Posts Tagged ‘Young Artists’

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Seminar A: Business Plan

Thursday, December 23rd, 2010

How to Sustain a Well-Tuned Business Plan

We are excited to launch a new seminar geared toward the needs of advanced young artists and emerging professional singers. During the seminar, each singer will create a career “business plan” and commit to a schedule to revise and refine. The session is designed to take an intimidating and often stressful process and make it practical and accessible to even the busiest of emerging professional singers.

This seminar has been a work in progress for some time, and we have gathered the input and feedback of so many educators and professionals. A special thank you goes out to educator Dr. Dana Brown, mezzo-soprano and career consultant Dorothy Byrne, and consultant Mislav Kos.

The Details:

Target: For advanced young artists and emerging professionals.

Honorarium: Please email info@velvetsinger.com for pricing.

Duration: The seminar is designed to last two and a half (2.5) hours.

Workbook: The seminar uses a customized workbook, which provides an efficient and practical platform for rich discussion. Please Download the Workbook completed with example answers.

Objective: The seminar helps singers create a career business plan and adopt a continual process for refining their plans going forward.

Impact: Singers will leave the session with a dramatically improved sense of self-awareness and empowerment over their path. The seminar begins by discussing the relevant issues a well-crafted plan is designed to help solve.

Integration: Some singers may have previously drafted a business plan through school or privately. We will build off of those experiences and integrate our work into one process.

Singers will:

  • Assess strengths / weaknesses
  • Identify / mitigate risks
  • Analyze priorities
  • Define and rank goals
  • Create a marketing strategy
  • Articulate core values
  • Compose a career vision and mission statement
  • Create a schedule to revisit / refine

Workbook with Example Answers

Click on any page to pop open a larger view.

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Posted in Announcements, Seminar Info, Seminars | No Comments »

Westminster Courseware – Analysis for Success

Thursday, October 28th, 2010

Masters students at Westminster Choir College are at a great advantage. Among many other fantastic course offerings which help prepare singers to quickly transition into professional realms, one course at Westminster focuses on the traditional gateway into operatic performance: The Audition.

Laura Brooks Rice’s graduate-level course “Opera Auditions: Preparation and Techniques” offers Voice Pedagogy and Performance majors the opportunity to refine this core element of our craft. Singers explore new repertoire and work to polish their audition presentation.

Ms. Rice brings in top-tier guest artists on a weekly basis to provide feedback. After leaving graduate school, feedback of this type and quality is so difficult (and expensive) to generate.

The course also focuses on process. Few students will leave the class with a flawless package of five arias ready to win The Met Competition. In addition to solving specific issues and making dramatic improvements, the purpose of the course is to teach a process for refinement, so that the singers are properly equipped for the journey ahead.

That is where Velvet Singer Software steps in. Ms. Rice delivers homework assignments that students can accomplish by the use of Velvet Singer. In this way, she leverages their efforts so that they not only learn about the here and now, but they also develop a process for the future.

Rather than creating a list of past auditions and current repertoire, with Velvet Singer the students develop a powerful method and skill set for tracking their auditions and repertoire far into the future.

What power? What is the key benefit?

A large part of the benefit to students occurs during the data entry process. Simply taking the time to make sure all of the boxes are checked makes a giant impact. Being deliberate about journaling what you performed and how you felt is certainly over half the battle. By the time it comes to look back on your journey and plan out where you want to go, you will have a simplified and clearer vision for the future.

Reporting and analysis illuminates what intuition and feedback cannot. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. You have to create a clean, objective look into where you have been before you can plan where you are going.

What is your most effective aria?

This report gives students tangible insight in which aria or song has worked the best in the past. “Win” or “Loss” is determined by the status of the audition record. If your audition status is set to “Contract Offered” or “Contract Accepted”, then that audition was a win. In an academic setting, a contract may be to sing a solo with your school choir (at Westminster, that solo may be at Carnegie Hall!) or to perform a role in the opera.

Are your auditions improving?

