Ric Mightybone Feliciano: The Teacher Who Shaped Nomad (Episode 149)

Make Music Your Business.

It has been said that the position of a teacher comes with great responsibility. In Episode 149 of The Career Musician, Nomad welcomes the teacher who helped steer him: his own high school music teacher, Ric "Mightybone" Feliciano.

Ric is a Puerto Rican trombonist, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and lead singer from Brooklyn, with 35 years in the business and credits including Billy Joel, Paul Simon, John Lee Hooker Jr., Pete Escovedo, Jimmy Bosch, Toto and Foreigner. He is a voting member of the Grammys and Latin Grammys and has been part of two Grammy-nominated albums as a horn arranger. It is a warm reunion, and a reminder of why being a music teacher and a working musician can be the same career.

A teacher can change a life

Ric's own start came in fourth grade in Brooklyn, back when school music departments loaned instruments to every kid. His teacher asked to meet his parents on a Friday. Ric spent the whole weekend thinking he was in trouble. On Monday, the teacher told them their son had a gift. That teacher, now in his 80s, still calls to check on his career.

Years later, Ric did the same for a teenage Nomad in a classroom tucked behind the speakers at a church school on Long Island, turning him on to music theory and classical music. Ric remembers telling Nomad's parents: this kid has something. The next week Nomad came in with a new guitar.

"That's why I'm saying teachers can really change lives. I mean literally change lives."

Ric Feliciano, 5:57

And not every life it changes ends up on stage. Ric points out that most musicians in the world are not performers. One former student used music to get a full ride to NYU, then became an engineer at Google who uses her musicianship in her work. Music, he says, is both math and language at the same time, the great unlocker.

Learn the hard way, and always save

Nomad remembers Ric's band being on the cutting edge. Ric credits Phil Driscoll, who told him at a NAMM show in New Orleans about this new thing called MIDI that would let all your keyboards talk to each other. Soon Ric was running whole church cantatas, music and lights, from a Mac 512K. Yes, 512 kilobytes.

Then the lesson. Nobody had taught them to save. Three weeks before a cantata, six months of programming got deleted. Ric pulled four days of all-nighters, rewrote it, and the new show was leaner and tighter than the old one. He never forgot to save again.

The manuals back then were pamphlets in engineer-speak, and there were no tutorial videos. Both men agree something is gained by learning the hard way. That Phil Driscoll album, with Ric's horn arrangements, was Grammy-nominated and got him into the Recording Academy. It was also Driscoll who told him he was a singer, which changed his whole career.

Know who you are, and who you're not

Nomad brings up how easy home recording looks now, and how you still need to know what you're doing to get good tones. Ric's answer is about teams. Usually you are amazing at one or two things. He is the music guy, the arranger. He can talk microphones and EQ, but his engineer handles that, and a partner handles the promoters and the schmoozing.

"You got to know who you are and who you're not. If you do that, you're going to be successful."

Ric Feliciano, 24:07

He calls it multiplication of goodness: the experts assembled make a better product. That is Objectivity from the ETHOS code, an honest read on your own strengths.

A working week of a career musician

Ric's day: teaching lessons, writing songs for the next album, and delivering music for a Hollywood trailer that just got accepted. When someone needs horns, he is the horn guy. He writes the arrangement, hires the players, sketches parts by singing into a Tascam, then writes everything out in Finale, which he has used for 20 years.

He also tells about touring Algeria with John Lee Hooker Jr.'s horn section, and about his salsa band honoring the classic New York Fania era with new songs and a heavy, in-your-face trombone sound. Honor the past, look toward the future. That is The Biz pillar, diversify or die, in one musician's calendar.

Come back to who you are

Ric did walk away from music for a while, doing real estate and other things he was good at. Then a successful real estate agent told him that selling homes was the one thing he could do in his sleep. Ric asked himself what his own one thing was. He went back to music, restarted his lesson business, and within a year was earning twice as much and was much happier.

His definition of success: changing lives. A solo that moves someone. A song that lands. Or, like the morning of this interview, a brother and sister who are seven and nine and playing beyond their years, and the feeling that he is exactly where he is supposed to be.

The takeaway

Teach, play, arrange, keep learning, and know your lane. A career built on who you really are lasts. If you want help building yours, start with the free Get the Gig guide.

Get the gig. Keep the gig. Build the career.

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