Weirdly Enough I spend more hours in the week listen to music than actually playing. It's like a weird part of me wish I did't have to play music or at least play bass which is why I wish I could gain more skills now and throughout my time in the music program to play keys and synths because sometimes I write songs only with a programmed drum beat and synths and keys but I don't know if I could brush up my skills from beginner to bandstand within the few years I have before graduating from school and into the music world.
Being a musician will require you to use many different mental processes that are not used when listening to music. Performing or writing music engage the brain in a totally different way than simply listening for enjoyment. Also musicians tend to use different mental processes when listening to music than lay people.
A bit more on my back story. I never had any expectations to become a professional musician. I took vocational electronics in high school and dropped out of the music program, partly because it was holding me back. I had hoped to continue in the city's youth symphony which played standard classical repertoire at a very high level, but the charter had a clause that required me to be in a school program and my high school orchestra teacher was a bit vindictive.
Within two years I was invited to play in a university jazz band. This was a great experience but I did not understand theory at this point or know how to read chord symbols. So I had to learn all the songs that did not have written bass lines from recordings.
When I went to college I had planned on majoring in match so I could be an electronics engineer. I also took music theory, solfege, class piano, and solfege which are the classes I thought would be most interesting and useful. Unfortunately higher level math course require one to be able to memorize pages upon pages of proofs and theorems. I could do the math, but I could not maintain the proofs in theorems in memory long term, so I eventually stopped taking math and declared a music major.
During third semester life took a twist so I need to get a job. I joined the military and an electronics technicians and graduated from the technical training school with honors without any significant effort. I had covered pretty much all of it in my vocational high school classes.
I was a decent technician and enjoyed the work. But there were some areas of the job that I did not like. There was a lot of busy work when all the radio were working and also I feared getting transferred to a mobile unit where I would spend a lot of time out in the field living in tents and mud. Once you get into a mobile unity you get a special designator the make it likely that you will repeatedly get assigned to mobile units.
During my first assignment, I actually volunteered for a unit where I would spend time in the field in mud, but this assignment would not give me a mobility designator. Also the base I was going to had a band. Shortely after I arrived, I bought a $200 plywood upright bass and started working my arco chops back up. I had continued practicing on electric, including playing through tunes in the Real Book and performing with a cover band at my first assignment.
Luckily the band career field was really low on bass players at the time. As I mentioned previously, I wasn't really qualified but they said they would give me a job in 6 months. The wouldn't give me the job right away because they did not want me there, and were trying to work things to bring in a bass player from another band who was a native from the area. I went back 6 months later and all of that had fallen through and they had hired another bassists and a drummer in a package deal, but the gave me to paper work that showed I had won a job. I still had to jump through a bunch of hoops with various agencies that did not want to do their job to process my cross training, but after a couple of weeks it was done. A few weeks more and I received notification that I was due to report to a new base in 14 days.
I walked into my new unit with my crappy $200 string bass on my shoulder and that made a huge impression. They new that I was not a highly skilled player and had planned to put me in the rock band. But when the Chief saw the string bass he decided to put me on the other side of the house where I would in a wider variety of ensembles to include concert band, big band, and jazz trio.
I had prior experience in all of these ensembles and I worked really hard to keep up and grow. I found the job very satisfying from close to 20 years. Most people in the program had at least BS degrees. Many had Master and a few even had Doctorates. Many of my peers were very dissatisfied with the job, and I saw a lot of great musicians put down their horn.
After I started burning out as a player I crossed over to be exclusively an audio tech. I had performed as an audio tech quite a bit through out my career and I still enjoyed doing this type of work. Also as an audio tech I was generally not expected to be in multiple rehearsals every day, so I could attend to my other duties and avoid much of the interpersonal drama that goes along with being a musician. After a few years of being an audio tech I promote to the higher ranks and finished up my career as a leader and manager. This is something I would have hated doing when I was younger, but as I matured I found a great deal of satisfaction in leading and managing. I would have continued if it were not for policy on high year of tenure that limits how many years one can serve.
So for someone who never completed a formal music education and who never planned on being a professional musician, I think I did pretty well. I feel like the military band program was a very good match for me because my strength and talent is more related to versatility than getting really, really good at one specific thing. I got to live in Europe twice for a total of about 7 years. During my first European assignment I toured from Rota Spain to Scotland, Norway, to Russia to Saudi Arabia (and lots of places in between). I have also done deployments into Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Middle-East, and Krygyzstan, and on my second European assignment I provided audio support for a tour of Siberia.
Today I still practice electric bass fairly regularly. Mostly reading through Real Book tunes. I don't really have much desire to perform as that usually entails way more drama than I like to deal with. I had also planned on buying a nice upright this spring so I could work on orchestral excerpts. But Covid had put a crimp in this plan. So basically, I can't really imagine giving up the bass entirely even though I no longer really care to perform.