This report show how many auditions you have been singing over each audition season and whether your outcomes are improving. Auditions take time and energy, so it is not enough for a singer to solely focus on whether or not they have projects to work on. If you are getting work, how much effort did it take for you to generate that work.

Who are you singing for?

There are several ways to analyze who you are singing for and what success you are seeing. This report breaks down your auditions by company budget level. This can be very helpful for those that are starting to target opera young artist programs.

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Posted in Courseware | No Comments »

Boston Conservatory – One Vision

Wednesday, October 27th, 2010

When I approached Boston Conservatory’s chair of voice & opera, Patty Thom at the 2010 Classical Singer Convention, she had a vision for how our business of singing seminar might help reinforce her curriculum. While at the convention, she awarded a generous $10,000 annual scholarship to a very lucky high school student with the vision of adding to her talent pool at Boston Conservatory. The convention also serves as a networking opportunity to help her stay connected with her colleagues.

I am delighted that Boston Conservatory was able to find the perfect fit for our seminar as part of our fall east coast swing! The fall can be a busy time of the year with auditions and operas to learn, but the students truly benefit from the receiving the right information at the right time.

The seminar was comprised of a wide range of singers from undergraduate freshman to master’s students with professional performing experience. This was clear from the moment that singers began sharing their scores from our first exercise: the Self-Management Questionnaire. The highest score reported was 41 activities that a singer regularly does, yet there were a group of scores in the teens and lower twenties.

I immediately encouraged those on the lower end, that unlike most of music school, this competition has only winners. The victory comes through identifying where you are in your unique process and also from opening up a dialogue with your peers. If the seminar had no other purpose, this would be enough to justify their time and energy.

The undergraduates seemed to really rise to the challenge of thinking about how to mirror some of these concepts to their current academic pursuits. When talking about auditions, we can just as well be talking about school juries and master classes. Rather than a gig, we spoke about school productions. Rather than focusing on the intricacies of tax accounting practices for freelance musicians, we fielded questions about resumes, cover letters, internships, thriving in competition and networking.

The purpose of the first half of the seminar is to wet the appetite and explore each singer’s unique entrepreneurial strengths and weaknesses as well as organization and outlook paradigms; the master’s students added a great deal to this part of the session. Peer-to-peer discussion can be a very powerful learning method, so we keep the seminar flexible to allow this to happen naturally.

It was the visualization exercise that seemed to resonate profoundly with undergraduates and master’s students alike. Stephen Covey’s foundational book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People encourages us to “begin with the end in mind.” In creating (and taking time to savor) a vision of the ideal, we can begin to identify a path to get there. Rather than hoping and dreaming for the fame and fortune of an international opera career, the Velvet Singer workbook visualization exercise challenges singers to create a very active and practical vision along seven categories:

  • At Coachings
  • At Voice Lessons
  • Relating to My Colleagues
  • During Auditions
  • At My Next Production
  • When I Relate to Friends / Family
  • About My Career in General

Boston Conservatory also graciously opened up the session to some of my customers and contacts from other Boston-area schools. Some Velvet Singer customers first get to know us through the seminar experience before they dive into the software. It was a real treat for me to watch the process in reverse: to have seminar participants that already regularly use Velvet Singer Software. This was a glimpse into how Velvet Singer Software can truly transform a singers’ outlook and toolkit. It was like reviewing “before” and “after” side-by-side and I like the results!

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Posted in Seminars | 8 Comments »

Westminster Gathers A Crowd

Monday, October 25th, 2010

Earlier this month, we kicked off our east coast seminar tour at Westminster Choir College. Everyone got involved to make sure that this seminar was a huge success. It was amazing to see the voice faculty (represented by Laura Brooks Rice), career services (represented by Joanne Lisa) and the office of the dean take such a large interest in what we were doing. They gathered quite a crowd of undergrads, masters students, alumni and faculty.

