Session work

Function band:

• Weddings

• Cruises

• Pub gigs

Skills Required:

• Networking/ knowing people

• Being good at your instrument

• Being reliable and a good person

• Being able to travel and get to the venues you’re playing at

• Genre knowledge and adaptability

  
  

Income potential:

£31,735

• The average session musician gross salary in United Kingdom is £31,735; to be more precise pay rate is £2,645 per month, £610 per week, or £15.68 per hour. In addition, they earn an average bonus of £1,600. Salary estimates based on salary survey data collected directly from employers and anonymous employees in United Kingdom.

This was the average session musician rates I found online although there are a lot of different factors to take into consideration which might affect the salary outcome.

We also focused on writing a 50 word mission statement about ourselves in this session and this is the one we came up with:

I’m Autumn Mckay. I've been playing drums for over a decade and have done many gigs ranging from metal to more acoustic trying to fit my playing to the genre in unique and creative ways. My aim is to inspire people and celebrate music to a wider audience using my skills and knowledge.

This is a link to what I need to do for the formative hand of the assignment in 2 weeks.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/16wKquS8d7PxRAmIzF0iyIHv6D8gkk_ERHGswVKLFidA/edit?usp=sharing

These are the 4 areas I chose linked above is the pie chart are the ratios that I want to divide the different areas of work into.

We also considered income and time splits and off branches of the career roles that we chose.

1. Original artist (50%, 20 hours a week).

2. Session Musician (30%, 12 hours a week).

3. Music Teacher (20%, 8 hours a week).

Friendship- least formal, shared interest, genuine liking extending beyond the work place.

Personal- semi-formal, greater personal connection, e.g. they work together out of 'want' or have lunch together.

Organizational- formal, secure structure, connections within a company e.g. a department.

Reporting- Formal, e.g. boss or employee.

We also went over how to network and examples of conversations we could have and who to network with.

The photo at the top is of my mind map for the essay for the all of future working relationships that I could face in my career in the music industry.

This week I interviewed Simon Hutchby on job roles on the industry which is the video linked above, I feel like this was super useful for me to get an insight into the music industry as he had done many roles in his career over the years and a lot of them I was interested in and ones I want to consider in my future career in the music industry.

This week in the lesson we talked money and budgeting we covered how to lay out your budget, strategies to save money and ways to deal with tax. I feel like this is important for my future career so I am not stressed out and overwhelmed about tax when it comes up.

We talked about laying out your budget using a spread sheet to visualize and organize budget we also talked about people that can help us sort out and help us out with tax such as HMRC.

This week we looked at the importance of EPK's and one sheets. I believe that this is super important to me a a musician in order to market myself successfully, we discussed adding aspects such as hyperlinks to music and social media.

in the lesson I started to develop my "one sheet" and put down some ideas I think in this I would like to add links to band stuff I am working on, my own personal playing and style and about me and what I do. I would like to incorporate some ideas that I wrote about in my mission statement as I feel like there is a lot of overlap with me branding myself as an artist.

The link at the top is to my bands EPK that we made ready for the release of our first single.

-eco merchandise

-moving away from exotic woods

-travel together in order to consolidate expenses

Some socially sustainable things we could do to build a career were:

-supporting other artists in your genre

-building a community

-dream networking 100

We also talked about stress and the best ways to deal with it one of the best ways we talked about was just taking a break and coming back which can apply to music such as instruments or just everyday life.

The photo at the top is covering the self determination theory this is some things we need to be self motivated for someone to improve the 3 things are: competence, autonomy and relatedness

I believe that this is crucial to learn about and is very relevant to my future career in the music industry as I would like to brand myself and my playing to the best of my ability. I think moving forward I would like to consider branding elements such as social media to market myself better to make me a more employable and presentable musician.

Over the time of being a band we've done a couple of meeting with Keiron Pepper and all of them have been super helpful and really insightful to developing our sound as a band and moving our career forward in the music industry.

The video linked at the top is our band rehearsing one of our original songs. In the video we were just rehearsing in order to learn parts but we want to get a really strong understanding in the song as this is track we want to go on to record and release in order to put on a upcoming EP and play live at shows.

I believe this will help me progress as a live musician as I want to show up to rehearsals with a positive attitude towards learning new music and be open to new ideas and criticism in order to develop as a band and get our songs sounding as good as they possibly can.

Over the course of the next months/ years I would like to progress with my original band and do more live shows working our way up to larger venues and gaining a wider audience of followers.

The 4 areas that I am documenting to show this development are:

-an artist development meeting to gauge our next steps as a band

-Rehearsing in order to improve upon our original songs

-playing live in a professional environment.

-Recording original tracks

I believe that these 4 things will help me develop as a original musician.

This week in the lesson we watched a video which is linked at the top of the page this video covers all the different roles that goes into making a tour happen on a large scale, I believe that this was really helpful to broaden my understanding of the touring industry that I want to go into in my future career in the industry. I feel like it also gave me an idea of other potential jobs to get into the industry as a gateway.

Some of the job roles I wasn't to sure about which the video explained to me were:

-Rigging technical designer- which designs a rig for the stage.

-Account manager which makes sure all the finances are correct and everyone gets paid.

-Health and safety manager- the person that debriefs the workers on safe practices and makes sure the show runs as smoothly as possible.

-Crew coordinator- who makes sure everyone is in there right place.

-Assets team- a team that manages the things that need to be bought and or hired for the tour.

-Logistics organizer- makes sure they show and facts such as stage size is correct for the people and equipment.

-Dispatch manager- the person who dispatches everyone on the road to make sure they are going to the right place and at the right time.

The video linked at the top is me recording drums for an original track we are working on releasing in the future in the small pond studio.

I feel like I am making good progress towards the end of the assignment and feel pretty confident that I will be able to get it done to a point where I am happy with it by the deadline.

I believe that these lessons have given me a really usual insight into the music industry and help me develop my future career in the music industry. I think the thing I found the most interesting is finding out how much each job role in the industry makes and how sustainable it is.