hey, welcome to 12tone! music school is kind of a weird place: it's supposed to teach you how to be
a musician, but being a musician is about so much more than just making music. people often ask me
if music school is worth it, and the honest answer is it depends what you want it to be.
I can't make that decision for you, but I think there's a lot to be learned from other
people's stories, so I'm gonna get a bit more personal than usual and tell you all about my
music school experience and some of the most important lessons I learned along the way.
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I actually didn't get into making music until I was 17: before that, my plan was to be a game
designer. I spent most of my time coming up with RPG leveling systems, making custom Magic cards,
and thinking about combat mechanics. then, in August 2006, Adult Swim released a new
series called Metalocalypse. suddenly, every teenager wanted to start their own metal band,
and my friend group was no different. I already loved metal and wanted to be involved,
but I didn't play an instrument, so we decided I'd be the singer. I went home,
tried screaming along to some of my favorite songs, and it turned out to be really fun.
unfortunately, none of my other friends were actually all that serious, and the band only
had one jam session before we all gave up, but I was hooked. forget making video games,
I wanted to be a metal singer. and that, I think, was my first real lesson: just,
like, do stuff. I know this comes up in every one of these "lessons from my life" videos,
so I won't belabor the point, but my entire career happened because I went along with a joke and
ultimately discovered a new passion. I'm not the most outgoing person, but to this day, when I get
invited to do stuff I try to say yes if I can, because you never know where it's gonna lead.
anyway, at the time, I was living near Boston, and if you want to learn about music in the
Boston area, there's really only one place to go: Berklee. I did the summer program there
in 2007 and 2008. now, you might expect this to be an intimidating experience: at my first one,
I'd been singing for less than a year, and it wasn't even the sort of singing Berklee was
known for teaching. I'd worked out a technique for metal screams, but I'd never done anything
melodic. honestly, though, I think that worked to my advantage. I was so out of place that it
was easy to write off any problems as the school just not understanding what I was trying to do,
which brings me to my second lesson: when you're learning a new skill, it really helps to not know
how bad you are. I was not a good singer. I wasn't even a good metal singer yet. if I'd known that,
like, really known that, I'd have felt pretty discouraged: for comparison, by the time I went
to college I'd picked up the bass, and I think meeting so many really good bassists while I was
still learning is probably part of why I kinda gave up practicing it. but at Berklee, the fact
that I could do those screams at all got such a reaction that it motivated me to keep going.
if I wanted to take the next step, though, I figured I'd have to go to music school,
and since I was already doing programs at Berklee that seemed like an obvious choice.
I applied at the end of my 2007 program and… they rejected me. rightly so, too: again,
I wasn't very good. but I had my heart set on going, so when I went back for the 2008 program,
I decided to try extra hard, to prove that I deserved to go to Berklee. near the end of the
program, I went to my ensemble teachers and asked if they'd write me a letter of recommendation.
two of them agreed, but when I asked the third one, he looked at me and said
"you don't want to do that. this isn't the right environment for what you're trying to do."
and that hadn't occurred to me. I wanted to be a musician, Berklee was a music school,
of course it'd be a good fit. but he was right: again, no one else in the program was doing the
stuff I did. none of the vocal teachers knew how to handle me, because none of them had experience
with the music I wanted to make. Berklee's idea of metal was bands like Dream Theater. now,
don't get me wrong, I like Dream Theater, but I was trying to be Rob Zombie, not James LaBrie.
so that year, instead of applying to Berklee again, I applied to an Associates program at
another, more rock-oriented school in Los Angeles. I don't like to give out the name of my alma mater
because it's a for-profit university, and while I got a lot out of my time there I have some pretty
serious issues with the way it was run, so I don't want to give them free advertising. still, though,
I got in, and it wound up being a much better fit than Berklee would've been. that brings me to
lesson three: find the right environment for you. prestige isn't all it's cracked up to be. there's
no doubt in my mind that Berklee's a better school, but it wasn't a better school for me,
at least not at that point in my life. being in a space that understood what I
wanted to do meant the system worked with me. I wasn't constantly fighting against it. there
were teachers there who could actually tell me from experience how to get better at screaming,
and they're the ones who convinced me that I should really work on my clean singing too.
this is also where I really started to get interested in theory. I tested out of the first
couple levels with the fragments I remembered from Berklee, and when I got to theory 3,
I pretty quickly noticed something. no one in the class was struggling with the material from theory
3. everyone was either doing fine, like I was, or they were still struggling with concepts from
theory 1 and 2. that's one of the issues with for-profit universities: they don't have much
incentive to fail you, so you can pretty easily pass without learning much. this observation,
though, is the foundation of how I approach my work to this day, which I guess makes it lesson
number four: most hard concepts aren't actually hard, they just rely on previous knowledge.