Velvet Singer SeminarMore important than the size of the session was the buzz that attendees felt going in. The atmosphere determines so much of what singers get out of the seminar, and Velvet Singer presenters only have so much control. When the singers arrive early to find school photographers snapping pictures and a flawless multimedia setup, the singers put on their thinking caps and get ready to be challenged.

Students at Westminster Choir College seem to possess a healthy sense of idealism and optimism. They generally feel fairly well-equipped for the real world and confident about their abilities to contribute. Their perspective also helped make this seminar unique. We stepped through our usual exercises to help brainstorm singing opportunities and they were very quick to offer creative possibilities.

What are you going to do differently?

These singers also seemed to have a very good sense of their priorities and goals. From Dissonance To Harmony challenges each participant to not only identify their top career priorities, but also to boil those down into a set of goals. Priority categories include:

  • Product Refinement
  • Differentiation
  • Innovation
  • Customer Relations
  • Sales & Advertising
  • Marketing & Growth Strategy
  • Stakeholder Communication
  • Reporting & Analysis
  • Planning & Forecasting
  • Risk Management
  • Operations
  • Financial Planning & Development
  • Cost Management

This group’s action items were some of the best of any seminar I have ever given. Singers really understood the value of moving 1) from priorities 2) to goals and then 3) to action items. It is not enough to stop working at a list of goals. What are the simple, tangible, concrete things you are going to differently as a result of this seminar?

Certified Instructor Program Launched

This seminar also represented a major milestone for Velvet Singer, LLC. This was our first seminar to incorporate the help of a Velvet Singer Certified Instructor, Mezzo Soprano Danielle Wright. Danielle introduced the concept of action items and prepared the singers that their proclamations should be:

  1. Succinct
  2. Measurable
  3. Specific
  4. Actionable

Maybe Danielle is also part of the reason that this seminar’s action items were among the best!

Webinar This Summer

Westminster College of the Arts’ Executive Director Scott Hoerl also shared some of his day with us. He has been instrumental in developing a series of Webinars for students and alumni and Velvet Singer is thrilled to become a part of this series starting in the summer of 2011 through The CoOPERAtive Program.

Thank you Laura Brooks Rice, Margaret Cusack, Joanne Lisa, Joyce Tyler, Scott Hoerl, Dean Robert Annis, Danielle Wright and all of the talented and intelligent singers of Westminster!

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Posted in Seminars | 30 Comments »

CoOPERAtive Program Sets High Water Mark

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

This program is amazing. If you are a young singer looking to turn the corner from hitting the cattle calls into earning paying contracts, The CoOPERAtive Program at Westminster is for you.

The CoOPERAtive Program is a very supportive and collaborative environment, featuring the country’s top talent. Not only do Laura Brooks Rice and Dr. Christopher Arneson bring in some of the most seasoned and passionate faculty, but they also make sure you spend ample time with each. Check out this faculty list including coaches, teachers, and conductors from the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Houston Grand Opera, Washington National Opera, New York City Opera, The Juilliard School and The Curtis Institute of Music.

The list includes such names as Susan Shiplett Ashbaker, Thomas Bagwell, Daniel Beckwith, Sandra Bernhard, Deborah Birnbaum, William Hobbs, Chuck Hudson, Gina Lapinski, Anthony Manoli, Mark Moliterno, Buck Ross, Debra Scurto-Davis, Ted Taylor, Marc Verzatt, Mark Moliterno, Nova Thomas, Lydia Brown, William Burden, Steven Crawford, Kathleen Kelly, Yelena Kurdina and and Brian Zeger.

How much value do you get? Well, they have taken the time to measure it so you can be sure you are getting your money’s worth. Singers typically receive over twenty six (26) coachings over the three weeks of the program. Yep, that’s more than one a day. One singer told me that she had nine (9) coachings the week before my seminar. And that is just coachings! That doesn’t include seminars, yoga, concerts, workshops and masterclasses. Read more about a Typical Day at the CoOPERAtive Program.

The Seminar and Individual Sessions

This seminar was certainly one of the best. We had a perfect room and the group was energized and well-prepared. Several of the singers had already printed the workbook sample and taken the questionnaire online. That is the kind of proactive skill that pays off huge in our entrepreneurial business.

