Need Some Serious Help Guys.. Please give me advice

drumgeek93

drumgeek93

Senior Member
I am a senior in high school right now and my plans for the future are to be a session player and move to nashville. My big decision right now is the choice of going to college or not.. I have no idea what to do. I know that a degree is not gonna get me anymore sessions than the next guy. Its all about the player. But I really need to know what you guys think. Thanks
 
Go to college in Nashville. Play out as much while keeping up classes. If you get a break, feel free to drop.

This opinion is not based on experience, just conjecture. Also I don't know your financial situation/ educational history.
 
Are there any colleges near by that have a good music program? Yes, the degree wont help you there, but you could learn alot and spend alot of time refining your technique under a reputable instructor there.
 
Do you have connections already in place in Nashville? It's not easy to get your foot in the door of the Nashville recording establishment. Producers don't take chances.

A college degree won't make any difference. Tenacity, drive, connections and being good on the drums, that's what'll get you where you want to go in the studios.

Can you read music? If not, learn.

If the producer really likes you he'll use you again.

I got into studio work back in the seventies when I was recommended as a sub by someone who was already doing that kind of work. I often thought about making the move to Nashville but I decided that it was just too big a risk for me to take at that time. The recording scene in Atlanta was going full throttle back then.

I did a session yesterday. I love doing that kind of work, it's my favorite thing to do. I love making producers happy.

If you can get yourself in solid you'll be doing very well indeed. Best of luck.
 
Their is belmont, which im looking at. My father was session player(keys) a while back. So I have a little bit of connection with producers there. I have done session work here, and an ok resume for a 17 y.o. I really want to just go for it. Leave everything behind and try my best in nashville. But I also wanna goto a nashville college to have a back up plan in case I dont have the chops. I dont read standard notation, but i grew up in studios learning the nashville number system. It has worked out pretty good for me so far.
 
drumgeek93 said:
Their is belmont, which im looking at. My father was session player(keys) a while back. So I have a little bit of connection with producers there. I have done session work here, and an ok resume for a 17 y.o. I really want to just go for it. Leave everything behind and try my best in nashville. But I also wanna goto a nashville college to have a back up plan in case I dont have the chops. I dont read standard notation, but i grew up in studios learning the nashville number system. It has worked out pretty good for me so far.
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Sounds pretty good, actually.

The number system, that's mainly for chord changes, isn't it? Good to know but standard notation is easy enough to learn; might as well do it. Eventually you will encounter a written drum part.

I think you're right in wanting to go to college. That seems smart to me. Sometimes I wish I'd done that.

You're the same age I was when I started in the business. I say go for it!
 
No matter which path I choose I'll be going head first as hard as I can. I cant ready notation well at all. Just basic 4/4 beats and such. How important, compared to everything else, do you think it is?
 
Hmmmmmmmmmm.............."what would I do?"........I went to college later in life. I was a great student "later in life" because I cared about school. You sound intent on not going to college at this time. OK.....when you go to a bank and ask for a loan....they do NOT ask you..."WHERE DID YOU GO TO COLLEGE?" They only look at your credit history and income. If Journey needed a new drummer tomorrow they would not advertise "must have bachelors/masters degree in music". We all know that ain't it.

I say go for it and be the best person you can be and improve your chops along the way. When it comes down to it....People like to work with people they LIKE. Drum on.
 
drumgeek93 said:
No matter which path I choose I'll be going head first as hard as I can. I cant ready notation well at all. Just basic 4/4 beats and such. How important, compared to everything else, do you think it is?
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It'll be the most important thing there is when you get handed a written-out drum part, and sooner or later you will be handed a written-out drum part. Be ready for anything. My ability to read notation was a big plus for me when I started doing studio work.

The greatest thing a producer can say about a musician is: "He can do it all."
 
PreppieNerd said:
Go to college in Nashville.
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Exactly what I was going to suggest. Going to college in Nashville will likely help you get work down the road because of the connections you'll start making. Network with EVERYONE you can there.

It's good to have a degree anyway, and it's better to get it over with now. By going to college in Nashville, you're accomplishing two things at once.
 
