When thinking about what I should be doing once I’m out of education, or what I can be doing as a musician to make a living, session work has always piqued my interest. Free-lancing and its spontaneous nature has always appealed to me as something I’d love to try for a while in my musical career. I am going to focus my research into further understanding what it’s like to be a session musician, and what it takes to be a professional. I will look at the good and the bad, to the practical and financial sides, and what my life could look like as a session pianist/keyboardist.
A session musician is brought into a session externally by an artist or group to play a temporary role in relation to their specialism. They could be brought in to record parts in a studio, perform on tour with an artist as part of their band; they’re they to play their instrument for whatever purpose the group needs.
On their “Job Profiles” section, UK Music describes session work as a very high skilled profession, stating its “tools of the trade” include: perfect sight-reading, adaptability between styles and genres, high performance level on their instrument, flexibility, cooperativity, and reliability. Session musicians are expected to know exactly what is being asked of them and to be able to deliver whatever it may be to a high standard with no questions asked. The attributes that this source mentions are what you want in order to get the most work. Strong versatility in a wider span of genres will mean people can hire you for a wider range of different sessions and will think of you as someone they can come to for any session gig they have. Having perfect sight-reading skills will show people that you will be able to learn any song very quickly, or even with no preparation at all with only the sheet music. Artists or groups don’t want to have to waste time teaching you a song and they won’t want to pay for it either, most people looking for session musicians will want the ones who can simply be given a score and won’t need further help or even time; the most efficient musicians. Being cooperative is an obvious must in the whole of the music industry, and session work is no exception. You will be constantly meeting and having to work with new, different types of people who you will need to always be professional towards, and in lots of cases get along with. This source lacked a lot of detail where it instead opted to have more quick-fire answers to general questions. Despite that, I found I was able to infer a lot about session work from what the source did give me.
In order to get started as a session musician, Paul “Crafty” Backman (well-known full-time musician and online music educator), in his YouTube video, “How to be a session musician (Part 1)”, begins getting you to think about who you are (or who you want to be) as a session musician. He suggests thinking about going down one of two routes, “becoming an expert in one particular area… this could be genre or just general ability. And the second way is that you just develop all of your skills, if you can play a lot of different instruments and sing and play a bunch of different genres you can have so much on offer”. This goes hand in hand with his next point where Paul talks about advertising yourself. You need to have a clear idea of what you have to offer, your skills, influences, genre expertise, etc. People will likely not want to hire you if they don’t know what they’re paying for you need to have your identity prepared. He goes on to suggest different ways to get yourself out there for sessioin work, whether you’re starting or not. “Networking” he explains, “finding people that are doing live recording or performances who might need session musicians, and just really nicely introducing yourself”, while making sure to be polite and professional, he goes on to explain. Networking and actually meeting and getting to know people makes a much more lasting impression than what social media can give you, for example. He highlights that it can also really help if you had things set up such as a portfolio, website, and business cards to give the people you meet. Along with helping give you a well put together image, this also lets people who need session musicians like you, find you. It gives you more opportunity to sell yourself. Paul then also advises to go find other session musicians like you in your local scene and get to know them. “You know if you become mates and they’re busy where they can’t do a session well who’s gonna get the call up instead?”. Its a great idea to build a close circle of like-minding session musicians where you can help one another.
Furthermore, in terms of starting out as a session musician, what’s great is that there are no real barriers or requirements for you to start. I could start offering free session work to my friends and fellow music students now in order to gain a portfolio and then, perhaps, later on, decide to go professional (or back out and look down another route if it’s not for me). Another huge benefit of session work is that I get to decide how committed to it I want to be, I could do this simply alongside my main profession (though it wouldn’t be nearly as effective/profitable). A potential challenge to this is that not putting my full commitment into something like this could mean stretching myself thin and having no real success in any field. I think that, to avoid this potential fault, I should try and start doing session work during education as soon as I can, this way I can get a better idea of how well it can work for me, leading to a better judgement of where I should place my commitments in the future.