when something's confusing, it's probably not because your incapable of understanding it. it's
just that the person explaining it has made some incorrect assumptions about what you already know.
especially in a field like theory, everything is built on top of something else. things
that look like huge logical leaps are usually just a series of small steps.
the art of teaching is figuring out which of those steps you need to make explicit,
and the art of learning is asking the right questions to uncover the steps you missed.
now, one thing that happens when you go to music school is that you learn about the music industry.
when I showed up, my plan was to become a world-famous metal singer. I was gonna start a
band, we'd immediately succeed, and then I'd spend the rest of my life as a superstar. and that,
I think, is a pretty common plan for music students, but if your teachers are any good
they'll pretty quickly explain that that doesn't happen. overnight success is basically a myth.
most people who manage to make a living in music spend years grinding in obscurity first.
in order to survive that, you need to try a bunch of different things until one of them takes off.
you can start a band, sure, but you should also be teaching, doing session work, and taking whatever
other opportunities come your way. this ties back to the first lesson, but it also taught me
another one: be realistic, but not too realistic. succeeding at something means failing at it for
long enough that you run out of failures. you have to believe you'll make it, but you also
have to understand that you probably won't. plan for failure while preparing for success.
that's the mentality you learn in music school, and it's one I carried over into my YouTube
career. as a viewer, you don't really see a lot of small channels: most of the people you watch are
getting tens of thousands of views at least, so it's easy to convince yourself you'll get to that
point pretty quickly. in reality, though, we were making videos for 6 months before we even crossed
a hundred subscribers, and it took more than two years before I was able to make this my full-time
job. of course, I do need to acknowledge that being able to give it that much time
was a privilege: I relied in no small part on the support of my family, and I'm not sure I could've
done it without them. a lot of people aren't in a position to spend years of their life on big
ambitious projects with little to no compensation, and we're losing out on a lot of amazing art
because of that. I don't mean to downplay those issues. I'm not saying this is how the world
should work, and I'm not saying it's how it has to work, but for now at least, it's how it does
work, and if you want making art to be your job, it's worth knowing what that actually looks like.
but I'm getting ahead of myself. back in the Associates program, I had a problem. I was
surrounded by all these amazing musicians, and I still couldn't put a band together. I was getting
pretty good, especially at the hard rock and metal stuff, but when you're the singer everyone expects
you to be in charge, and I suck at being in charge of people. plus, there's the business side:
for those of you who've never seen the inside of the LA music scene, it's pretty bleak. there's
so many bands trying to make it here that club owners can do basically whatever they want. most
of the available gigs are pay-to-play, and it's a constant battle to build enough hype to stay
relevant. some of my friends did it anyway, but much to the disappointment of my pre-college self,
I found that I just didn't care enough. don't get me wrong, I loved performing. there's nothing
quite like being on stage absolutely killing a song in front of an excited audience. I still
miss that rush, but it wasn't enough, and I hated every other aspect of being a gigging musician.
that meant I had to start looking for alternatives, and the obvious choice
was teaching. I enjoyed my theory classes, and I wanted to teach them some day, but I figured
that couldn't be a job on its own, right? all the theory teachers I'd seen were instrumentalists who
taught one theory class, so I figured I'd have to be a vocal teacher, and to do that, I needed
a fancier degree. I finished up my Associates and got accepted to the Bachelor program at the same
school. by this point, I was pretty close with the school's main vocal technique teacher. she'd
been my private instructor for four quarters, I'd taken her vocal teacher training classes,
and she understood what I wanted to do, so when I started the Bachelor program, she offered to
let me sit in on some of her classes. she gave me her schedule and told me to show up to whichever
ones I was interested in, so… I showed up to all of them. a lot of the credits from my Associates
program had transferred over so I had a pretty light schedule, and I figured if going to some
of her classes was helpful, going to more would be better. for three years I sat in on every class I
could. after a couple quarters of that, she even started letting me act as a sort of unofficial TA,
helping her manage the students and letting me practice my vocal instruction.
