CALLEN
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California raised and Texas born, I'm a creative not only focused on what hasn't been done yet, but where new ideas will fit in the ever changing music industry.
I started out playing drums in a few bands growing up in Lafayette, California. San Francisco didn't have much of a music scene, but it did have warped tour. I was playing drums for a post hardcore band on a warped tour 2013 stage before I knew I wanted to do music as a career and less of a hobby. If you know me then you know playing hockey is the other 50% of my soul.
As I grew into music and continued my education in Boston I went on a journey of self betterment in my musicality and production knowledge as well as industry knowledge. I kept learning drums, piano, guitar, and voice. My demo's started to become less of a voice memo / garageband project and more of a song that could appear in related artists to whomever I was listening to at the time. My experience and inspiration as an artist has always been hands on through trial and error.
My first real recording experience in a professional studio was in a studio in Fremont, California called Castle studios with an incredible engineer/producer to this day, Aaron Hellam. Over time my musical taste generally evolved and kept changing. I really like John Mayer when I was really focused on learning guitar, I really liked Avenged Sevenfold when I was going crazy on drums as a kid, I really liked Muse and Coldplay when I was teaching myself piano. Thanks to an awesome music instructor who was also my hockey coach once upon a time, Matthias Montgumery, I began to see the whole picture with recording and production. I started recording myself playing drums over my favorite songs on youtube similar to Cobus, another inspiration of mine as a musician. When I was in high school I started recording my own alternative rock, full band demos. They sounded terrible, but as those evolved I started playing with a band and even brought those demos into a bigger studio so I could hear them at a higher potential. I still thought they sounded terrible at the end of it. Fortunately, you can't find anywhere... I don't think haha. When I went to college I played in a ton of bands from jazz to rnb to rock to edm to pop. I started to meet like minded individuals in production and writing and was really inspired by some of my friends.
MYSTERY SECTION (assume some stuff happened inbetween these parts of the story)
My first EDM concert was Bassnectar in Colorado with my sister who was attending CU Boulder at the time. I think I was still in high school.... I had already been using Ableton for a while and wasn't crazy into EDM, but was into remaking deadmau5 songs on Ableton and Massive haha. I think seeing the energy at that show started my real journey as an EDM producer (WHICH BY THE WAY I'M STILL VERY MUCH ON)
After touring with a rock band lead by my brother, I moved to Nashville, to ground myself and dig in to a career in production & songwriting.
In my journey of trying to grow as a producer I started getting involved in the splice community and actually won one contest with an original song which is out now called "Silver & Gold." The song got premiered at Music tech fest in Stockholm and all the proceeds go to musicians without borders.
I've done multiple remix contests on splice as well as original song contests and one of them was for toplines by a girl named Karra, another badass industry person, singer, producer, and writer. I didn't win the contest, but I did make a song out of one of her toplines, and sent it to some people on youtube.
Trapnation reached out to me asking if they could post it. This felt like it was too good to be true so I remained jaded about it, but still sent it to them. The next thing I know, this random song I made called "By My Side" has almost 800,000 streams on youtube. My sense of hope for being a creative professionally was reborn.
To sum it up, I've got a ton of projects I'm excited to release this year that are all different blends of genres focused around my background in singer songwriter and EDM.
Stay up to date by following me on social media!
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STILL A COOL STORY BRO
As an artist and experienced "industry" individual, I still believe anything is possible with music truly......
(AKA if you follow whats in your head to the very end;
from thinking it, to distributing it, to making merchandise for it, to playing it live, you can make a career out of it.)
As cliche as it may sound music is the language we use to share perspective and emotion (an extension of our soul or whatever).
It is really easy to forget that and feel lost in an oversaturated business where people are constantly spending money on their music and not seeing returns. That can be really discouraging, I know I've been there and experienced the weight of feeling cheated, lost, or tired with being an artist.
To be more specific; paying for playlists, paying PR companies, paying managers, really there are too many ways to spend your money on stuff that aren't the music and it not do anything for your artist development.
The moral of the story for me has been FIGURE OUT how to do all of it yourself before paying someone else to do it.
WHY? you say?
Well, funny enough if you figure out how to do most things yourself you are able to express yourself with so much more clarity both visually and sound wise not only to fans, but to other industry people. An example would be if you are a writer who likes to work with producers, learning how to demo your own friggin songs will 1. save you money 2. expedite the process 3. put yall on the same page way faster.
Another example is someone like Laurin saying I think you should turn the snare and kick up 2 db
instead of someone like chad
saying "I want it to feel huger my dude its just not quite exploding in the boom ka boom ka"
You get the gist.
Another important lesson I've learned is only work with people that will call you and meet with you FACE to FACE. This is almost a blog post, maybe I'll start a blog and continue my rants in depth haha.
My overall mission as an artist and individual is to inspire new genres of music as well as inspire people to chase quality over consistency.