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The Complete Guide to Becoming A Musician and Singer
What it really takes to make music for a living—real pay, real paths, real days—before you quit your day job or major in it.
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: What Does a Musician and Singer Actually Do?
You're probably picturing a spotlight, a cheering crowd, and the rush of a song you wrote connecting live. That's a real part of this job, and it's genuinely as good as it sounds. But the reality of a working musician and singer is that the spotlight occupies maybe two hours of a twenty-hour work week. The other eighteen are made of driving, waiting, emailing, rehearsing, and carefully wrapping cables. This chapter is about those other eighteen hours, because they're the difference between someone who has a good time performing and someone who actually builds a career.
Core Responsibilities: The Three Buckets
Every working musician's week falls into three overlapping buckets: performing, preparing, and pitching. If you don't do all three, you don't get booked again.
Performing is obvious—it's the gig. It might be a 45-minute set at a coffee shop, a three-hour wedding reception, a 90-minute set with a cover band at a county fair, or a 15-minute slot in a musical theater production. But performing also includes sound checks, which start hours before the crowd arrives. A sound check is when you and the sound engineer adjust microphones, monitors, and volume levels so the audience hears you well and you can hear yourself. If you're late to the sound check, you're not playing. In this career, lateness isn't a personality flaw—it's a reason you never get called back.
Preparing is the hidden bulk of the job.