 Hi folks I'm Mike and I hope you're well. This is a continuation of a video I made recently when I had lost my voice. My voice is back so I feel I'd like to explore this subject just a little bit more and hopefully you will find it helpful. And I'm really asking the question with everything which is against us a lot of the time and how difficult it can be to be a musician why do we bother to make music at all. Now before we delve into this I'd like to thank the sponsor for this video DistroKid if you follow the link in the description down below you'll get 7% off an already amazing price to distribute your music to the world. I was rummaging through an old shoebox of Keepsakes recently and I found this old photograph of me holding my first ever electric guitar. I was about 15 years old at the time it was the early 1980s the UK was in recession my father had been unemployed and there wasn't much money around but somehow I managed to scrape together just enough money to buy this off of something called a Little Woods catalog. Now UK viewers may remember this it was a catalog which had just about everything for the house in it and for a weekly amount you could pay things off over I think 20 or 38 weeks and I managed to you know use some pocket money and doing some odd jobs and things managed to buy this guitar. The brand was Kay if I remember rightly and this guitar was an absolute piece of crap it was really awful it was basically a piece of plywood with some strings and magnets on there it had awful intonation awful machine heads the neck was bend you know it was just dreadful to play so much so that when I ended up doing my first gig my high school gig with my high school band which is we're in this photo here for the night I had to borrow a guitar off of a friend and it was a fender of some kind and I can still remember playing that guitar and it felt like absolute heaven to play a proper instrument but I battled on and by the end of high school I'd managed to buy another guitar but it was still not a very good guitar just marginally better you can see it here I think it was an encore or something like that the equivalent of a cheap sort of Chinese brand now that you may buy off of wish or something like that but it was more playable at least now I wish I could tell you that this story had a really nice ending at this point that although I had terrible equipment that I had loads of talent and it made all the difference but that's not true also in my shoebox of keepsakes I found this little note here it's from my high school music teacher who for some reason did an assessment of my high school band and for my part for the bad part he said that I would never be a great axe hero meaning I'll never be a great guitar player encouraging words hey but that was the bad part for the good part he said he he said that I knew my limitations and I played well within them that was the good but hardly encouraging words there so you would think look if I didn't have the gear and I didn't have the encouragement and I didn't have the talent you know why did I even bother past that point what I can say is that by that point I just had music in me and somehow I just had to do it so much of my 20s was spent playing in a band in the UK a lot of time spent in the back of a van at dingy venues but thankfully we managed to find some venues where we could play our own material okay and looking back I learned so much during those years about writing about arranging for a band about the way different elements of a band work together and I'm so thankful for those years as well as the camaraderie and just the experiences involved there now towards the end of my late 20s was the first time that I began to record some music at home on something you would call a door I think we were on kind of 486s or Pentium PCs back then and there was this piece of software called digital orchestra pro or plus or something like that and the point was not only could you record MIDI etc and had some onboard sounds but you could also record audio this was fantastic for me it meant that I could express myself in ways that I couldn't express myself with the band you know using string sounds or whatever I wanted to use and that was when I started this journey now there was nothing for me to work with in terms of tutorials I had been in some studios with the band but I didn't really know much about the recording process I just had to learn through trial and error there was no YouTube or anything that and that's what I did so in the early 2000s I came to Australia and that was the first time that I began to perform solo just my voice and a guitar playing small venues but still again playing my own material and thankfully I found places where the audience was receptive to that then sort of during that time through a series of chance meetings etc I ended up becoming the state coordinator for the Australian songwriters association so I was in contact with a lot of songwriters trying to encourage them trying to get exposure for them etc then through another series of chance meetings and circumstances I ended up being the producer on a local tv show which was about music creation about local music creation that's a whole story in itself but I really wasn't qualified for this position nor did I have the experience but I had to learn quick and learn the hard way very intense time I remember but you know there was an element of visual production in there we're live venues recording people and then there was some audio production involved with that as well and I started to get a little bit more experience but still to this day I would not call myself a music producer but it did add to my experience in that way so the next phase of my life I think it's going to sound really familiar to many of you I'm going to call it the break okay what happened was I got married I had some kids and I felt really strongly that I should probably provide a stable kind of life for them especially financially and the musicians life just wasn't that so I gave up music at that time and again through some chance meetings and some coincidences I ended up becoming a project manager and then finally a vice president of a social network in Asia I worked in Hong Kong and it's a pretty big social network at the time and that was kind of what my life was okay at one time I think you know I just hardly played guitar at all maybe for about five or six years definitely I didn't really make any music at all now I finally came back to Australia where I had a job as a project manager for a large ISP I think the largest internet service provider in Australia at the time and that was the life I was living you know the suit and tie working in the big glass building and it would have made no sense for me at all at that time to give all of that up and just become a musician again but that is exactly what I did now I didn't just become any type of musician I became a street musician or is it sometimes called a busker I think after working in the corporate world with all its restrictions