Music Study, Music Opinions, Songwriting, Music Blog, Music Performance
From January 1, 2026 - I allowed myself to start writing some of my thoughts in this blog.
Let’s begin,
Within the year of 2025, I practiced vocal, piano, bass guitar, electric guitar solos and acoustic guitar as I’m mainly vocal with rhythm guitar focused musician in my free times. In addition to that, I took Harmony studies and its applications to understand overall music composition which is the musical part of Songwriting (and you know that It has lyrics writing part too), or dedicated in Orchestration.
During all level of these efforts, I couldn’t stop thinking about these approaches “Virtuosity” or “Being song-focused”.
Performing a song at a virtuosic level requires intense technical practice and memorization of progressions, where the story of the song evolves. If you’re a piano player, having the skill of sight-reading can make you free from the most of the memorization part but you see that It’s an additional effort as well. These concerns are not much different from other instruments. And think about multi-instrumentalist approach for a moment.
On the other hand, the approach of being song-focused artist, knowing other instruments at a functional level will help you place them in your musical idea. And then you can try multiple times to record and see the result. This should be the main motivation of an independent artist; to use their most of the time to focus on creativity, lyric writing, brainstorming, harmonization, and song structure in my opinion. Iteration of that practices may bring you virtuosity at some point on some of your instruments, but not necessarily on all of them.
Overall, don’t forget that audiences want to see your energy, storytelling and emotional depth & connection during the performance whatever your goal.
Thanks for reading,
Burak.