Why I Don’t Do This Anymore, Part II: Eric’s Breaking Point!
by Eric Summer
When I left you, my loyal threes of readers, hanging two weeks ago, I was rambling on about potential career paths for music school graduates and how I’d arrived at the conclusion that I didn’t want to do any of them. If you remember, there was a fascinating tutorial about symphony playing, chamber music, weddings, and studio playing. If you don’t remember the “fascinating” aspect, then you’re just not remembering it right. I’m pretty sure I put “fascinating” in there somewhere. It’s OK if you don’t remember; memory can be a funny thing. I won’t fault you for it.
Anyway, I’d neglected at that point to mention one interesting offshoot of studio playing, which is called “sidelining.” That’s when some movie or TV show or commercial needs an orchestra on-screen, and the music has already been recorded. It’s basically just musical pantomime. You just fake playing along to the recorded track. I did a few of those–a few music videos and a car commercial or two, I think. The best money I ever made was on a sidelining gig. On the flipside, a different sidelining gig was pretty much the penultimate straw for me as a professional musician. Let me describe it for you: it was a music video for a John Legend song, directed by the acclaimed director Kanye West, so there was already a talent-vacuum in the room that could have snuffed out the creative fire of Beethoven, John Lennon, and Stephen Spielberg combined. But that wasn’t really what set me off, nor was the grand-canyon-sized disparity between the amount of money the sideliners were paid and the middle-finger-shaped pile of gold the Kanye-Legend juggernaut no doubt made on the deal. It was just one guy who did it, but he was a guy I was familiar with in many forms over the course of hundreds of gigs. It was Professor Cranio-rectum (real name unknown). This was a guy who didn’t know what he was talking about, but wanted everybody on the gig to know he really had something to show us rookies. So he advanced the notion that since we were playing pop music, we shouldn’t use vibrato. There was no vibrato in pop music, according to the Professor. (more…)