and timetables I wanted the freedom of playing music on my terms I didn't even want to book gigs and turn up at a particular time and kind of turn myself on and play I wanted to play music in the way I wanted to play it now I have to say I actually made a very good living out of this surprisingly so I think even better than I had when I was doing gigs before to be honest with you and I learned so much during this time never looked down on a professional street musician it is a skill and an art and to itself I had nothing to hide behind I didn't use amplification it was just me my guitar and my voice and I learned something super important during that time which my high school music teacher hadn't imparted to us and that was I didn't really need to be like a virtuoso guitarist or singer I had to be able to be competent in it but the most important thing and the most important thing which made people throw money at me was playing with passion and emotion investing myself in the song every single time understanding what the song was about what meaning of it was and putting my all into that and connecting with people it was like a light bulb moment really it just changed the way that I played music for people and it was a really important stage of my life now I became like very proficient during that time because I just had to rely on me in terms of my music but I still was I'm still not a particularly talented or skillful guitarist or singer and you know at times I'll reveal to you that it can make me feel like a little bit of a fake to be honest with I'll give you example last year a few months ago I made a video about one of my guitars a Taylor nylon string guitar and in that video you may want to watch it later I played a kind of a pseudo classical piece of music which is not really what I do at all but I love the piece of music so much I really wanted to play it now I've since I put that out it's got a few thousand views I've received a lot of compliments on that video people saying how much they enjoyed it etc and this is the part where I felt a bit fake because I have to tell you that in order to play that piece of music for that video I started off learning it by ear and that took me probably a few months to learn it all the way through okay and then it took me a while to even be able to play it all the way through and then a little while longer to play it all the way through without any mistakes and then I spent some time trying to refine the kind of emotional approach that I wanted to put into the piece of music but quite a number of months really the best part of a year or something learning that piece of music now in the video it just looks like I play like that all the time I can promise you that look and the thing that makes me feel bad is I know that some of you out there are good enough guitar players that you could probably learn it within a week or two or maybe quicker maybe you could sight read it and just play it so um thankfully there's all the smoke and mirrors of video production and sound production but yeah um but that's okay I just I don't want you to feel bad if you feel like you always struggle to get things to that level I think for many of us mere mortals I mean it's still the case that we have to work pretty hard at it so I'm at a stage in my life now where I'm no longer seeking commercial success for my music at all I do make music and my target audience is just really a few family members and friends a few hundred people probably at the most and some of it you get to see some of it you don't some of it is just in that small group but I believe I put just as much effort into the quality of that music even though it's only going out to a small pool of people now I probably wouldn't bother to release it commercially at all to places like Spotify iTunes Amazon Google Play etc if it wasn't for the fact that it is really really easy and really really cheap I'll touch on our sponsor a little bit again DistroKid because I release my music through DistroKid and once you've created that piece of music it's just a matter of getting a bit of artwork which you know you can either design yourself there's different ways to create artwork you upload that to DistroKid you upload your song there's a bit of a form to fill in and then you know they do it all for you they get it out to Spotify and iTunes and Amazon etc for you so it's there's no resistance to releasing your music you know around the world and look if someone happens to discover that piece of music and they enjoy it and you know bring something to them then I'm glad it's out there doing that so I guess the question is and the point of this video is look if I'm not all that talented and I'm not looking for any commercial success like why do I bother making music at all so hold on to your seats folks because I'm going to get a little bit philosophical with you now some years ago when I was still a street musician I used to perform with my nephew Chaz who's a talented singer and songwriter and we did this duet thing together and it went down really well with the crowds and we had a lot of fun doing it most of the time but on this one particular day we hadn't really connected with the crowd it was awful weather and we were on our way home with not much to show for it and Chaz said to me Mike why do we do this and I said to him then what I'm going to say to you now it's not a question of why do we do this it's a question of how can we not do it it's who we are see this is the way I see the universe I see it is this kind of integrated organism with a lot of moving parts which are all really necessary we've got the flowers and the trees and the oceans and the wind and everything in the universe and one of the beings which is required in this universe at the moment is human beings and amongst those human beings we need the types which are going to be doctors and farmers and nurses and teachers and all kinds of different human beings and because human beings seem to love music so much we need some human beings who are going to be musicians the universe needs us to be what we are I want you to ask yourself not why am I going to keep doing this but how can I not do this I believe that for many of us it's almost like our destiny it's what we are supposed to be and I think if you honor that if you honor what the universe is asking you to be you're going to be a much happier person now even though you may not be the most talented or the most skillful on your instrument you can find a way to connect to people and that is the value in making music also the process itself is so much fun I really enjoy the process still I really enjoy making music in my home studio and the great opportunity we now have to do that and I hope you'll continue to join me on that journey now I'd love to hear from you now in the comments down below about your story with music where have you come from where are you going what does music mean to you why do you continue to do it thank you so much for watching this video and I'll see you in the next video