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Bassists with music degrees?

#21
My music degree was a double-edged sword. It gave me a strong enough background in theory and arrangement that I could skate on wits and talent. That means I never learned to work. I picked up other instruments in recent years and the novelty has helped keep me interested enough to develop a respectable work ethic. If I had found that work ethic 15 years ago, I might have made something of myself.

As it stands now, I compare favorably to the majority of musicians I cross paths with in my area, but I'm not exactly living in a bustling music scene.

Oh, and it put me in a shitload of debt that has made it difficult for me to own nice things. Not that the gear makes the man, but...
 
#23
I was making a steady living playing nightclubs 6 nights a week before I went to music school - after I went to music school for a year I went back to playing full time but now I understood a lot more of the technical stuff my out of work friends with degrees were saying - but I was still making a lot more money at music than they were. So at that stage (right out of school) I felt like their degree wasn't doing much for them. But after a few years, I was still playing the same sorts of places and many of my friends with degrees were scoring soundtracks for movies.
 
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#25
I have a music education degree and have taught for about 20 years in public and private schools so in that respect my degree has been very beneficial. The theory, eat training and other classes I took made me a better player for sure. I could've got that same knowledge from private lessons but being able to play in various ensembles, interact and learn from different players was an experience that I probably could've only gotten at a school.
 
#26
IamGroot said:
Examples of music degrees in the US are Bachelors or equivalent or higher degrees from a college, conservatory, or music school.
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I stopped at the Associates level, but still benefited immensely from the education. I may have been a better player if I had completed Bachelors, but I doubt I would have been any more successful. But I had a fairly unique career path that suited me well. Not everyone is cut out for the path I took.
 
#28
People are really letting their egos get involved in answering this. I don't have a music degree. I gig with a lot of people that do have music degrees.

Let's put it this way -

Not all of the great players that I know have degrees.
0 of the players I know who have degrees are terrible.
I know terrible players who have been playing a long time.

So I guess the point is, I don't think the degree makes you an incredible player. But I do think that there are very few awful musicians who have degrees. The degree is by no means an indication of excellence, but I do think that it's an indication of competence.
 
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#29
Yes. I'm a much better musician after my diploma and degree in music. The training was incredible, the competition was astounding and enlightening, the super picky ensemble work in all genres made me aware of weaknesses i didn't notice before, and i improved a ton.

It was super expensive too lol... and I still make my living in another industry. Worth it to me... others might disagree.
 
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#31
Bass'd on a true story said:
People are really letting their egos get involved in answering this. I don't have a music degree. I gig with a lot of people that do have music degrees.

Let's put it this way -

Not all of the great players that I know have degrees.
0 of the players I know who have degrees are terrible.
I know terrible players who have been playing a long time.

So I guess the point is, I don't think the degree makes you an incredible player. But I do think that there are very few awful musicians who have degrees. The degree is by no means an indication of excellence, but I do think that it's an indication of competence.
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In my experience, music schools are turning out tons of unqualified degree holders who can not play themselves out of a wet paper bag. For a time I was in charge of auditioning musicians for one of the Air Force bands, and it was really a bit surprising how bad some of the candidates were (often recent graduates from prestigious schools), and how hard it was to find a good player who wanted the job and would be happy in it long term.

Most of our players held at least a Bachelors. We also had quite a few with Masters and a sprinkling who held Doctorates. I was sort of an outlier because I came into the program with "some college". Some had been hired straight from high school. They usually struggled significantly, and if they stayed in, they rarely developed into strong performers, although some were competent enough in various niches. The most talented musicians tended to get disillusioned with performing, and either separate to pursue a higher degree or get out of music entirely.
 