Ah how you remind me of myself a few years ago. I figured I would bail on college (although I guess it's not really bailing if you never start) and move to Chicago to start gigging with a buddy out there. The entire music thing fell through in a long drawn out sort of way, and I ended up scraping by at odd jobs living a life of menial labor and poverty. I always managed to have something to eat, so I'm not saying life was TOO rough, but rent was pretty hard to make.

I was too busy working to really pursue music all that much. And in a city with killer drummers coming out of the woodwork left and right, nobody gives two shits about you unless you really have something really really unique.

I decided to go back to school for a more marketable skill. There I found another passion to share with my love of music in the form of medicine.

I still love playing drums and actively gig quite frequently. I have found that if anything, my passion for the instrument has increased inversely to the importance it has in paying my bills; I'm not betting on music for my paychecks which leaves me free to play what I want when I want.

I wouldn't trade those experiences away or do things any differently if I had the chance, but I did learn a couple of things.
1) It can never hurt to have a fall-back. Go to school. I admire your passion and I bet you're a damn good drummer, but what if something out of left field ruins your drumming career; let's say you end up with (God forbid) some type of injury which leaves you unable to play regularly?
2) Be prepared to bust ass. It's easy to daydream about making a living as a musician, but plenty of other people aren't sitting around thinking about it; they're working damn hard to do it. Depending on your amount of innate ability, you will have to work at least as hard as all these other musicians, and to be safe, you should work a lot harder.

On that note, somebody has to do it and it might as well be you! Go for it man! Just make sure you keep some perspective and get working on those chops!

Edit: now that I think about it: I'm doing way better in school after taking a few years off. Don't rush into it if you aren't motivated. I gained a lot of things taking those years off that my classmates can't get with their bachelor's.
 
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I didn't start college until I was 28 and I crammed the whole 4 year degree into just 7.5 years! I was playing in bands during the time I spent in school, but not quite as much as I did before going to school.

I would recommend getting a degree for sure (not majoring in music), but there's really no hurry. It's not like in Japan where you'll be laughed off campus if you're over 25. I would focus on my playing and giving the session player aspiration highest priority while you're young and energized to do it.
 
Nashville is called "Athens of the South" for a reason. There are so many colleges in and around the Nashville area, it would a shame to move there and not go to one of them.

As noted, it can take a while to break in to the scene, so you might as well take some classes to pass the time. If possible, you can schedule late morning and early afternoon classes, and that leaves evenings and nights for gigs and such.
 
funkytomtom said:
Ah how you remind me of myself a few years ago. I figured I would bail on college (although I guess it's not really bailing if you never start) and move to Chicago to start gigging with a buddy out there. The entire music thing fell through in a long drawn out sort of way, and I ended up scraping by at odd jobs living a life of menial labor and poverty. I always managed to have something to eat, so I'm not saying life was TOO rough, but rent was pretty hard to make.

I was too busy working to really pursue music all that much. And in a city with killer drummers coming out of the woodwork left and right, nobody gives two shits about you unless you really have something really really unique.

I decided to go back to school for a more marketable skill. There I found another passion to share with my love of music in the form of medicine.

I still love playing drums and actively gig quite frequently. I have found that if anything, my passion for the instrument has increased inversely to the importance it has in paying my bills; I'm not betting on music for my paychecks which leaves me free to play what I want when I want.

I wouldn't trade those experiences away or do things any differently if I had the chance, but I did learn a couple of things.
1) It can never hurt to have a fall-back. Go to school. I admire your passion and I bet you're a damn good drummer, but what if something out of left field ruins your drumming career; let's say you end up with (God forbid) some type of injury which leaves you unable to play regularly?
2) Be prepared to bust ass. It's easy to daydream about making a living as a musician, but plenty of other people aren't sitting around thinking about it; they're working damn hard to do it. Depending on your amount of innate ability, you will have to work at least as hard as all these other musicians, and to be safe, you should work a lot harder.

On that note, somebody has to do it and it might as well be you! Go for it man! Just make sure you keep some perspective and get working on those chops!

Edit: now that I think about it: I'm doing way better in school after taking a few years off. Don't rush into it if you aren't motivated. I gained a lot of things taking those years off that my classmates can't get with their bachelor's.
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I like the way you think!
 
