Bert Lochs

I am a professional trumpet player, composer of both jazz and classical pieces for small and large ensembles alike and a teacher. I am leader/initiator of two trio's: Trio Bert Lochs and Lochs/Balthaus/Herskedal and I play in the Guus Tangelder Bigband, Pieter Basts E.S.P and the Jasper Somsen Group. With my trio's I made some very well received CD's and I played at the North Sea Jazz Festival and a lot of Dutch and German venues. I teach at home and at the music school of Alphen a/d Rijn. One of my main skills is teaching the Balanced Embouchure method. A method of trumpet pedagogue Jeff Smiley. I discovered it in 2002 and it helped me play a LOT better, and it completely turned around my view of how to play and teach the trumpet.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Homo universalis

As a professional musician you have to be a kind of homo universalis. Just playing is not enough by far.
If you want to have gigs, you need to do and know all kind of things that aren't even remotedly related to music.
It starts with being able to talk about your music in a coherent way, writing coherent articles about what you do, writing them in your own language and preferably in one or two other languages as well. And then convincing other people that your music should be heard, booked or sold. That takes a salesman's mind and attitude. Selling your music also takes a number of skills not really music related: making a website, taking pictures, or at least being able to recognize a picture that will sell your band or yourself. Making a CD, which is fun to do, but also makes you a producer, mixer, masterer, technician. I mean, it is pretty hard to play well in a studio situation, but that is what you are supposed to be able to do. But after that (if you don't have a record company or a lot of money) comes the editing: most musicians are capable of that themselves by now, because of nice applications like Logic or Cubase, but you have to learn it. Then there is of course mixing. That is a very underestimated skill. It is a craft not any musician can do, but is often performed by musicians with Logic or Cubase. Personally I don't do this. I leave it to the pro who has done this numerous times and likes to do this. I hate it, I don't know how to listen beyond the music and take it to a technical level of listening to sound and trying to optimize the music from that perspective.
Then comes of course the making of a cover. I happen to have a brother who is a graphic artist, and he makes the most beautiful things, but I also have to decide what I want and have to have an opinion about these things. At least he or other artists expect an artist's view from me or musicians in general.
Then there is of course the bookkeeping, knowing the roads and bumps to subsidies, knowing the rules on taxes, keeping your own books and paying your fellow musicians without breaking the rules.
To sell your band it is also useful to be able to edit some movies for Youtube, to know how Blogging works, to know Facebook and other social networks, to know how applications like Finale or Sibelius work  (for writing and publishing music), to keep up with the newest developments in music in general, music that you play, the instrument you play, and then I forget the educational part of being a musician: most of the musicians I know also have a teaching job which require totally different skills yet again.

Wow, and only because you loved playing a trumpet, or liked the sound of a piano when you were seven years old and appeared to have a certain talent.

I want to stick all the musicians a feather in their cap for being so versatile!

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