How Musicians Balance Touring, Recording, and Personal Life
How Musicians Balance Life: The career of a musician involves a lot more than just songwriting and playing tunes for an audience. There’s a lot of travel, business deals with labels and music video directors, and hours upon hours of soundchecks and rehearsals. The struggles of touring, recording albums, and balancing one’s friends and family only complicate things even more.
Whether we’re talking about a rock band from the 1970s or a hip hop collective from the 2000s, touring is hard for any kind of musician. The struggles can get under the skin of even the most hardcore musicians. Here’s how they manage it all.
Touring as a Professional Musician
Being on the road for months at a time can be a big challenge, especially if they are leaving behind family at home. There’s always FaceTime and phone calls, but being away from your spouse and children for several months every year can be very emotionally taxing.
For one thing, many musicians are stuck in the same cramped buses and trailers for months on end. It can be very suffocating for some, especially those with mental or physical health issues. The amount of downtime that accompanies touring can also lead to bouts of boredom. To stay entertained, many musicians will do things like play online games, read books, binge-watch TV shows, etc.
But most will just want anything to give them that feeling of being home at least for an hour. So, they will write to family and friends, or look up local news and trends. Some will go a step further and do simple tasks they do when at home, like buying a lotto ticket. The correlation between lottery and travellers goes back a long time, but there’s something that drives people who venture from place to place to try their luck, and musicians are certainly no exception. So, it should come as no surprise that even musicians tend to look up SA lotto results in hopes of testing their luck.
On tour, sometimes musicians simply don’t get along with one another. Bands might have chemistry on stage, but that doesn’t always translate into chemistry as friends behind the scenes. Tensions can build, arguments can arise, and sometimes this leads to fallouts or major creative differences. As close as bandmates can feel when rehearsing, sometimes a long tour can, unfortunately, be a nail in the coffin of their bond.
Recording as a Professional Musician
Recording albums can often be a frustrating and stressful experience. Even with months of preparation beforehand, many unforeseen things can go wrong in a recording session.
Recording studios are renting out their spaces and their tools all the time. This means that wear and tear is an inevitability. Maintenance can do a lot to increase the lifespan of tapes and pedals, but eventually, they will break, and this often happens in the middle of a recording session. These setbacks don’t usually cost bands money, but they can cause huge delays. This can add to their stress if they only have a couple of weeks to finish an entire album.
Mixing is an aspect of the recording process that can be especially difficult for a musician. Sometimes, the band is competing with one another over volume and frequencies, and the decision to be placed low in the mix can be a blow to someone’s ego.
There’s also a factor of perfectionism that can easily creep its way into the process. Thanks to digital audio workstations, musicians, producers, and sound engineers can be extremely precise about all aspects of the recording process. This is a blessing, thanks to its microscopic perspectives, but it can also be seen as a curse if it ends up taking too much time.
Balancing Personal Life as a Professional Musician
Arguably, the hardest thing about being a touring professional musician is being away from friends and family for extended periods of time. Though mileage varies from person to person, the emotional toll this takes on a person should not be underestimated.
Being away from loved ones for a tour can be a big deal. But some bands get so big that their demand across the world becomes massive. This results in a major tour every year or two. Once someone has been on the road multiple times, numbness can set in, but it can also cause rifts between the musician and his or her family.
Political reasons can also be a big factor, especially when major events happen when a musician is on the road. These politics can cause major dilemmas among musicians and their families, and the decision to continue touring in the middle of political upheaval can also be a stress-inducing time.
In order to keep things balanced and stable, many musicians go out of their way to dedicate time to focus not only on mental health but family time, even when away from them. This can manifest in many different ways, but for some, it looks like daily phone calls, buying gifts to send in the mail, or even flying out family when on tour.
A more intense tactic some musicians can afford is to keep tours to a minimum. Some bands will only play in certain countries or continents to reduce the time of the tour. Though a three- or four-month tour can still feel like a long time, it’s much shorter than the 10-month touring protocol that many bands opt for.
At the end of the day, a musician’s lifestyle isn’t always as glamorous as the movies and music videos make it seem. Still, with the right mindset and balance, many professional musicians are able to record and tour, year after year, living a satisfying dream come true.