Chris Harvey, a session guitarist and music content creator on YouTube, gives an interesting insight in his video “A Day in The Life as a Session Guitarist VLOG”. In the recording session he goes to in the vlog he talks about how closely he’s worked with the creator of this particular project, Tony. “We’ve done a couple albums together already but this is the first one that I’ve really started to co-produce”. Before this, my idea of a session musician was a lot less involved than what Chris describes here. It suggests to me that when you get closer with the people you keep working with (the people who keep hiring you) the experience can become a lot more comfortable and involved. This now also opens up my mind to the potential of having more of an MD (musical director) role in a session. He even wrote the chords for some of the songs. It is clear that he tries to sit himself comfortably among the rest of the group to a point where his input and ideas have value, as opposed to just being there to think about and record his guitar part. This truly highlights value in being a reliable musician in this profession, earning the respect of those you work with a lot can lead to you being able to have some more creative direction over the project. In conclusion, session work can be a lot more than I first thought it to be. More on what Chris does here as a session musician, he allows himself, the singer and recording engineer all to do as many takes with him as they need to, while also listening and implementing their suggestions/changes. He’s on top of the equipment and gear being used to record him, small attentiveness to detail like this will allow him to think about how he needs to play according to how the recording equipment will pick his guitar up and how it will sound. In conclusion, I have found that there is, excitingly, a lot more to be done in session work than simply playing your part.
Financially, session work is always going to be on and off due to the nature of the profession. You would often get paid different amounts through each job depending on what it is and with who. At some points you get so much work you can’t fit it all in, but sometimes you may not be able to find any session work for a while, which could leave you scraping by. Overall, it can be a very unsteady profession most of the time, but there are always things you can do to push yourself out there more to try and ensure you get more consistent flow of work.
A big issue with this profession is having to understand the legal side of it all (of which there is a lot). The Musicians Union website has a lot of information on working as a session musician and what you can expect from the legal side. The first topic of interest is called a contractor (or a fixer). Contractors are authorised by the Musicians Union to “engage musicians in session work”. They’re responsible for making sure that “various media agreements are adhered to”, the completion and appropriate delivery of consent forms, and paying the musicians their fair amounts (including the session and secondary fees). Session musicians seem to get paid a flat fee for their initial time and work and then are further paid as a performer on the track through PPL when the track is played. Contractors seem to be very useful middlemen that keep everything fair and just for both parties, ensuring that everything goes a lot smoother, and there are no worries between everyone. Luckily, MU gives easy access to their licensed fixers, if I were ever in need of one in the future.
As with any creative profession in the music industry, one of the biggest and most likely problems you’ll face while working in bands or with artists are writing and arrangement disputes, more specifically, who owns and deserves credit for which parts of the song. If issues like this aren’t thought about and carefully discussed early on, it could lead to explosive backlash for everyone involved. It is also important that everyone understands the different rights you get from the song depending on what exactly you contributed (e.g. composition rights for lyricists, performance rights for everyone who was recorded on the track, master rights for the label, etc.). Another popular solution to this issue are called split sheets. These are sheets that clearly show the splits and percentages of royalties and rights across everyone involved with the project. Groups will often write these immediately after a song is written, before people forget what they deserve and what they don’t.
In conclusion of my research, I feel I have managed to gain a much clearer understanding of being a session musician as a profession. To do it properly takes time and effort towards your instrument and craft, and dedication to whatever jobs come your way. Session work for some groups can be a lot more rewarding if you try to put yourself into the mix with the writers and arrangers of the project you’re on. It is an unstable profession, financially but there are many ways to put yourself out there in an attempt to gain a more consistent work flow. The legal side with all the close knit agreements can feel overwhelming to understand but I’m sure I can become more comfortable and knowledgeable about that side of the industry.
Bibliography
Chris Harvey Guitar. “A Day in the Life of a Session Guitarist || VLOG.” YouTube, 18 Jan. 2022, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1HiHwJnfoc. Accessed 7 Jan. 2026.
“How to Be a Session Musician [PART 1].” Www.youtube.com, Crafty Music Tips, 22 Mar. 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcOVC-w2ZWU. Accessed 7 Jan. 2026.
Musicians Union. “Session Musician Advice.” Musiciansunion.org.uk, 3 Oct. 2023, musiciansunion.org.uk/working-performing/recording-and-broadcasting/working-as-a-recording-session-musician. Accessed 7 Jan. 2026.
UK Music. “Session Musician.” UK Music, 16 Sept. 2020, www.ukmusic.org/job-profiles/session-musician/. Accessed 7 Jan. 2026.
