This is the first in a series of articles on the importance of education to a music career.

I don’t think anyone would dispute that learning is important; there’s learning your instrument, the craft of songwriting, the ropes of the business….but there are many ways to go about it. We all learn as we go, whether it be through formal or informal study or some combination of the two, and accumulated experience. I chose to go to music school first where I earned two degrees in classical guitar performance. I can’t say I had a plan, at first, other than knowing that I wanted to go to college and that I wanted to play music. After a few years of study, I decided to develop a performing career as a concert guitarist and teach in a university program. But I was gigging in rock bands all along. And when a guitar-related hand injury forced me to stop playing for a few months, I had to take a hard look at what I really wanted to do. My focus shifted to songwriting and the path of an independent artist in the commercial music world.

It felt like starting over. I wondered if I had made the right choices. Eight years of my life and thousands of dollars I had invested in preparing for a career I wasn’t going to pursue. In some ways, I really was starting over. But even if I had stayed in classical music, I would have still been just getting started. Negotiating the perilous pathways of the music business requires skills and knowledge you can’t develop in a practice room. Those hard lessons would come later. But ultimately, my formal education did help to prepare me for the challenges that lay ahead. It just did so in more subtle ways that took me years to realize.

Formal schooling taught me to be articulate enough to write my own press kit and find the best way to explain a concept to a student. In my fifteen years as a self-managed artist, I would often be complimented on my promotional materials and found, more than once, that I could be a more effective publicist or promoter than the professional I had hired to represent me. In school, I learned to show up on schedule, respect deadlines, and manage my time efficiently. The work ethic and standards of responsibility I had developed as a student gave me a tremendous advantage in business dealings. Simple things like a prompt response to a phone call or email sent the message that I was serious about my career. I also found that the ability to multitask effectively was as essential to an independent artist as it is to a grad student at crunch time.

On the musical side, I had the ability – actually, the luxury – to make practicing my instrument my number one responsibility. I learned to listen and react with finesse and subtlety, essential skills for an ensemble player in any setting. I developed a command of tone, timing and dynamics, and absorbed music theory and structure in a way that still serves me every day as a songwriter, arranger, and producer. And the laser-like focus a conservatory student applies to practicing, as intense as any Olympic athlete, is a valuable life skill in any profession. That patience and discipline helped me to rebuild my technique after my hand injury and come back an even stronger player than before.

Schooled or not, we learn these life lessons as we make our way in the world. There is no substitute for experience. Many great musicians honed their skills on the road. I remind my students constantly how many of their heroes were never “formally” educated. I can’t think of too many rock stars with Master’s degrees! Still, the intense, extended focus on opening your ears and mind that formal study offers does take your abilities to a level they might not otherwise reach.

Having said all this, I do still believe that the academic route is not for everyone. A person with great natural gifts might not want to step away from their own work as an artist to study things someone else has decided they need to know. Once you’ve attained a level of command over what you do, it’s very hard to enter a situation where you have very little of it. I’ve had students express great frustration over this. They feel if you are already an artist in your own right, following your own vision is much more gratifying. My response to them is that they should think of the two sides, artist and student, as two separate and parallel paths that will meet down the road. The skills you build as a student help you develop your artistry. However, formal study does require an openness to different ideas that not everyone is willing to adopt. Consider your own learning style. If you think you would find the academic environment stifling instead of stimulating, you’re probably right. Some people thrive most when forging their own path and success as an independent artist often requires you to do just that.

In subsequent articles, I will explore the ways that learning can continue over a lifetime and how the skills that make it possible are mostly a matter of mindset and not necessarily part of any formal curriculum. But an intense and focused study with masters who have learned how to learn is undeniably valuable. Ultimately, whether formal education is for you or not, is a matter of where you are on your journey and where you want to go. I didn’t know those things when I started school but I was a whole lot closer to finding out when I finished. And that is why the path I took was the right one for me – twists, turns, and all. Your own path is for you to find.