Demonstrating your musical abilities on paper seems impossible! After all, how can someone see how amazing you are on guitar or drums just by looking at a bit of paper?
But never underestimate your ability to bag an audition by effectively showcasing your skills, experience, and qualifications on your resume.
To help you sell yourself quicker than Taylor Swift’s last album, we’ve pulled together some of our top writing tips, as well as a musician resume example to get you started.
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Musician Resume Example
The above Musician resume example gives you a good steer on how a Musician resume should look and read.
The information is presented professionally, and the content is well structured to ensure that time-strapped recruiters and managers can spot the important skills and knowledge quickly.
Refer to this example as you write your own resume.
Musician resume layout and format
Your resume layout and format will play a big role in helping hiring managers to take notice of your resume and stay glued to it.
Shoot for a simple yet professional look to ensure you make a strong first impression, and organize the page in a way that is easy for readers to digest the information.
The following formatting tips should help.
Tips for resume formatting
- Length: Attention spans in recruitment are notoriously short, so keep your resume short and sweet. There’s no exact rule for resume length, but aim for 2 pages or less if you want to ensure yours gets read in full.
- Font and text: Nobody likes to read huge unbroken paragraphs of text – and recruiters are no different. Break your resume text up with bullet points and use a clear simple font.
- Design & structure: Hiring managers should be able to skim through your resume easily and pinpoint the information they want quickly. To help them do this, organize the page into clear sections with bold headings and dividing borders. The design should be clutter-free and professional-looking, with a calm color scheme.
- Photos and images: You are not obliged to add a photo to your resume in the USA, but it can be a nice way of adding some life to the document.
Quick tip: Formatting a resume to look professional can be difficult and time-consuming. If you want to create an attractive resume quickly, try our quick-and-easy Resume Builder and use one of their eye-catching resume templates.
Resume layout
Add the following sections when you write your resume.
- Name and contact details – Add to the very top of your resume to introduce yourself and make it super-easy for recruiters to get in touch.
- Resume summary – Reel hiring managers in with an “elevator pitch” style paragraph which sums up your suitability for the job.
- Skills section – A short and sharp list of your most important skills, that can be quickly skim-read.
- Work experience – List your previous jobs (from newest to oldest) detailing the skills learnt and applied in each.
- Education – List your qualifications and professional training.
- Additional info – If it helps your application, you can add an extra section for things like hobbies and interests.
Now, here’s what to include in each of these sections in your resume.
Resume Contact Details
Make it easy for hiring managers to contact you by adding your contact details to the top of your resume.
Keep this section small to save space and include the following.
- Name and profession title
- Telephone number – Ideally your cell phone so you can answer quickly.
- Location – Add your general location such as LA or New York
- Email address – Use a professional looking one with no nicknames.
You can add a link to your LinkedIn profile if you have one – you do not need to include personal details like date of birth or marital status.
Musician Resume Summary
Start your resume with a bang by adding a powerful summary to the top, summarizing your most valuable skills and experience.
This short paragraph is your chance to show recruiters why you are a perfect fit for the job and encourage them to read more of your resume.
Top tips for creating an effective resume summary:
- Keep it brief: Attention spans are short in the job market, so keep your summary brief and high-level at around 4-7 lines – This is just enough to catch the eye of rushed hiring managers.
- Tailor it: Recruiters will be scanning for the skills and knowledge they mentioned in the job description, so add as many as you can to your summary.
- Avoid cliches: You might be a “highly motivated go-getter who thinks outside the box” but generic meaningless cliches like that don’t tell employers much about you – stick to factual information in your summary.
Example resume summary for Musician
What to include in your Musician resume summary?
- Summary of your experience: Summarize the type of work you have done in the past and the benefits you have delivered for the organizations you worked at.
- Relevant skills: Scatter your most in-demand Musician skills through your summary to ensure they are noticed quickly by hiring managers.
- Important qualifications: Showcase your level of education with a quick mention of any qualifications that are essential for the Musician roles you are applying to.
Quick tip: Choose from hundreds of pre-written summaries across all industries, and add one to your resume with one click in our quick-and-easy Resume Builder. All written by our recruitment experts and easily tailored to suit your unique skillset.
Core skills section
Underneath your summary, write a core skills section to make your most relevant skills jump off the page at readers.
It should be made up of 2-3 columns of bullet points of your relevant skills.
Before you do this, look over the job description and make a list of any specific skills, specialisms or knowledge required.
Then, make sure to use your findings in your list. This will paint you as the perfect match for the role.
Best skills for your Musician resume
- Music performance – Using instruments and vocals to transfer musical ideas to the listener.
- Music composition – Creating original pieces of music by potential combining a variety of instruments and vocals.
- Music technology – Utilizing technology to perform, compose, notate, analyze, edit, playback or record pieces of music.
- Live production – Developing, creating, and refining recorded music for public presentation, initially recorded live.
- Digital composition – Utilizing software or electrical components to compose music without acoustic or live instruments.
Quick tip: Our quick-and-easy Resume Builder contains thousands of in-demand skills for every profession that can be added to your resume in seconds – saving you time and greatly improving your chances of landing job interviews.
Resume work experience section
Once you’ve hooked the hiring manager with your summary, you can really blow them away with you work experience.
List your previous jobs from newest to oldest to show the impact you made at each organization.
If you have years of experience, you can leave out some of the older jobs, and if you have little/no experience, you can bulk this section up with voluntary work and college placements.
Structuring your job descriptions
You probably do a lot in your job, so its vital to break all of that information down into a good structure.
Structure your jobs as follows to make it easy for recruiters to skim through and pinpoint the essential info.
Job outline
Kick off each role with a high-level overview to summarize the focus of the job, what the organization/department does, and how you fit into the bigger picture.
Key responsibilities
Then delve into the detail of your job by listing out easy-to-read bullet points which show how you apply your skills in the workplace.
Tailor these bullet points to focus on the skills and knowledge that are required in the jobs you are applying for.
Key achievements
Round off each job by adding some impressive achievements you made in the role.
Anything you’ve done that has made a big impact on your employer will make a good impression, think; generating revenue, saving costs, or improving a product.
Quantify your achievements with number where possible e.g. “reduced call wait time by 10%”
Example job for Musician resume
Outline
Leads the New Orleans Symphony Orchestra as First Chair Violinist, executing exceptional performances at world-renowned venues while ensuring outstanding tempo, note quality and unity with the wider orchestra.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead a 100-person orchestra made up of string, wind, brass, and percussion instruments
- Perform orchestral works for audiences ranging from 50-10000 people
- Collaborate with other musicians to meet exceptional performance standards and achieve a cohesive sound
- Assist the conductor to guide musicians through complex compositions
Quick tip: Create impressive job descriptions easily in our quick-and-easy Resume Builder by adding pre-written job phrases for every industry and career stage.
Education resume section
Nearing the end of your resume, your education/qualifications section should be added.
In a well-structured list, add all of your qualifications and certifications that qualify you to perform a typical Musician role.
If you have plenty of work experience, keep this section brief – if not, add lots of detail to make up for your lack of experience.
Additional info for your resume
If you have anything else to add which is relevant to the jobs you are applying for, the additional info section is the place to add it.
Perhaps you have a hobby which involves relevant skills, or maybe you have some awards or publications worth mentioning.
Writing your Musician resume
Writing a Musician resume can be challenging but following the steps above will ensure that you land plenty of interviews.
If you want to speed up the process and use an attractive professional template, try out our quick-and-easy Resume Builder.
Good luck with your job search!