Guava’s music place

        In the whole world music is an important part of life. As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said,” Music is a universal language of mankind.” We can understand what the song wants to explain without knowing the language. I can feel that the song is about a sad story even though don’t understand the Japanese. Because of the importance of music, many people try to become a musician. But how to become a famous a successful musician? This is the problem that I will try to discuss. I think there are three points to becoming a successful musician: knowing music theory, being creative, and having talent.

The first point is knowing music theory. Music theory includes chords, melody, and so on. Music Theory is not the thing that people who want to perform have to know. Everyone can play music without having this kind of knowledge. For example, people can play guitar by remembering how to press the string and remembering the chord they are going to play. But when it comes to making a song, which is not just knowing how to press the string, you need to know music theory. In my experience, making a song need to consider consonance and dissonance, which might cause the song to be good or bad. And your song will become a disaster if you don’t consider it. Another reason that music theory is important is when musicians is performing during a concert, they can change the melody easily. Sometimes they can combine another song to make this concert much better. So, music theory is important to become a musician.

The second point is being creative. Because many people want to write the song by themselves, how to attract other people is the important part. The easiest way to attract people is to create your style. The first part of it is about the chord. There is a lot of pop song on the internet, but some of them can be performed with four chords or seven chords. I won’t say it is wrong, but I think it cannot let me have the motivation to listen to their song. All of the melody sound familiar. The second part of it is having your own style. You can combine a lot of instruments into a song. For example, Wagakki Band. This is the band from Japan. Their song combines Japanese traditional instruments into their song. So, compare with other Japanese bands, I would like to hear their songs because of their creativity. Another example is Jay Chou from Taiwan. His songs add a lot of Chinese traditional music. And this becomes his icon.

The third point is talent. Some people will say the practice can fix everything. Just like Bruce Lee said “Practice makes perfect. After a long time of practicing, our work will become natural, skillful, swift, and steady.” And because some people think practice makes perfect, they create a rule called the 10,000 hours rule. It means people need to practice it for 10,000 hours to master a skill. But I think it is not the correct rule. I think practice can make people skillful in something, but want to become a master or genius, you must have the talent for that thing. For example, about talent’s importance, Mozart. According to history, he can write music when he was five years old. At six years old, he could perform in front of an audience. In his life, he composed about 600 works. I don’t think it can be explained that he practices a lot so he had this achievement.

I won’t refuse that it is easy to perform or write a song. Everyone can do it. But I think if you want to stay on the stage forever, it is very hard. You need to have enough knowledge of music theory that you can write a beautiful song. You also have to be creative to attract an audience. And last but not the least, talent is an important part of musician, too.

Reference

America music institute. (2015). How are musicians so creative? https://amimusic.org/musicians-creativity/

John Boulware. (n.d). The Language of Music,

for Real Musicians https://www.music-theory-for-musicians.com

John Wilson (2020) What Are Music Chords And How To Play Them https://www.musicgateway.com/blog/how-to/chord-music-theory 

Mick (2021) Talent vs Hard Work: What Is More Important for Success? https://insideoutmastery.com/hard-work-vs-talent/

Piano from Scratcher. (n.d). What Chords Are In The Four Chord Song? How To Play It In Any Keyhttps://pianofs.com/what-chords-are-in-the-four-chord-song-how-to-play-it-in-any-key/.

Wikipedia.(n.d). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_theory