Artist Development and Coaching in Chicago

Most musicians know how to practice. Far fewer know how to diagnose what needs practice in the first place.

It's easy to spend an hour running scales, playing songs you already know, or repeating exercises that make you feel productive. It's much harder to identify the one thing currently limiting your playing and design twenty minutes of work that actually changes it.

A large part of artist development is learning how to make that distinction.

We might look at how you structure practice, how you divide technical and creative work, how you evaluate progress, or why something you've practiced for months still falls apart under pressure. Sometimes the answer is repetition. Other times the answer is changing the exercise entirely.

The objective isn't to create a perfect practice routine that you follow for the rest of your life. Your needs will keep changing. I want you to become better at noticing those changes and adjusting accordingly.

That matters whether you're taking advanced guitar lessons, studying composition, learning improvisation, preparing for an audition, or simply trying to get unstuck after years of playing.

Most of us begin by borrowing constantly. We learn somebody else's solo, steal a voicing, imitate a songwriter, copy the way a favorite producer builds a record, or spend six months obsessed with one guitarist's phrasing. Eventually those influences start interacting with one another, and something more personal begins to emerge.

The more interesting question is whether you're developing enough taste to recognize what you actually care about.

Artist development can mean studying the musicians you love more closely, expanding what you listen to, figuring out why certain sounds affect you, and noticing which parts of your own playing feel genuinely interesting. It can also mean recognizing habits that have become too comfortable.

For some musicians that leads naturally into composition and songwriting. For others it happens through improvisation, arranging, performance, production, or deeper study of music theory and harmony. There isn't one route to having a musical identity.

One of the biggest differences between practicing and performing is that performance doesn't give you a rewind button.

You miss something and the music keeps moving.

That sounds obvious, but it changes the skill we're actually trying to develop. A musician who can play something perfectly in a bedroom isn't necessarily prepared to perform it in front of an audience, play it with four other musicians, recover from a mistake, adjust to a bad monitor mix, or respond when somebody else does something unexpected.

Those abilities have to be practiced too.

I've spent a large part of my life performing, directing ensembles, teaching musicians, and watching what happens when preparation meets an actual stage. One of the things that experience taught me is that confidence usually isn't the absence of mistakes. It's knowing that a mistake doesn't have to derail everything that comes afterward.

This overlaps heavily with the way I teach improvisation. Listening, adaptation, recovery, communication, and staying present are useful whether you're taking a solo or simply trying to get through a difficult performance without disappearing into your own head.

You may be preparing an audition for Berklee College of Music or another university or conservatory. You may need to assemble a composition portfolio, prepare repertoire, improve your improvisation, record an audition video, or figure out what a school is actually looking for.

Or the opportunity may have nothing to do with school.

Maybe you're preparing for your first serious band audition, a session, a tour, a professional ensemble, or a gig where the expectations are simply higher than anything you've done before.

Those situations require more than knowing the notes.

We can work on repertoire, musicianship, sight reading, improvisation, theory, performance preparation, arranging, composition portfolios, audition strategy, and the practical details that often get overlooked until the deadline is close. Just as importantly, we can figure out where your preparation is weakest early enough to actually do something about it.

Having studied composition at Berklee and spent years teaching, performing, directing bands, and working professionally as a musician, I've seen both sides of that transition. The goal isn't simply getting someone through an audition. It's making sure the preparation leaves them better equipped for whatever comes afterward.

Some of the musicians I enjoy working with most aren't beginners at all.

They've been playing for ten or fifteen years. They can learn songs quickly. Their technique is solid. They understand theory. Other people probably already consider them good musicians.

They just don't feel like they're moving anymore.

Plateaus are frustrating because the solution is rarely "practice harder." Often the musician has become very efficient at practicing exactly what they already know how to do.

That's when we start looking for blind spots.

Maybe your rhythmic vocabulary hasn't developed alongside your technique. Maybe your ear is lagging behind your theoretical knowledge. Maybe every improvisation begins with the same handful of ideas. Maybe you've spent years learning other people's music without writing enough of your own. Maybe your technical ability has outgrown your harmonic vocabulary.

Once we know what's actually happening, we can work on the problem instead of vaguely trying to become "better."

Eventually you may have to communicate with bandleaders, prepare charts, run a rehearsal, show up to a session ready to work, organize a portfolio, collaborate with people who think differently than you, teach someone else what you've learned, or decide which opportunities are actually worth pursuing.

None of that appears on a scale diagram.

But it matters.

Artist development can include conversations about professional expectations, rehearsal preparation, leadership, collaboration, creative projects, music school, teaching, building a body of work, and figuring out how the different parts of your musical life fit together.

I don't think every musician needs to turn music into a career. In fact, sometimes keeping music separate from your income is exactly what allows it to remain meaningful.

But if you do want to pursue music professionally, knowing how to play is only the beginning.