18: What classical musicians should learn early on in their careers
What do you wish that classical musicians learned at the earliest part of their careers, or actually during their sort of formative education?
Music production. Yeah, learn how to record yourself. Learn about the simple tools of production like EQing, compression, reverb, just basically how to work in a digital audio workstation because people pay hundreds and thousands of dollars for studio time when in essence, they could just record it from their bedroom, have it take as much time as they want to, make it as good as they possibly can before they release it. But because they don't know how to do that, they don't know how to treat their room. They don't know how to arrange their microphones. They then have to pay lots of money to people who do know that.
So if you don't have a lot of money, it's much better to pay the some-odd $100 for Logic, or Ableton, or Pro Tools, or, or even just using a free program like Garage Band, and learn how to record yourself. Because it will be it will be one of the most important skills you'll ever have because then you don't have to ask permission to make your own intellectual property. You can do it yourself.
I've been here since 2013. I know it's hard, but you can do it. It takes a lot of discipline, and it just takes this idea of being 1% better every single day. But if you're consistent - all right, I said about consistency and brand - if you're consistent, you'll be so surprised. Yourself 90 days from now will thank you. That actually talking about people building a presence online, there's an unlimited number of examples of people that over time increased the quality of what they were putting out, both the production level and the actual substance of it. And sort of like yourself, it didn't take off until they had been at it for a period of time and there's no magic formula to that. You just have to be in it for the long game and the love of what you're sharing.
It's like investing. I don't know if, if the audience watching this is into investing yet. That's-- That's a whole 'nother topic. But Warren Buffett has a saying, "Time in the market beats timing the market." So time in learning how to produce, learning how to record yourself, learning how to listen back to your audio recordings, refine your, your art is much better than trying to wait till you're perfect and then put it out because then you'll never really put out that much. Anyway... And it's never as good as you think it is, but it's also never as bad as you think it is either. And that's, that's what I like to focus on.