or chords, or new songs, or learn some new scales and challenge yourself to integrate them immediately into your repertoire. Learn a new strumming pattern, or learn to play in different time signatures like 6/8 and 3/4 (that one is super important if you want to play with a band).
If you sing, and especially if you lead at church or in a band, learn how to pick, play and/or write songs in keys that work with your voice. Another good skill to learn is how to transpose music so that it works for
you. Too many worship leaders pick songs in a key they think will work best for the congregation. That's noble and all, but the truth is it doesn't really matter what works for the congregation because if it doesn't work for you, it's not going to connect with anyone else either.
If you're still skeptical, hear me out.
Go to a big arena concert and listen to the crowd belting out their favourite songs in unison. Nine times out of ten, those songs are way too high for people to sing on their own. It would likely sound bad if they tried. But in a large crowd, it doesn't matter. You just sing it together. And it sounds AWESOME! You strain your voice along with everyone else and it creates something epic!
You know what doesn't sound awesome? A singer who chooses keys for songs that are too high for them personally, so they have to yell or screech into the microphone to get the notes out.
That usually sounds terrible, unless it's an effect you are going for and can actually pull off (not many people can!).
Think about it.
