How High Can You Succeed as an Amateur Musician?

This is a topic that sticks in my mind.

I've brought her up before, but I have an adult student who once a week or once every other week, she'll talk about hearing some advanced music, and inevitably she compares herself, a student, to someone who's playing this advanced music, and she always calls them professionals.

And even though I usually correct her by telling her that professional is not necessarily a label of how well you play, it's still something she always defaults to.

It's just how she thinks of more advanced musicians.

They're professionals, and less advanced are amateur.

So I just want to talk about the differences that I see between amateur and professional musicians, and to also convince you that it's not potential.

It's not what you can hope to achieve.

Let's start with the obvious difference between an amateur and a professional musician.

The simple definition is that a professional is paid for the work they do and an amateur is not.

But I would even go a little bit further.

I think you can be an amateur musician and get paid, at least occasionally.

It might be for a smaller gig like playing for a community theater production, or occasionally playing for a wedding, or you're in a band that gets a modest pay for playing at a gig that, and it gets split among all the members.

So a way that I would put it is if you are a professional musician, whether it's full-time or part-time, you count what you earn for your music as part of your expected income.

So an amateur musician can be paid.

It's just not something that they're expecting to be much of a percentage of what they need to sustain a living.

Now, here's another difference between amateurs and professional that I don't think a lot of people think about.

And by the way, I'm talking about musicians.

I think that you could say this is the same thing with athletes, actors, any other arena where you have the label amateur versus professional.

So in my observation, an amateur can be as good as the best professionals.

A professional is not allowed to be as bad as the worst amateurs.

So that means it's a tighter window.

An amateur can be an absolute beginner.

It can be someone who really struggles with their instruments, is a beginning composer, struggles to create melodies and rhythms and harmonies, and you can be in a lot of stages as an amateur.

You could also be playing virtuoso music.

You could be composing at a very high level.