Music Mentoring with Brighter Sound - Part 2: Mentoring for Emerging Musicians
Complimenting our Youth Music funded mentoring work for young people, Brighter Sound has also been running a similar programme, this time for emerging musicians, as part of our Wall of Sounds partnership with Band on the Wall.
Supported by the Arts Council, the programme has helped these artists grow and develop through a variety of means, including; being involved in collaboration residencies with high profile artists like Snarky Puppy (http://snarkypuppy.piedpiperplayer.com/) and The Unthanks (http://theunthanks.piedpiperplayer.com/) attending master-classes & industry conferences and mentoring & coaching opportunities.
Leading on the mentoring strand has further reinforced my view that mentoring, when it is done right, is one of – if not the most -valuable method for developing people.
There have been challenges of course, from mentees needing to leave the programme for personal reasons to mentors seemingly disappearing off the face of the earth!... Or more likely, he simply didn’t want to be involved any more – but didn’t bother to tell us!
Nonetheless, the impact and benefits of the programme have far outweighed the negative aspects. Indeed, perhaps one of the best partnerships we had, was born out of the disappointment of losing that mentor.
Although losing him wasn’t our fault, I felt like we’d let our mentee down and I was determined to make up for it. So, I looked over his initial application to the programme. And that reminded me that he had initially suggested someone working in A&R from XL Recordings as a potential mentor…
Finding people like this is harder than it sounds, but through some online research and a few ‘punt’ emails, I found a lady that used to work for them, who had also appeared at a music industry conference event in Manchester, ran by two of my current mentor team.
Result! I’d got lucky… Before long she had been inducted into the team and her impact on our mentee cannot be overstated. But don’t believe me! This is how our mentee summed it up:
“I've been involved with the mentoring program for a number of sessions now, Hannah has proved to be a wealth of knowledge on the industry, having some of her time dedicated to talking about my plans has helped me inform my decisions with more confidence. By far the most valuable aspect has been the chance to reflect and clarify my aims and motivations.”
This is just one of a number of success stories. Another great partnership has seen a mentee from Nottingham meeting up with a mentor from Brighton, often in London, to work on her artistic development, as vocalist specialising in Jewish, Turkish, Greek and Romanian styles:
“As well as the valuable guidance on musicianship that I have received, I was keen to find out the 'tricks' and 'secrets' of the trade, how to 'make it'. By generously sharing her skills, experiences and contacts Polina is proving that the only secret to stable success is hard work and dedication. It is a well known fact, but to actually be able to have the insight of a successful musician in real life is a big motivation to keep working and buzzing.”
We’ve even had a mentee in Hamburg with a mentor in London!
But that’s not to say local partnerships don’t work just as well:
“From the outset, Louis brought the focus around to marketing and in the first session, we talked a lot about how a promoter would see me, the singer-songwriter, in the first instance. Obviously one of the major selling points for an artist is their website, and Louis talked about the website as a ‘shop window’.
I have to admit, I hadn’t thought about it in those terms before. For most musicians, the idea of ‘selling’ a brand, instead of just the romantic ideal of writing songs and having people listen to them, is an alien concept. I’m no different.”
For me, the programme has been one of the most fulfilling I have been involved in. Seeing the impact of the work on the mentees has been very rewarding. And, combined with our young people’s mentoring programmes, it helps us provide a complete mentoring package for aspiring musicians in the region. Something that I look forward to growing and developing in the future.