FAQs
- What education and/or training do you have that relates to your work?
I started playing 15 years ago in my bedroom in a house way out in the stix (hill country). I was self-taught until I received a music scholarship that paid for my music degree where I was fortunate and determined enough to remain a high GPA with Grammy nominated, winning and performing musicians. My guitar teacher was the son of the fiddle player who played “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” (however we mostly played Texas Swing and cinematic jazz standards in our lessons). I have been a performing artist for eight years myself now and I’ve played every kind of venue you can imagine and I look forward to playing for the rest of my life.
- What advice would you give a customer looking to hire a provider in your area of work?
Try to remember all the hours of practicing or if you’re hiring a string player of any kind, the many many hours of practicing and physical pain (it hurts pretty bad for the first few months) it takes to be in the position of being able to entertain publicly. Appreciate that they do not usually have an entourage of people at their call to handle everything. They have to learn, prepare, engineer sonics and sound equipment, act, market/promote, book/schedule, be their own Human Resources, transport/travel, load/unload (sometimes more than twice in a day), and somehow have the energy and guile to express things artistically in a way that connects to not one but many, many people all at once. I do not suffer stage fright but many do and my best piece of advice is a reminder to be mindful that it takes a lot of guts to do what we do.
- What questions should customers think through before talking to professionals about their project?
What kind of music do I (or do I think my guests will) really enjoy for this event? What specifically do I want them to sound like? If I want them to learn specialized playlists or tunes for my event, how much time am I giving them? (just ask them if it’s enough time - my average rate of learning is 3 new tunes/day) Do I have an appropriate size “stage” area for their equipment? Do they need anything provided by venue in order to be able to facilitate this service?