Podcasts about artshacker

Bass player Jason Heath has built a vibrant career as a performer, educator, entrepreneur, and host of one of the most important classical music podcasts.  Through this experience, he has accumulated a vast knowledge on how to practice and grow a career into something that is authentic and rewarding. In this episode, Jason discusses: How Contrabass Conversations goes beyond the bass community is a show which brings value to all instrumentalists His book, Winning the Audition: Turbocharge Your Orchestral Audition: Advice from Leaders in the Field His story building a truly unique portfolio career, from growing up in North Dakota, to going to school in Chicago, joining several orchestras, teaching full-time in high-school, starting a blog, creating the podcast, and creating a vibrant career in San Francisco, CA Not being afraid to ask yourself the hard questions about where you want to be in your career and listen to the answers Practicing mindfully – o   how there are no shortcuts o   how audition winners come to develop the skills to win by finding the answers for themselves, believing in the themselves, and playing authentically o   the importance of falling in love with practicing The Modacity App – a tool to practice more mindfully The relevance of music in today's world An ideal practice session for him Problem solving: Macro. Micro. Macro – “Think big, and go to the smallest possible chunk.” How he uses ForScore His strategy to stay enthusiastic about performances   Jason's Doublebass blog: https://doublebassblog.org/ Contrabass Conversations: https://contrabassconversations.com/ Jason's Double Bass Community Online Music Library: https://doublebassblog.org/music Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/contrabassconversations/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jason__heath/ Contrabass Conversations on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/contrabassconversations/ Jason's book: Winning the Audition: Turbocharge Your Orchestral Audition: Advice from Leaders in the Field Leon Bosch on Contrabass Conversations, episode 213: https://contrabassconversations.com/2016/05/16/cbc-213-leon-bosch-the-sherlock-holmes-of-the-double-bass/ Modacity app: https://www.modacity.co/ Dr. Don Greene, sport psychologist : https://www.winningonstage.com/ forScore app: https://forscore.co/   Biography Jason Heath is the host of Contrabass Conversations, a podcast devoted to exploring music and ideas associated with the double bass. His blog and podcast are highly regarded in the music world and have been featured as top offerings in the world of arts and culture for the past decade. He is the author of Winning the Audition and Road Warrior Without an Expense Account and his work has been featured in International Musician, TimeOut Chicago, Adaptistration, ArtsHacker, The Scroll, Bass World, Double Bassist, and Bass Musician Magazine. Jason serves on the Board of Directors for the International Society of Bassists and is the Double Bass Product Manager for Eastman Strings. He also serves on the advisory boards of Musician's Toolkit and Be Part of the Music, and he is internationally active as a clinician and consultant.  Jason is past president of the Illinois chapter of the American String Teachers Association and past orchestra representative for District VII of the Illinois Music Educators Association. A highly decorated veteran teacher, Jason is a past faculty member at DePaul University, the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and Trinity International University.  He currently works with the San Francisco Symphony's Music and Mentors program and teaches internationally at various bass events, clinics, and master classes. Jason's former students hold positions in the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Grant Park Symphony, and Philharmonie Sudwestfalen. As a high school orchestra director, Jason's orchestras had many notable performances, including the Midwest Clinic in Chicago and tours in Peru, Spain, and Cuba. A graduate of Northwestern University, Jason performs with the IRIS Orchestra in Memphis Tennessee and ensembles in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was a member of the Elgin Symphony for 16 seasons and has also performed with the San Francisco Symphony, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Grant Park Symphony, and numerous other professional ensembles.   THANK YOU: Huge thank you to my producer, Bella Kelly! Also, most sincere thank you to composer Jim Stephenson who graciously provided the show's musical theme!  Concerto #1 for Trumpet and Chamber Orchestra – Movement 2: Allegro con Brio, performed by Jeffrey Work, trumpet, and the Lake Forest Symphony, conducted by Jim Stephenson.   MIND OVER FINGER: www.mindoverfinger.com https://www.facebook.com/mindoverfinger/   If you enjoyed the show, please leave a review on iTunes!  I truly appreciate your support! Visit www.mindoverfinger.com for information about past and future podcasts, and for more resources on mindful practice. (As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which helps cover some of the costs associated with the production of the podcast.  Thank you for your support!)

