Musician

Wouldn’t it be great if you could generate a predictable monthly income with your music? With a subscription-based business model where fans support you in exchange for special perks, you could do just that. Guest-blogger and musician Mirjam Sieben is here to tell you how it works.

Struggling to reach potential fans or need a new way to guarantee income because you can’t play gigs for a while? Whether you’re a musician, DJ or producer, you can use what’s known as a marketing funnel to gain fans and make more money. Guest-blogger and musician Mirjam Sieben from Onlightning is here to explain the 5-step process.

Is it possible to make music by just playing it by ear and coasting on talent? Do you really not need any knowledge of music theory to become a good musician? There are actually plenty of real-life examples, including Bert van den Brink — one of the Netherlands’ most well-known jazz pianists, who prove that you don’t. While he’s a natural when it comes to making music, Bert did decide to deepen his knowledge and argues that a musician needs both a feel for music and some understanding of the underlying theory.

Putting together a full samba band is no mean feat. The percussion involved covers an array of different drums and other instruments, from bigger bass-drum-style instruments to smaller percussive sound-effects – samba music is characterised by a rich percussive tapestry of counter-rhythms. In this blog, we attempt to summarise some of the essential samba beat-makers.

For any singer, there’s often a tension that lies between flawless technique and singing with real feeling. Is there a way to strike a perfect balance between the two? Guest blogger and professional gospel singer Heleen Spreeuwers takes a deep dive into the age-old singer’s dilemma, looking at how the performance pressure and perfectionism that’s involved in being a vocalist can clash with what probably moves most vocalists to sing in the first place: the ability to tell a story and to emote.

If you’re making music, you’re often going for a big sound, which is exactly why most songwriters tend to only perform with a full band backing them up. But some dare to take everything on themselves, building a one-person ‘one man band’ by playing multiple instruments at once or manipulating some kind of complex MIDI system that can sound just as big as a twenty-member-strong ensemble.

Guest blogger Iris Siemons writes songs for both herself and for other artists and, for a long time, she just didn’t see the point in learning anything about music theory. Why learn to read notes when you can just record them and then listen back? Now that she’s a little older and a little wiser, her eyes have been opened to the beauty of music theory; how it can not only help you to become a better musician and how it can actually serve as a really helpful tool for your writing practice. Basically, music theory is about far more than just reading music.

Where there are humans, there are also mistakes, simply because making mistakes is exactly what makes us all human. Even seasoned musicians will, without fail, make at least one mid-gig mistake – whether they like it or not. The big difference between an experienced musician and one that’s still a little green isn’t necessarily the number of mistakes, but how they respond to them. As long you don’t panic or make weird faces, maintain your focus and control and keep listening to the rest of the band, you can still save the show. To make on-stage bloopers more bearable, here are four expert tips.

When you think of the harmonica, you immediately think blues or – at a stretch – you might think jazz. But you’re unlikely to think funk and soul. The truth is the. harmonica can lend its unique sound to pretty much any genre. To illustrate just how flexible the pocket-sized wonder is, guest blogger Marlies lines up 10 funk and soul classics that feature plenty of harmonica.

Guest-blogger Guillaume de Lophem is a singer-songwriter and artist coach. He’s also a self-taught musician, which didn’t stop him from making an EP and working on a 12-track album that’s soon to be released. Guillaume is the living proof that you don’t need to be a professional musician to release music and offers six practical tips for budding songwriters.

When you’re performing live, the intros and outros of your songs are critical moments. Finishing strong is incredibly important, so you want the outro to have the necessary weight to it, but how do you come up with an impacting outro? Use the tips we’re about to give you and those weak rounds of applause will be a thing of the past, whether you play your own songs or play covers with a fade-out.

Jazz is arguably the root of all popular contemporary styles of music. As jazz pianist John Lewis once said: “Rock is just another kind of jazz.” Born in New Orleans, the style has a fascinating history that we’ll be digging into today. Read on and find out what sets this spirited style apart.