A New Start

I wanted to be a professional musician, I knew it...and then I quit. I was in my second quarter in the Northwestern University trombone department, and I didn't want to do it anymore. I think some combination of the stress of leaving home for the first time, a (for the first quarter) crippling embouchure change, an identity crisis, and feeling like a small fish in a big pond made me feel like being a musician was not for me.

Then, I spent 5 full years away from the trombone--I actually played about 5 times in those long 5 years. I missed it so much, and never found anything else I cared about quite so much as making music. So, I started practicing again after I moved from Chicago to Las Cruces, New Mexico.

My challenge is a great one: how to break into the music scene in a city where there isn't much of a "scene" of any kind...

Part of my issue is, also, that I have had terrible experiences with performance anxiety in my past life as a musician. It's something I think I can get over, with a healthy dose of confidence-boosting preparation and a healthy dose of helpful feedback.

That's where you come in. I need help. I need people from all kinds of backgrounds and with all kinds of knowledge, experience, and good-old-fashioned encouragement to listen in and talk back. On a regular basis, I'm going to record myself and post these recordings here. Content may range from a lip flexibility exercise on trombone (hopefully not too many of those...I understand that they aren't the pinnacle of entertainment) to a song I'll sing and accompany myself with guitar.

I want to be clear--I don't want this to be a one-way street. I plan to post plenty of information, resources and thoughts that may be interesting and ideally, even helpful. I don't want this to be a space merely for feeding my narcissistic tendencies. In my next post, I want to give you a little background about my life as a musician so there's some more context to my thoughts on this blog.