A musician’s life must be a glamorous lifestyle. Touring the country, playing music, and partying your heart out must be all that they do. How hard could it be to just stand on stage and sing and dance and play an instrument?

Its nothing like breaking your back in construction, cutting your fingers on the paper of piles of office reports, and no where near as exhausting working in a field feeding the country.

Musicians and performers have it so easy, especially since there are so many of them. What do they do, sit around and wait until they get a wonderful idea?

Usually when I talk to a person who isn’t a musician, doesn’t perform, or doesn’t create their own art form, these are some of the things that seem to be their understanding of what a performer does.

There is this idea that artists have it easy, that their life isn’t so difficult or demanding. However, the reality is that it is just as demanding, if not more so than most occupations and careers. It may not be as physically demanding for some as workers on an oil rig, or as mentally demanding as tax brokers and researchers, but it is still challenging and complex.

Composing a song, arranging parts to play, and making it interesting in a live performance is a quite a daunting task.

Writing songs and writing them well is a mission with in it, and then learning to play it and engaging with the song on stage can be a different thing, especially with bands and many musicians.

Keeping the energy up, calming the audience down again, and keeping them entertained is a musician’s mission, and it’s not always easy, especially with how many of us there are out there.

However, even with all the complexities of live performance, and all the issues surrounding live set ups and arrangements, recording songs is a totally different science. It takes a lot of patience, time, and effort in order to do it with quality and performance. With a whole band, the task is greatly complicated. Even with engineers and top of the line equipment, recording is a long and careful process. And not everyone has the patience, the knowledge, or the willingness to do such a thing. They might think they could, but if they are ever faced with such a task, then they might find themselves at a loss of what to do next.

Next time you or some one you know questions the effort put in by musicians and like performers, remember that it’s a much more complicated process than you might think, and not everyone can do it.

If you think it’s easy, how about you pick up a guitar, set up a microphone and perform for a room full of people. Or try and record your own songs. You’ll find that it’s much harder than you think, and you’ll think twice before you doubt a musician or a performer.