I’m sure a lot of professional musicians find themselves in the situation whereby they are making a living, and working with music (playing or teaching), but where this also feels like it may as well be any other job, and very removed from the ideals which made a career as a professional musician appealing in the first place!

I’ve been working on a lot of other people’s projects recently. They have been a wide and varied mixture of musical styles, from structured and intensive reading for independent album projects, to teaching and performing student compositions for submission to exam boards. This is becoming a seemingly terminal dilemma whereby funding an existence (which is costing time which I want to be using to create, record, and achieve my own goals) is a matter of performing, recording, sharing skills, and serving to assist others achieve their goals.

I’m putting this in a blog primarily for my students because recently I’ve found that I have had to do something that I frequently tell my students they need to do when they complain that where they want the skills, they have no time to practice because of other commitments. I’ve practicing what I preach and “made time” for my own practice, and work. If I didn’t do this, my own creative work would be on back burners and on hold forever, because (as I’ve found) there is always someone who wants me to teach or play something somewhere! Comfortable as this situation may be, and reassuring from the point of view of being “employed” (within an increasingly fragile employment and credit climate), in the end, spending time doing what people actually want to do with their lives is very important.