When you`re young enough to get a good education; you`re not old enough to appreciate what you are being given!!!
Life is unpredictable and you cannot expect guarantees, so as a "more mature" person who got his education after he left school, I would say it makes sense to finish your education before jumping headlong into the music world without a safety net.
However, I applaud your passion and enthusiasm and how I envy the petulance of youth!
 
There are plenty of "has-beens" and "wanna-bes" out there who cliam to have "almost" made it as a session player or touring musician and now earn a meager living working whatever menial jobs they can find because they have no education or marketable job skills, other than "being a musician". In other words, they weren't nearly as good as they thought they were.

However romantic the idea sounds, nobody likes a musician who lives on edge with no money and has to bum most of what he gets day to day. That gets old really quick when you have to continually hit up people for food money, gas money, bum rides because you can't afford to get your car fixed, etc. Nobody likes a begger.

Take the wonderful advice offered here. Move to Nashville and enroll in a local college to begin to get an education and do session work or other music work, whenever you get it. If you start getting more and more session work and it cuts into your class and study schedule, and feel like you can support yourself ONLY doing music, GREAT, ride that wave as long as you can, and cut back on school a bit or rearrange your class schedule but NEVER stop working on your degree. You'll thank yourself later.

It never hurts to get an education and/or skilled in something you love doing that is marketable. If your session work doesn't pan out like you hope it will, you have your education and skill training to fall back on.

One guy I know who thought he had it to "make it" in Vegas and LA and acted like a premadonna, worked in a greezy porno shop as a clerk just to get money to eat. Another guy is divorced with two kids to take care of, age 48 or 49, but still is trying to "make" it as a singer / songwriter and lives with his mom and is continually broke. Still another disbanded his band because he wasn't earing $200 a night gigging like he thought he should be, he was making less and he put no effort into marketing his band.

Don't be these guys!!

My .02 cents.
 
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One question I have is do you know any current session drummers. If so, maybe ask them what route they took to get where they are in nashville. I thinks it's one of those once your in, your in, deals where it's tricky to get a name for yourself as a session guy but if you do your in demand. I would ask around and see what studio guys and producers look for in a session drummer and try to emulate their needs. Good luck.
 
Please for the love of god talk to your parents. The decision to attend college or not isn't something that should be left up to responses on an internet forum. If my kid ever told that she was not going to college because her "buddies" on the drum forum told her not to I would seriously question her sanity.

On that note. Go to college kid. Get the peice of paper that seems so meaningless now, but can make all the difference later. Learn the difference between their and there. The world is a big place, dont be in too much of a hurry to grow up.
 
I have lived in Nashville in the past and have made my living by sound engineering over the last 7 years.

I've met more than a few professional session players in the area and their are a few things that immediately strike me about them.

1. Almost all of them have an outside skill or hobby of which they used to make a living at.
Literally, any pro you meet will have something they fall back on in lean times. Find an outside skill and develop. This might be difficult if you are practicing 16 hours a day 6 days a week but I bet you don't do that :) Bassist Les Claypool was a carpenter, (so was Harrison Ford), outside skills to support yourself can greatly improve you confidence. Its hard to really be a "rock star" when you are worrying about rent.

2. Balance. A lot of successful songwriters don't necessarily have this, but most of the session & side men are very stable in their lives. Discipline.

3. Everyone gets one shot in Nashville. You ARE seen by the players if you play in town, and if you are decent you will do some session work. If you can't deliver the entire track in no more than 2 takes you will probably NEVER work again for a decade+ before your next shot. Be sure and be tight with a click. Everyone talks in this town. You screw up one session and EVERYONE will know it.

4. Be friggin awesome. Are you the best in your city at drums? In Nashville you will probably only be average, if not below average then. Remember, music Mecca's attract the Best of the BEST. If ANYONE in your town is better than you than you have a serious uphill battle ahead of you because the guy that THEY consider untouchably good will be competing with you for session work. PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE and remember, people don't pay to have their friends play, when money is put out people want the best.

.02

P.S. If your friend mutters on about playing a show with Major Label Interest run like hell. It is the dumbest line known to man. Or do do it, if you didn't get sign they didn't want you. When I did sound in various clubs around the area they ALWAYS said at EVERY SHOW, "major label interest". That term is a peeve of mine.
 
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