9 Rules That Almost Ruined My Classical Music Career

I found my old notebook last week. The one that travelled with me through every music school and every conservatory, corners bent, half the pages filled with things my teachers said while I wrote them down as if they were law.

I expected nostalgia. What I found instead was a list of the worst advice I have ever received, plus the slightly uncomfortable detail that I followed almost all of it.

Nine of them are below, in the order they happened, together with what changed when I finally stopped listening.

1. "Don't go to master classes, they will confuse you"

One teacher, one method, one approach. That was the rule. Other teachers would change my fingerings, give me wrong ideas, ruin what I had built. I believed it completely, so for years I stayed home while my colleagues came back from summer courses talking fast, full of things they had just discovered.

Then a teacher I admired came to a town near mine and something in me refused to sit that one out. I went.

His approach to the right hand had nothing to do with mine. A different way of thinking about colour, about tone, about ideas I had never even considered. Instead of confusing me, it made everything clearer, because I understood there is no single correct technique waiting to be found. There are many, and you get to choose, combine, expand.

Looking back, when a teacher tells you not to learn from anyone else, that advice is rarely about protecting you. It protects a method, an authority, an ego. The student is the one who pays.

2. "If you make a mistake, stop and start over"

In the practice room this made perfect sense to me for years. Then came the first concert with a small mistake in it, and my instinct did exactly what it had been trained to do. It told me to stop. In front of an audience.

Learning to keep going turned out to be as important as learning to play well. Possibly more, because it is the one that saves you when you need saving.

3. "Never use the score in front of an audience"

Apparently it looks unprofessional. I have never understood why.

If your memory makes you anxious, having the score in front of you can keep you calm, and calm makes you more musical, not less. The score ruins nothing.

There is one version of this that I do not recommend, and I know because I tried it: studying everything by memory at home and then putting the score on the stand only at the concert. Not a nice evening.

4. "The violin is ruining your guitar technique"

High school. I started playing violin, fell in love with it, practised both instruments and had a great time. My guitar teacher did not share the enthusiasm. He sat me down and told me my left hand was getting worse, and that if I kept going I would never play the guitar properly.

That day really got to me. I quit the violin and dropped out of the projects I was part of.

A few months later the school orchestra put together a collaboration with orchestras from other countries, and I could not resist. Just once, I told myself. I never stopped after that, and eventually my guitar teacher accepted it. I played repertoire I would never have touched otherwise. I grew as a musician, not just as someone with two instruments.

As for my guitar technique, the violin was never the problem.

5. "Enroll with the violin, the guitar has no career"

This one came from the orchestra director. The violin has a seat in an orchestra, a clear path, a ladder with visible steps. The guitar has none of that, and he knew it firsthand, because his brother is a classical guitarist who is not happy with how things went.

Technically he was right. There is no orchestra chair waiting for a classical guitarist, no obvious ladder to climb. I believed him for a while and genuinely doubted my choice.

What eventually settled it was realising I was not looking for a traditional career at all. I was not trying to fit into a slot that already existed. I wanted to build something new with this instrument.

Advice can be completely correct about the world as it is and completely wrong for the world you are trying to build. The path does not have to exist yet.

6. "Nothing matters until you win a competition"

This one did not come from teachers. It came from everyone around me, all preparing for the next competition as if it were the only door in the building.

So I started believing that the whole job was playing perfectly, note by note, without a single accident. Get that right and everything else would follow.

It does not work like that. Being a musician means having something to say, knowing how to communicate it, knowing how to connect with people, building something that outlives one evening on stage. Competitions can open doors, absolutely. But if you walk through one without knowing what you want on the other side, winning changes very little. I have watched people win important prizes and disappear, and I have watched people who never won anything build extraordinary careers, because they knew exactly what they were building.

So if you are feeling the pressure, the useful question might not be "can I win this". It might be "am I ready to win it".

7. "If you're nervous, imagine the audience naked"

I have been told this more than once. I tried it exactly one time and ended up nervous and uncomfortable, which is two problems where I previously had one.

Not recommended.

8. "Play what people recognise, or they will scroll past"

Brussels, during my masters. I had started recording pieces and putting them online, trying to understand how any of it worked, and a musician who was already doing well on social media gave me a very clear instruction. Play music people already know. Otherwise they scroll.

So I did. The views went up, the algorithm was delighted, and people clicked because they recognised the music before they pressed play. By every available metric it was working.

It also felt wrong, because becoming a delivery system for other people's music was never the point. My reason for doing this is to bring new music into the world of the classical guitar and help the instrument grow into something more original.

So I changed direction and started focusing on original music. The numbers dropped. That is simply how it goes. What arrived instead were messages from someone who had just discovered a composer they had never heard of, or someone who picked the guitar back up after years away. I have no idea how to convert that into a view count, and I have stopped trying.

9. "You make strange faces when you play"

This one arrives from the comment section, more times than I can count. Look more composed. It is distracting.

I understand the note. I also cannot do anything about it, because when you play, your whole body is involved. Hands, breath, posture, arms. The face comes along with the rest of it, and it is part of the communication. The music moves through you, and if your face shows that, I do not see the problem.

It actually went in the opposite direction. Certain pieces needed more movement than sitting allows, so I had strap buttons drilled into my guitar and started playing standing up, because the music was asking for it.

What the notebook says now

I am not throwing it away. I still write down what people tell me, teachers and colleagues and strangers in the comments.

The difference is the filter. Now I ask whether a piece of advice serves the music I am trying to make, or whether it protects somebody's idea of how things are supposed to be done. I get that judgement wrong on a regular basis. Being wrong on my own terms has turned out to be much more interesting than being right on someone else's.