I debated what the lesson here was, but I think there's actually two. the first is that there's
no time limit on learning: I think the way that schools are structured gives the impression
that we're supposed to spend a set amount of time on each task and then we're done,
but that's not really how learning works. if you love doing something,
give it as many hours as you can. the more you work at it, the faster you'll grow.
the other lesson, though, is to find a mentor. find someone who's already doing what you want
to do and ask them for help getting to where they are. my time in the Bachelor program would've
been way harder if this teacher hadn't taken me under her wing. her support and guidance helped
me figure out what I wanted to do and how to go about doing it, and even though I didn't wind up
becoming a vocal teacher, I'll still always be grateful to her for that. oh, and bonus lesson:
if you're an expert in something, if you've succeeded in some field or other,
always take the time to drop the ladder back down. there's a whole nother wave of awesome
people coming up behind you, and if you're fortunate enough to be in a position to help,
even just a little, it's one of the most rewarding things you'll ever do.
that actually ties in to my theory experience too: I've mentioned before that I pretty quickly wound
up serving as the unofficial theory tutor for a lot of my class. this was where I really honed
my ability to explain difficult concepts. I'd meet up with friends and go through the homework.
when they got confused, I'd backtrack until I found the part that was giving them trouble,
and then work back up from there. the joy of walking someone through the steps to a
realization was a huge part of what led me to make this channel in the first place.
but not all my classes were so interesting. like any Bachelor program,
there was a bunch of weird requirements that didn't seem to have any real point.
we had a conducting class, a bizarrely simplistic computer class, our music history was a joke,
and even some of the vocal classes felt pointless 'cause not all the teachers were great. and look,
I'm not gonna claim that taking these classes was secretly worth it: they were a waste of my time.
but it did help teach me that sometimes, when you've got a goal you're working toward,
it's ok to just do things 'cause they have to get done. being autistic, I've never been great at
tasks I didn't understand the point of, but these classes were standing between me and my degree,
so I put my head down and did the work anyway. did I apply myself as much as I could've? no,
of course not, but I applied myself enough to pass, and that's worth knowing how to do.
on the flip side, though, was ear training. now, ear training is not a pointless class.
I use those skills all the time. but back then, it kinda felt like one. it was a lot
of work and it didn't seem to be related to my instrument, so I just kinda coasted through,
putting in just enough work to pass. looking back, this is one of my biggest regrets, and it leads
to my next lesson: you can't always tell what's important. sometimes you just have to trust that
other people know better than you and put in the extra effort anyway. and yeah, I know this is the
opposite of the last lesson. what can I say? life is complicated and I have no idea what I'm doing.
but if the whole point of this was to become a vocal teacher, why aren't I? how'd I wind
up doing this instead? well, by the end of the Bachelor program, that was still my plan. in fact,
I wanted to teach at that school. I'd become good friends with many of the teachers, and a handful
of them agreed to be references to try to convince the head of the vocal department to hire me.
problem is, the quarter before I graduated, they wound up firing the department head and bringing
in someone new. I still reached out, but the new head decided she didn't want to hire recent
students anymore. she thought it looked bad if the school's graduates mostly wound up coming back to
work for the school itself which, honestly, yeah, fair enough. it's not a bad policy,
it was just bad timing for me. I'd put a lot of my eggs into that one basket, and finding out that
she wasn't even willing to consider me meant I had to figure out something new, fast. I wound up
getting a job as a piano and voice tutor for kids, and in my spare time I started making 12tone.
and that brings me to my final lesson: sometimes your plans are bad and it's ok if they don't
work out. after I graduated I kept in touch with some of the teachers, and as I got a
more complete picture of what working there was like, it became clear that I'd dodged a bullet.
the pay wasn't great, there was a lot of politics and busywork I hadn't really seen as a student,
and it seemed like most of the people who taught there were looking for a chance to
move on to something better. not getting that job meant I had to find something else to do,
and that something else turned out to be this. this video you're watching right now exists
because I tried really hard to get a teaching job and then didn't get it. making 12tone is the most
creatively satisfying work I've ever done, and looking back now, not becoming a teacher
was the best thing that ever happened to me. so make plans, but don't be afraid to change them,
because it might turn out that the new plan is the one you should've been planning all along.
I said at the beginning that I think it's worth learning from other people's stories,
and if you want another story, I'd recommend How Music Works, by David Byrne from Talking Heads.
Byrne is one of the most interesting, creative musical figures of the last 50 years, and his
take on the structure and evolution of music is as unique and insightful as you'd expect. if you
want to check it out, the audiobook for How Music Works is one of thousands of titles available on
Audible. Audible is the internet's leading provider of audio entertainment, including
audiobooks, podcasts, comedy, and exclusive Originals that you can't find anywhere else. plus,
if you go to audible.com/12tone or text 12tone to 500-500, you'll get a 30-day free trial including
one free audiobook that's yours to keep forever, even if you cancel your membership. you could use
that to get Byrne's book, or pretty much anything else you want. the selection is ridiculous. again,
that's audible.com/12tone or text 12tone to 500-500 to get your free audiobook today.
anyway, thanks for watching, and extra special thanks to this video's Featured Patrons,
Duck and Howard Levine. if you want to help out,
and help us pick the next song we analyze too, there's a link to our Patreon on screen now. oh,
and don't forget to like, share, comment, subscribe, and above all, keep on rockin'.