lowquality.net

When I grad­u­ated from Berklee Col­lege of Music I moved back to Vir­ginia because I didn’t know what else to do. I prob­a­bly should have gone some­where else, maybe New York or Los Ange­les like every other Berklee grad does. I don’t know what I would have done there either, much less how I would afford it. I was in debt up to my elbows, burned out, jaded, and totally con­fused. Mov­ing back here seemed like a good idea once I learned that I could teach bass at Alpha Music. Alpha was my old stomp­ing ground so I was excited to be a part of, what I once believed to be, the best music store in Hamp­ton Roads. That sit­u­a­tion ulti­mately fell through because I real­ized there was no future for me at that place, as well as no inter­est from the man­age­ment in the per­sonal well being of the teach­ers. Upon this real­iza­tion, I made a some­what fool­hardy deci­sion and quit before I had any­thing else lined up. From that expe­ri­ence, I did learn that I love to teach music, par­tic­u­larly to kids. I now know I can, and always will, want to teach bass.

But, pri­vate instruc­tion can be a hard busi­ness to main­tain. When you live in a sub­ur­ban sprawl like Hamp­ton Roads its very dif­fi­cult to pro­mote your­self with­out the secu­rity of a music store. Also, a pri­vate teacher is a sole-proprietorship; when you take a day off, you don’t get paid. So no mat­ter how much money it looks like you’re mak­ing, you’re really just afford­ing the oppor­tu­nity to pay for things like med­ical insur­ance, and vaca­tion leave.

Some­times teach­ing com­bined with free­lance gig­ging can work out well, but the life of a free­lance musi­cian is not as glam­orous as some may think. Not that I care about glam­our, but at the pro­fes­sional level, musi­cians are required to pan­der to the masses. Not every­one gets to be a rock star. The typ­i­cal work­ing musi­cian works in wed­ding bands, trib­ute acts, show bands, and very often “pan­der­ing to the masses” means “play­ing crappy music.” I am not imme­di­ately opposed to these kinds of gigs; I like the diver­sity GB bands dis­play. Show bands can pay very well and be a lot of fun, so can restau­rant gigs. How­ever, in Vir­ginia Beach, pan­der­ing to the masses means 10 year-old cover songs by the likes of Cracker, Bush, Dave Matthews and Sub­lime. In some places, expect to play “Sweet Home Alabama” or “Mar­gar­i­taville” if you want to take your equip­ment home with you.

Rehearsal spaces are a pre­mium in the Tide­wa­ter Area, so bands don’t really rehearse much around here. The result is play­ing bad songs with musi­cians who don’t really prac­tice for a mea­ger 50 bucks a night in a bad club. So, per­son­ally, work­ing as a musi­cian in Hamp­ton Roads seemed about as reward­ing as work­ing retail. At least retail can some­times offer decent benefits.

So I looked into retail.

Since my teens I have been cov­ered with some weird pheromone that repels retail inter­view­ers. I’ve had one real retail job in my life (KB Toys for the hol­i­day sea­son) and even they admit­ted it was because they were des­per­ate. I don’t know what it is. Maybe they sense that I am too much of an indi­vid­ual or too intel­li­gent to be a retail lackey (at least that’s what I repeat over and over again as I cry myself to sleep every night). Maybe they are wor­ried my sar­casm will scare away the cus­tomers or per­haps they sense that I am likely to tell some old lady to piss off. I don’t know what it is, but it doesn’t seem to be get­ting bet­ter with age. So, retail is out.

Food ser­vice.

I’m not work­ing around food. For­get it.

So that leaves one thing… com­put­ers.

It’s not my first choice, but if I can’t do music full time with­out scroung­ing pen­nies together to pay my bills, and gen­er­ally being mis­er­able, then com­put­ers it is. I love com­put­ers. I have had some mea­nial, IT related jobs and I have pretty much been a geek since we brought home our Tandy 1000 EX. The rea­son I didn’t con­sider this avenue sooner is that, in the IT indus­try, you are required to have some cer­ti­fi­ca­tions to get your foot in the door and I just don’t have the for­mal edu­ca­tion to get them. I briefly con­sid­ered self-studying, but the certs are so expen­sive that it felt risky to do it on my own. So, I thought maybe I should just get a legit IT degree.

Both my dad and my friend, Joe, have degrees from a regional tech­ni­cal col­lege called ECPI, and their expe­ri­ences with the school have been highly praised. I know how much they each were mak­ing in their first jobs after grad­u­a­tion, and I am sure I could make at least as much. Entry-level net­work admin jobs in Vir­ginia pay around 40k to 50k; nat­u­rally pay is much higher up north, out west, and even more when you are will­ing to travel. Some com­pa­nies don’t even require you to live in the same state, and they will fly you wher­ever they need you. I know that I can live on 30k com­fort­ably; what­ever else I make can take a big chunk out of those debts. So I am cur­rently mak­ing prepa­ra­tions to enroll in Jan­u­ary in their IT / Net­work­ing & Secu­rity Man­age­ment degree.

I admit that part of me feels like a sell­out, but there is no freak­ing way I will ever get out from under this stu­dent loan debt doing music and music alone, not in Vir­ginia, any­way. I can’t afford to move to a more sub­stan­tial music scene, like New York, because I am over 100,000 dol­lars in debt. I wouldn’t even be able to make a month’s rent up there; all of my income would go into that black hole.

I don’t regret my time spent at Berklee, I got every­thing I should have out of it. It may be sur­pris­ing to hear me say this, but I think it was worth every penny. Music is still my num­ber one pri­or­ity, though I plan to take an dil­li­gent crack at IT. I am hop­ing the IT field will aug­ment my music career. Hav­ing a job I can sim­ply log on to would be a bless­ing. Did I men­tion that ECPI’s tuition for the whole three year A.A.S. pro­gram is 28k? That’s like a semes­ter at Berklee. Yeah. You can laugh, it’s funny.