We’re chatting about how to start a podcast on today’s solo episode.  This episode is based on a series of articles that Jason published on Artshacker.com in 2016 and includes updates for today’s newest publishing and editing tools. Listen to Contrabass Conversations with our free app for iOS, Android, and Kindle! Contrabass Conversations is sponsored by: D'Addario Strings This episode is brought to you by D'Addario Strings! Check out their Kaplan strings, which have versatility and control throughout the dynamic spectrum, rich tonal color palette, superb bow response, and beautiful balance. Robertson & Sons Violins For more than four decades, Robertson & Sons has specialized in providing the highest quality stringed instruments and bows to collectors, professional musicians, music educators, and students of all ages. Their modern facility is equipped with three instrument showrooms as well as a beautiful Recital Hall available to our clients to in their search for the perfect instrument and/or bow. Upton Bass String Instrument Company Upton's Karr Model Upton Double Bass represents an evolution of our popular first Karr model, refined and enhanced with further input from Gary Karr. Since its introduction, the Karr Model with its combination of comfort and tone has gained a loyal following with jazz and roots players. The slim, long “Karr neck” has even become a favorite of crossover electric players. The English Double Bass Book The English Double Bass Book examines the great English double bass makers of the 18th and 19th Century, illustrating in fine detail the incredible work they produced. It also explores the fascinating story of how the double bass came to England, its development guided by the great Venetian virtuoso Domenico Dragonetti, and the rise and fall of the English double bass makers. To pre-order your limited-edition copy, please visit www.theenglishdoublebass.com. Subscribe to the podcast to get these interviews delivered to you automatically!

Jason Heath is a freelance double bass player who started his Contrabass Conversations podcast way back in 2007, nearly 10 years ago. Now with well over a million downloads, Jason's incredibly popular podcast is the Internet's most comprehensive resource on all people and topics related to life and music around the double bass. This month, we're going to be exploring the world of music podcasters and entrepreneurs, starting with Jason Heath, who has I believe the longest running classical music podcast show around, nearly 10 years running, with over 250 episodes and well over a million and a half downloads at the time of this broadcast. An interesting historical sidenote: former MTV VJ Adam Curry is credited with being one of the initial pioneers of podcasting, and launched what many believe to be the first podcast show produced on a regular basis, Daily Source Code, back in 2004. Podcasts are essentially “radio shows” that you can listen to either directly on a web page or on a smartphone or MP3 player. The beauty of podcasts is the fact that anyone can produce and distribute their own shows. This can be an inexpensive, yet powerful way to get your name out, reach a worldwide audience, and connect with the movers and shakers of whatever musical niche you're passionate about. For Jason Heath, podcasting has been a way for him to do all of those things and more, enabling him to extend his freelance double bass career far beyond what's normally possible. Links Contrabass Conversations Podcast: http://contrabassconversations.com/ Jason's websites: http://doublebassblog.org/ http://jasonheath.info/bassist/ "How To Create A Podcast" articles on ArtsHacker: https://artshacker.com/series/podcasting/

On both the blog and the podcast, I’ve always taken the stance of making things as good as I can and then putting them out in the world without any apologies.  Nothing drives me crazy more than listening to a podcast and heading the host apologize for a few minutes about this or that. I resolved never to do this.  I would make the best product I could and then just present it without and excuses or “aw shucks” commentary. Today, I’m letting loose. This is all the stuff that I have struggled with behind the scenes over the years.  All the times I slapped my head in frustration at my missteps. Check out the accompanying blog post, (featuring similar but not identical content) and enjoy these tales of podcasting gone wrong!  You can also check out the three-part series I wrote for ArtsHacker about podcasting for more nuts & bolts information about the technology behind making a podcast.