We had a great discussion and the singers were very willing to share and contribute their creative ideas. I was flattered to read their comments (below).

The directors of the program also made sure to block out time for individual follow-up sessions with many of the singers. We met in fifteen-minute time slots throughout the afternoon discussing web sites, resumes, headshots and brainstorming marketing and product positioning.

We were able to make some major leaps forward with many resumes. In many cases, we condensed and refined the content. In many others we found small errors and discussed some basic graphic design formatting principles: less is more, readable should be the highest priority, white space is golden.

Please Email Us your resume if you would like some free feedback! We are happy to help in any way we can.

We chatted about the trade-offs of creating your own website from scratch using a WordPress blog engine, hiring a website designer such as Vox Page1, using a Flash based template such as Dynamod Web Portals, or building/hosting your website through Classical Singer or YAP Tracker.

I was also able to help singers refine their product positioning and strategize their market development. Most specifically, several singers had interest in creating a recital series. We helped them move from having a unique idea toward putting it into action: picking some deadlines on the calendar, deciding on a name for the series, targeting the right market, creating a fee structure and budgeting for print materials.

This was a fantastic session and I look forward to revisiting Westminster in the fall!

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Posted in Seminars | 22 Comments »

Tenor Ian McEuen No Longer Livin’ On A Prayer

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

Article by Sarah Alo

Back when Ian McEuen was wailing the high notes of hair band classics in the 80s cover band he and his friends formed in high school, he thought he was having nothin’ but a good time. But it turned out that music took a hold of him like poison. After a few rock bands—and high school choir—he ended up falling in love with classical music.

Upon gaining a full scholarship to Carnegie Mellon University, he entered the world of classical singing, and after graduating this spring, attended the Classical Singer Convention 2010 in New York.

Before finding Velvet Singer at the convention, his management system was “a complete disorganized mess.” He found himself missing deadlines, not able to remember everything in his busy schedule.

“I didn’t know what I needed prepared until the last minute,” he said. “I had a big problem with dates before. Now, I can see exactly when everything is. It helps me plan my life. It’s all there.”

His previous management tools consisted of iCal and a notebook.

“It never really came into my head that there would be a program that would do all of this,” he said. “Velvet Singer has released a lot of the stress in my life. I didn’t have a system before, and now it is all laid out for me,”

This summer, McEuen will appear as the Marquis in Corigliano’s Ghosts of Versailles with the Aspen Opera Theatre Center.

“Now that I’m actually making money, Velvet Singer helps. The fact that it tells you which category expenses go in is really helpful. Performance taxing is so nebulous that anything that can help is fabulous,” he said.

When creating an expense record in Velvet Singer, it presents common expense categories that typical freelancers would use, like headshots, classes, coachings, piano tuning, and more. It then helps to find which tax category that expense goes with, and even gives tax advice, too. At the end, grouped expense reports can be printed to help file taxes faster.

McEuen’s passion is singing. In the future, he does not know exactly where he will end up. He would like to sing overseas at a big house somewhere like Germany or Italy, or even in the United States, as well as do as many recitals as possible, he said. This fall he will head to the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music to begin his graduate studies.

Still, according to McEuen, his future career is a question mark.

“But, I do have goals,” he said. “As singers, we have a hard time seeing progress.”

He said that the Velvet Singer journal tool helps to see that progress. He can go back and look at an aria that he used to not be able to get through, and see now that it is one of his best. Velvet Singer assists singers in not only managing future engagements, but also in keeping track of past performances and assessing auditions.

McEuen also finds that the contacts tab is an “invaluable” tool for him. Besides just keeping track of the people he encounters in his career, he uses it to have a list at the ready when he needs to thank people.

“There is no such thing as luck. It’s about being prepared and being in the right place at the right time,” he said. “I think Velvet Singer will help me be prepared when those opportunities come about and help launch me into my professional career.”

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Posted in Testimonials | 1 Comment »

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