• Is your calendar a blank?
• Is your phone so quiet you keep checking the ringer to see if it’s broken?
• Is your bank balance shrinking daily?
• You’re a good musician and you’re ready to work! What are you doing wrong?

It’s not enough just to be good at what you do. It’s not the best players that get the jobs. It’s the best salespeople.

Does that make you cringe? You are a highly trained a...

I’m back.

In his book “Do the Work!” Stephen Pressfield writes about the most powerful anti-creative force we know: Resistance. Resistance is the enemy that attempts to keep us from accomplishing any creative endeavor, or any other kind of achievement. Resistance attempts to destroy momentum and, with it, our faith in ourselves.

You may have experienced Resistance when:

• you wanted to begin a
...

Each of us is a product of our upbringing. That’s no less true in music than in a family. Our teachers have a profound effect on us. For those of us who go on to make music an important part of our lives, we realize the impact of our teachers in our work every day. We recognize the place we hold, the responsibility we have to continue traditions and walk further down the musical road.

My teacher,...

Woodshedding (noun) a centuries old practice technique designed to produce correct and consistent performance through relentless repetition. Sound like fun? Not likely.

The legendary jazz saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker is often cited as a musician who owed his success to the woodshed. As Parker told the story, after some embarrassing performances as a young musician, he began “woodshedding” el...

Today we celebrate the 329th birthday of a musical giant: Johann Sebastian Bach.

I have always had an affinity for Bach’s music. It speaks to me in its order and its beauty, its complexity and its elegance.

And I love playing Bach’s music, although I remember struggling, as a young piano student, to play without using the pedal. (Ah, the irony – I’m stuck with seven pedals now.)

When I was a Cu...

We often talk about what freelance musicians need to DO: make phone calls, send out contracts, talk to clients or potential employers, keep a music stand in the car. But the long list of tasks seems less daunting when you distill it and realize that there are habits and attitudes that you need to develop to be successful in the freelance market. It doesn’t matter whether you’re interested in playi...

© Zdenek Precechtel – Fotolia.com

Recently, a group of dedicated harpists and I finished the “Kaleidoscope Challenge.” “Kaleidoscope Challenge.” This online challenge was 4 weeks of practice techniques and FaceBook camaraderie designed to make our daily practice more efficient, focused and effective. The techniques were part of the “practice repertoire” I have developed over the years and found...

Musical lessons from a computer crash? Absolutely! Read on…

My laptop’s hard drive died this week. The data on the drive is unrecoverable. This is an incredible inconvenience, and one that many people face everyday. As we entrust more of our lives, our work and our memories to these technological marvels, we discover how dependent we become on them. And in those first few hours without my preciou...

What is the spirit of an professional musician? And do you have to be one to have one?

The usual definition of a professional musician is a person who gets paid for playing music. Simple, and true enough, as far as it goes. But most professional musicians would define it much more broadly.

Professional musicians know it’s not just about the money, although that’s certainly part of it. It’s about...

In the last post, I offered some ways for busy professional harpists to create momentum in the new year in their playing and in their business.

Today I would like to suggest some similar momentum-creating ideas for adult students or non-professionals or teachers of the same.

I have a number of adult students, and I love teaching them. They are motivated, focused on what they want to do and hard ...