One month until Winter! What are you currently working on? Whether training, prepping for a show, recording, writing, or whatever you might have going on in the world of music, we would love to hear about it! Personally, I'm finally at the end of a year-long journey of changing my voice to fit a more Southern Gothic Rock style than the Progressive Hard Rock/Metal I was doing before. I'm still trying to relax into it rather than force it, but a more forward/fast vibrato, a lot of grit, and some wild vocal runs, I finally feel like I found a passionate and colorful singing voice that seems to fit like a glove. I hope to soon start finalizing the demos of at least 15 of the 50 songs I've written. I'll likely post a few here when they're ready. I've also been producing one of my students and getting back into mixing and mastering a bit more as well. All of that while prepping a new, premiere coaching program for Rock Singing Success. Unfortunately after 23 years of marriage, life took a very unexpected, confusing, and stressful wrong turn this year. So, everything is taking far longer than I had hoped, but I'm excited for what comes next—even if it's not entirely what I had originally planned.

I don't have music to share for Music Monday like I had hoped, but I want to still share something valuable. While I no longer coach music career as my main thing, I still enjoy constantly learning about and keeping up with current music business best practices. While researching the validity of a certain music business book, I accidentally came across the Custom GPT, The Musician's Roadmap. I used this tool to map out a full release plan for my songs, collaborations, and poetry, that fits my brand, genre, goals, ideal fan, and more. But to do that, I had to know how to talk to it about yourself. Otherwise, it give incredibly generic answers. If you're unfamiliar with Custom GPTs, to put it simply, they're an AI conversational interface that's trained on knowledge base files and specific instructions to answer your questions. Trained and instructed correctly, they can be very powerful tools. In this case, The Musician's Roadmap is trained on just about anything you need to grow your music career, from recording to growing a fanbase. Like any Custom GPT, the more detailed information you give it about you and what you're trying to do, the better the answer it will give you. One big trick with AI is to get it to ask you questions to help you come up with better prompts or to ask it better questions, especially if you haven't yet fully figured out how to prompt it or what information to give it. To test it, I gave it general information, just to see what type of answer it gives and if it was worth using. The answer was detailed, but as I told it: "This list is vague and overwhelming. Ask me questions to help me form a better plan based upon my brand, music, ideal fans, and more." That opened up the floodgates. The questions it gave me, which I'll put below, helped it give me a very details plan specifically for me. That started a good back and forth conversation that felt like an extremely well-informed expert was brainstorming ideas with me. Any new ideas I had, I would ask it questions about, which it would then compare to it's knowledge on trends, market, and genres. That led to a whole conversation about possible things to do for social media, fan interaction, release schedule, collaborators, hired guests, other creative offerings, and much more. I now have a full, multi-phase, monthly plan to start moving forward with, and good ideas for how to adapt it as I go.

I have been working on vowel anchoring. I struggle jumping around with pitches, but anything else of note with these? https://youtu.be/OS0vzLTWHjk

Just wanted to get some feedback on whether I am doing this correctly. https://youtu.be/-NCvigikDG0

One of the best questions to ask when you want to play local shows.