Complete Musician: How to Be One

How to become a complete musician. What does It take to be one?

As you progress with your piano or keyboard lessons and as you become better at playing your instrument, it would be a good idea to know the areas, besides playing the piano (or your main instrument), where you can improve and which will help you to become a better musician.

A complete musician is one who has a good grasp over the various aspects involved in the music creation process.

If you aim to become one, you should have a fair amount of mastery in areas such as performance, arrangement, harmony, composition, vocals and music technology.

One example of a complete musician was Gunther Schuller (American composer, conductor, horn player, author, historian and jazz musician) who began as a French horn player, played jazz, was a champion of Milton Babbitt’s 12-tone music; and of Scott Joplin’s ragtime. He wrote two scholarly books about jazz history, Early Jazz and The Swing Era; and a primer about conducting, The Compleat Conductor. He reconstructed and recorded Charles Mingus’s two-hour orchestral work Epitaph; and music by Bruno Maderna, even a Beethoven Fifth.

1. Become proficient at playing your instrument

   If you go through some of the big names in the music industry like Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Yanni or even if you consider legendary composers like Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, one thing you will notice is that these guys were not only good at composing ever-lasting numbers but were also extremely good at playing the instrument.

   In fact, most of them got recognition early on in their career as a performer and later as a composer.

   The point here is that, though it is possible to compose and arrange songs with some amount of mastery over the keyboard, one should always strive to be a very good player of the instrument.

   It will give you tremendous self confidence, considerably improve your image as a musician and you will be able to arrange your songs much faster.

   Besides getting skilled at your instrument, you should also try to learn to play in various styles. If you play the electric guitar, you should also learn to play the acoustic guitar, and so on.

   Scott Law, a multifaceted artist, who is a master guitar player, singer-songwriter and recording artist says I really came to the guitar first as an electric guitarist, and then I realized how much value there is to be gained by learning the acoustic instrument, and the fundamentals of playing the acoustic instrument have served my electric playing very well. So yes, I do both, because I want to be a “complete musician”.

   So, make it a habit of practicing daily on your instrument even if you get a lot of composing and arranging work.

2. You need to be an OK Singer

   I am not saying that you need to sing well to be a good keyboard or a piano player.

   But to be a complete musician, you need to have some skills with your vocals. Besides, just look at the advantages involved.

   

   • You can communicate your composition through your voice. Vocals being an important part of any song, you will be able to communicate well and extract a better performance from your singers if you have to record your own composition.
   • As a musician, people around you will respect you if you can sing well and anyways they will expect you to be at least a decent singer.
   • It creates a great impression if you can sing and perform at the same time on your instrument. Just look at Elton John or Stevie Wonder; don’t they look amazing?

3. Composing, Arranging and Music Technology

   A lot of students already manage to create tunes of their own after having learnt the piano or keyboard for around a year.

   They find it very exciting to create new things and should be encouraged to do so. What is exciting further is that as the computer becomes more and more powerful and faster, it is making composing on a computer far easier and economical for a lot people.

The Complete Musician (Book): An Integrated Approach to Tonal Theory, Analysis, and Listening

There’s also a book by this name that reveals how music theory, music skills, and music-making is connected. Music students will find this book useful as it teaches them the principles of writing, analyzing, hearing, singing, and playing tonal harmony, and enables them to understand the most important musical forms.

The book has 865 pages (its a comprehensive theoretical training manual for undergraduates and not really a beginners book) that covers a lot of ground. The eight parts (each divided into three to five chapters) of the book include: The foundation of Tonal Music; Merging Melody and harmony; A New Harmonic Function, The Phrase Model, and Additional Melodic and Harmonic Embellishments; New Chords and New Forms; Functional Chromaticism; Expressive Chromaticism; Large Forms: Ternary, Rondo, Sonata; and Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Harmony.

If you intend to be a complete musician, honing your skills in the arranging and composing department is very much necessary and you can easily do so as it is getting much easier to set up your own home studio nowadays.

With some good samples and software, it is possible for you to create a very good mix of your composition on the computer. Even if you do not have a computer, lot of keyboards and digital pianos nowadays come with built-in sequencers which you can use to record your composition.

In fact, the better ones give you all the tools to make the perfect mix on your instrument, just as in a computer.

But the point here is that you will need to spend time to learn to arrange your song. You will also need to learn how to use the various effects and software to create that final mix.

If you think that you are not very tech savvy, do not worry. It is not difficult! It is just like learning any new thing and with practice it becomes easier to do.

This is then what you will need to improve upon as you go further in your quest for becoming a better musician, in fact a complete musician.

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KeytarHQ Editorial Team

KeytarHQ editorial team includes musicians who write and review products for pianists, keyboardists, guitarists & other musicians. KeytarHQ is the best online resource for information on keyboards, pianos, synths, keytars, guitars and music gear for musicians of all abilities, ages and interests.