I wrote a three-part series for Drew McManus’ site ArtsHacker earlier this year, and this got my brain going: what if I also put out some “pulling back the curtain” podcasts about how I do all of this and what I’ve learned in the process?  So that’s what today’s episode is.  I’m breaking this into two parts: today I'm covering “the art of the interview” and seven lessons I’ve learned about interviewing.  Next time we’ll go deep into the tech behind recording, editing, and putting these episodes out. Podcasters like me end up having this strange skill set where they’re half Jay Leno and half IT guy.  While some of the bigger podcasters split these duties into various team members, the vast majority of podcasters (myself included) fill both of these roles. Early Days: Discovering Podcasts I discovered podcasts not too long after getting my first iPod Video in 2005.  My first podcast was This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte (who I’ve actually seen live! my wife and I went to the TWiT studio in Petaluma last year to see a live taping of This Week in Tech).  I was hooked from the get go, and it wasn’t took long before I thought, “What if I did my own podcast?" I filed that thought away for a year.  My blog was starting to grow, and I was having a good time riding that wave.  But the more I got into blogging, the more I thought about how cool it would be to have a podcast. I was loving listening to interview shows, and I had broadened my listening to include about 20 podcasts at that point.  It was basically all that I listened to outside of some music.  It had totally supplanted any other form of talk radio or television. As 2006 progressed, I resolved to start my own show, and the last few months of that year were spent purchasing gear, setting up a website, getting hosting for my new podcast, and learning how to use my gear to record and edit.  I did some unreleased test episodes at the end of 2006 and put out my first podcast on January 1st of 2007. Getting My Sea Legs Recording yourself makes most people self-conscious, and listening back to yourself as a host can be particularly awkward.  Like most people, I hated how I sounded on the mic, and I didn’t really know how to use any of the gear that I had that well, so it was trial by fire for sure.  I had this questionable Acer laptop at the time, with caused all sorts of problems early on, but I’ll save those details for the tech episode next time. I put out what I thought was a pretty decent first episode, just stating the purpose of the show and what I hope to do.  The funny thing is that I have done pretty much exactly what I said on that first episode!  I went back not too long ago and listened to that episode, expecting some truly cringe-worthy material, but to my surprise it was actually pretty tight. My first three episodes had no guests—they were just me rambling into the microphone, and it’s amazing to hear how stiff and stilted my delivery was.  It was all new to me, and that’s the first big lesson I have for this episode: no matter how well-versed you may be in public speaking, it takes time to find your own rhythm and your own voice in front of the microphone for a podcast.  Imitating someone else may work at first, but ultimately you have to find your own style.  It’s tough! My First Guests I finally got a guest on episode 4—Andy Anderson from the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and I am eternally thankful to him for being willing to take a chance on something like this.  Andy is an incredibly open guy, which was amazing for a first guest. He made it so easy for me.  I can think of a lot of other people I interviewed after that which would have been much more challenging interviews, but Andy was amazing and was really helpful for building my confidence.  I mean, I really didn’t know what I was doing.  I had listened to podcasts for a while at that point and had taken in a lot of interviews, but doing your own interview is not the thing entirely.  It can feel kind of formal and weird—I actually think that it’s one of those deceptively difficult skills that seems easy when done well but is in reality incredibly challenging to do at a high level. Lesson #1 - Starting an Interview I hear moments of quality interviewing even in those first episodes, but I cringe as I hear what I call extended resume-type questions: then you went to this school, then this school, then you auditioned for x, y, or z, etc. I still start basically all interviews with some talk about the musician’s early years, but I no longer expect to talk about each minute detail of their progression through school, training, and employment.  It’s not necessarily that interesting… I mean, sometimes it is, and if so that’s cool, but what I do now is listen intently to what they are saying and listen for any sort of interesting twist in their path or any extra passion in their voice about a particular aspect of their upbringing. A tip I picked up from Tim Ferriss that I pretty much always use these days: talk with a person for at least 10 minutes (especially if you haven’t met in the past) before starting the interview.  This makes for a way less stilted conversation.  The concern that most people have is that you’ll “blow” all the good content in the pre-interview and it will be stale when you’re actually recording, and while this can be kind of true, the benefits of chatting for a while far outweigh the disadvantages. I have also stopped being so formal with the beginnings of interviews.  It just feels more natural to me.  If you’ve listened to the podcast for the long haul, you’ll notice that, at a certain point, I quit “welcoming my guest to Contrabass Conversations.”  It just seemed too stilted and didn’t really add anything to the podcast.  