 Hey guys, it's John Briningham from Art of Composing with another daily vlog. This is episode number two and today I thought I would address a question that's been asked of me quite a few times on the composer symposiums, which is should I go to college for music? Now to me this question is difficult to answer because everybody has unique circumstances and what's good for you may not be good for somebody else. So I can only relate what happened to me in my personal experience, but when I went to college I started off as a music major and I was really excited about it. I really I wanted to have a career in music, but I didn't really know exactly what that meant. I didn't know the directions I fully wanted to go. I did know that I was really into music theory and I was into composing and that posed some problems for me because when I got to school I realized after about a year that the focus of the school was mostly performance. What I probably should have done looking back on it is really thought about not where I want to go to school, but who I want to study with and what it is that I actually want to study. Part of learning the craft of composition is knowing the directions that you need to be pushing yourself and the things that you need to be learning and it takes not just good teachers, but the right teachers to be able to teach that stuff to you. Well as a 17, 18 year old kid I didn't know any of this stuff and I kept getting pushed into the performance direction for trumpet and it was just something I didn't want to do. I ended up switching my major from music to history after about a year and a half. So whether college is right for you in music, there's a ton of factors. Can you actually afford to go to college? And I'm not talking about afford with student loans or putting yourself in debt. I'm saying is it actually a good monetary decision for you? A lot of people can afford to go to college, but when they get out of college they realize that they don't have any good job prospects and they're in a ton of debt. So for me going back to UCLA and the film scoring program I had GI Bill and it was covering all my costs. So it was a really good choice for me. For you it may not be the same thing. So hopefully this is just a taste of answering that question, but I want you to just sit back and just take some notes if you're thinking about going to college about what it is that you want to get out of it, what you want to study, who it is that you would actually want to study with, go around, listen to different you know composers and composers from schools who are teaching there the kind of music that they're putting out. And I would say talk to some mentors in your life. Talk to your parents and other teachers, music teachers that you've already got maybe from high school or if you're older just people around that have been around in the industry and been around and done it. So hopefully you like this this daily vlog episode number two. Be sure to check out the rest. Subscribe on YouTube and I'll see you tomorrow.