156 - Being Sick As A Session Musician

📣 Calling all sick musicians!

🫣 No I’m not talking about awesome musicians - you can be awesome too, but I want to share what I do when I’m ill as a session musician!!!

🎧 Listen to my episode A Drummer's Guide To... Being Sick As A Session Musician

😱 So on the road is the worst version of events - not only are you a victim to the schedule, you’re around people that you desperately don’t want to get ill, but chances are you’re in close quarters!!! It’s a nightmare!!

👀 So what do I do?

✏️ Firstly I isolate myself as much as I physically can, and on every tour I do, I have my own ‘pharmacy’ with various medications that can help me deal with any issues for the 2 hours I need to be on stage, and the other 22 hours, I rest, I sleep, I hydrate, and literally cross my fingers it passes quickly without infecting anyone else!

🙈 If I’m home, weirdly it often is harder because I won’t LET myself rest! What a ‘mare! So I try to do ONLY what is ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY and then rest every other minute I can - I’m rubbish at this, I know I am, I’ve literally just come off the back of being a bit sick and it being drawn out much longer than it probably needed to be because I didn’t just stop! I know, I know, nightmare!

💰 The other component to this that I think is important is to have a financial buffer, so some sort of savings that if you had no work whatsoever, you could survive. This is beneficial way past just being sick and allows for the inevitable fluctuation in this creative world.

🎧 If you want to learn more about being sick (as strange as that sounds!) and lift the curtain further on all the other things it takes to be a professional musician, aside from playing your instrument, then look for A Drummer's Guide To... on all good podcasting platforms and youtube