Five Tips for New/Emerging Musicians Who Work Across Cultures

1. Identify and Express -- in simple/accessible but compelling words -- the essence of what you are doing; musically, artistically, culturally; if possible, work with an outside person who has experience doing this, so that you can get a fresh perspective and someone with a wide scope who can help you put things in a context that is useful/inspiring for a more general audience.

2. Set up systems each step of the way; Think: "how can I take the work I am doing now and document it and make tools now, so that the next time I do this it is that much easier and I have a running log of what worked and what didn't"?

3. Identify your "ideal customer" and Brainstorm ways to reach that specific population; don’t try to be all things to all people; otherwise your music will sound like a lot of other lowest common-denominator music which downplays the strength of music that explicitly crosses cultures; once you do it for one target market do it for another; keep in mind that the "ideal customer" for physical recordings, digital recordings, and live concerts may be different and require different channels for reaching them.

4. Each project (a live set or an album or a "digital bucket" as I heard one client call it recently) should have something (not many things) that ties it together; this could be a tradition or hybrid being explored... or a narrative, real or imagined... or a historic time period, etc.; this makes it easier for people to bite, chew, and digest; if each project is all over the map, it is harder to build bridges across cultures; within that limitation, of course, there can (in most cases, should) be diversity (in tempo, meter, timbre, lyrical content, instrumentation/arrangement, etc.); think of your project as one of many projects you will do in your career, so you do not need to cram it all onto your next album or next set; in the case of touring, repeat concerts might be more likely if you have something different to offer in year two.

5. Understand why you do what you do and integrate that into every decision you make; your methods can (and should) reflect your vision/mission as a musician/artist/performer/human.

Bonus Tip (more of a musical tip): don't use cheesy synthesizers (unless you are trying to make a joke or a point); if you are not sure what a cheesy synthesizer is, ask the most cutting edge musicians you know; in some cultural contexts synthesizers are the only affordable/accessible way to re-create certain historic sounds (big horn sections, for example); but I find -- at least with most of the media that tends to cover global music in the USA -- cheesy synthesizers (or dated electronic beats) are a tip-off that someone has not thought about how their sound is going to translate to the audience here, who may read it as "dated".

-- Dmitri Vietze, rock paper scissors, inc. :: music of global significance :: publicity for the world :: www.rockpaperscissors.biz