If anything, it hurt the podcast because it made people clamp up a little bit.   Lesson #2 - Coaxing Out Good Content My philosophy is that people I’m interviewing have a story to tell, and if I can’t get that out of them then it’s my fault as an interviewer. I have to ride the wave of discussion and pick out what is most interesting. That can be easy or stupidly challenging depending on the guest.  Fortunately, I’ve picked up a few techniques from some of my favorite interviewers (most notably Tim Ferriss, Chris Hardwick, and Marc Maron).  Questions like “tell me the story of….”  or even something as simple as “what was that like?” work really well.  Questions that can be answered yes/no are also a little dangerous because there’s not a clear call for the guest to elaborate.  Some will, others won’t. Also, some people are just more reflective/verbal than others.  With time, you start to pick up within minutes (and that’s why you don’t want to just dive into the interview immediately--get to know them and make the environment relaxed) what sort of guest they’ll probably be.  Regardless, I feel like it’s my job to suss out the interesting content from them. So… how to figure out what is going to be interesting from a particular person? That’s where research comes into play.  Lesson #3 - Researching Strategies For me, researching is key to doing a good interview.  I start the process with a new note in Evernote for the upcoming guest.  I then devour anything and everything that I can find online about that individual.  My Evernote document quickly becomes filled with biographical information, YouTube links, photos, audio examples, and the like.  As I read, watch, and listen, questions start to formulate in my mind.  Through this process, I’m looking for the key things that make that person’s story unique.   Lesson #4 - Formulating Good Questions I used to send every interview guest the same set of stock questions.  This led to the same kind of interview formula for everyone.  Over time, I quit using that list, approaching each new interview with a totally blank slate.  Even though guests will have certain commonalities (education background, career path, musical genre, etc.), I find that I get a better interview if I start from scratch every time.  I think that things got a lot better in terms of content when I quit trying to shoehorn everybody through the same ringer of questions. Lesson #5 - Plan Like Crazy, but Improvise in the Moment I write a lot of potential questions for a guest before an interview.  I will sometimes share these if requested by a guest or if I feel that it will enhance the interview.  If a guest doesn’t request them, I’ll typically not send them unless I find something a little off-the-beaten-path in my research that I think would be interesting to dig into.  I never want to surprise a guest with something way out of left field, but I’m also trying to balance preparation and spontaneity, and I don’t want things to be overly scripted.  It’s a balancing act that is a little different for every guest. In the interview itself, I almost never look at those questions.  I try to go with the flow and will only look if i feel like we’re grinding to a halt.  At the very end, I do look just to make sure that we didn’t skip any key topics, and I try to remember to ask my guest if there was anything we didn’t talk about that they wanted to cover.  This has been a super helpful thing to ask! Lesson #6 - Give Your Guest “Final Edit" The intent of my podcast is never for it to be a “gotcha” kind of show.  The intent is to make my guests look good and learn their unique story.  With that in mind, I let them know that I edit, so anything that they want to restate can be easily changed.  Also, they can listen to the interview before it goes out and suggest any changes.  They have final edit on anything I put out.  That knowledge takes pressure off of the guest to phrase everything perfectly, and it also allows us the luxury of exploring tangents and taking chances.  If these tangents don’t lead to interesting content, they can always be chopped out in the editing process. Lesson #7 - Talk About Myself Talk about myself?  How egotistical. Actually, this is a wicked technique when used correctly because it encourages the guest to be more open.  If I start by relating something that I’ve struggled with, if make it more likely that my guest will feel comfortable sharing in similar fashion.  This leads to a more open and honest conversation and much better content. I try to use it with discretion lest the podcast turn into the “Jason Heath Show,” but it works wonders with making a human connection and encouraging honesty.  Tim Ferriss is a master of this technique and articulated this lesson eloquently on his podcast.  Though I’ve done this subconsciously to a certain extent throughout the life of the podcast, I’ve practiced this lesson more consciously in recent months. Final Thoughts For me, interviewing is like any other skill, requiring practice and repetition.  I find it both satisfying and  quite challenging.  One cool side benefit of the whole interview preparation and execution process is that it requires me to formulate questions, which helps me ask better questions of myself.  It’s a self-education process as much as anything, and I’ve grown to appreciate the whole process more over time. Next Time I’ll be digging into all the dirty details about the technology behind podcasting and sharing some humorous missteps that I’ve made along the way.

Please welcome to the ADS Podcast, Drew McManus! Drew is one of…  Read More→ The post A conversation with Drew McManus: What is Artshacker.com? first appeared on Audience Development Specialists.