#33
You know, I just found this talkbass website 2 weeks ago. Been quite enlightening. And yes, I bought a bass here and just visited the guy who built it 30 years ago. Back then I was a steinberger-playing jammer and garage band player whose only training was on clarinet in high school. I played keyboard in cover bands and made a few extra bucks. I quit my day job in 1991 to play music full time. I fell on my butt. My big music break was in 1998, playing bass in a blues band (2 gigs to cover for the regular player). I met a music therapist at the gig and my life changed forever. It resulted in a government funded music education. I got a music composition degree in 2002 at age 42. During my first semester of graduate school I got a huge disability settlement from the government, so I didn't have to hunt down gigs or teach. But if I hadn't gone to music school and graduated this never would have happened. During the last 17 years I've sung in Ireland, played bass clarinet in Rome, was paid to play clarinet in Arizona (the clarinet was paid by a scholarship the school gave me). All my schooling was paid by the VA. Only recently did I decide to play bass again. At age 58 and aching, who knows if I'll ever play out again. But after visiting Jerry Dorsch today, anything is possible. So yes, you can be a great musician without school. The list of those folks is endless. But for me, school paid off by allowing me to live period. My cancer was treated 10 years ago thanks to the disability settlement I got in grad school. And I got to experience some really cool music stuff, all made possible by a sub bass gig in 1998.

My two cents.
 
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#34
No degree, but took a fair amount of music in college. Still an enthusiastic amateur, will never be a great musician, but I've enjoyed it all immensely.

My favorite class was a second-year theory class where the format was basically: study the Bach 2-part inventions. Pick one and write a paper about it. Now write your own 2-part invention. Repeat for Bach fugues, Haydn string quartets, etc., etc.

What I learned was that if I want to learn to play some kind of music, I don't need someone to tell me how, I just need the music itself. If I can study it closely I can figure out how it works.
 
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#35
bfields said:
No degree, but took a fair amount of music in college. Still an enthusiastic amateur, will never be a great musician, but I've enjoyed it all immensely.

My favorite class was a second-year theory class where the format was basically: study the Bach 2-part inventions. Pick one and write a paper about it. Now write your own 2-part invention. Repeat for Bach fugues, Haydn string quartets, etc., etc.

What I learned was that if I want to learn to play some kind of music, I don't need someone to tell me how, I just need the music itself. If I can study it closely I can figure out how it works.
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But without that education...

I will wholeheartedly agree that you don't need music school to be successful at playing, though. I stopped studying it formally when I got out of high school. Not that I'm super successful but I've had some good moments and played right alongside many music majors. But the more I've learned academically, the more I've been able to understand it. I'd say the same for you, most likely.
 
#37
JimmyM said:
But without that education...

I will wholeheartedly agree that you don't need music school to be successful at playing, though. I stopped studying it formally when I got out of high school. Not that I'm super successful but I've had some good moments and played right alongside many music majors. But the more I've learned academically, the more I've been able to understand it. I'd say the same for you, most likely.
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Definitely. Yeah, I put that badly. What I meant was that the classes I took were most valuable not just for what they taught me about particular pieces or types of music, but for showing me more generally how to break a piece of music down and think about it what makes it work. And for giving me the confidence that that was something I could do if I set my mind to it.
 
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#38
I'll tell you guys what I REALLY wish I took in college, and that's business related classes to music. I took some business related classes but never really learned how to apply them to music. Nowadays you can find classes targeted to how you market yourself in the industry. I always thought that the business was a such a crapshoot that it really didn't matter. But what I failed to take into account were the tangential businesses associated with music that could have been lucrative but weren't playing with a cool band, and I was too big a ham to be interested in anything but playing in a cool band.
 
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#39
Three observations:

I was up for a full ticket scholarship to a university you'd all recognize (in piano). It dawned on me that it would be an uphill climb even with the degree to do it for a living, and I passed, and I was really good at it. No regrets. I was a wild willful child at 17, and the idea of being locked up with all the rigors and musty traditions of classical music for another four years chased me off. I loved Chuck Berry as much as Rachmaninoff, but even then, that was blasphemy to that crowd, that mindset. So I needed to be somewhere else, and I went.

I've played both with gifted natural players and degreed players, and the schooled guys always had an edge IF they would let it fly and weren't puckered up by that training.

I would have loved to gotten a degree in bass as I look back, but I never even held one until I was 28, so the horse was out of the barn by then, and the schools were far more rigid back then.
 

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