Benjamin Alan On Life As A Creative And How To Succeed As A Musician
Benjamin Allen only started sharing his music since COVID. In the last few years he’s grown a pretty large audience of loyal fans who love his music. In this episode, we talk about how to be effective creating music, the mindset, and the lifestyle that must exist around it when it’s not your full-time gig (yet).
We hear how Ben got into music in the first place as a youngster. He is one of those musically inclined people, who always appreciated the art, but never really took it seriously. He found success as a competitive goalie in hockey, but mid way through the teen years decided music was the greater passion.
Ben shares a behind the scenes glimpse into his personal development, fitness routines and wellness. A big part of his wisdom comes from the need to juggle making enough money to pay the bills while still pursuing music with enough momentum and consistency.
We chatted about dealing with haters and building personal confidence. It’s so important as a foundation for new musicians to be able to stand in their own self-esteem. This can also be helped by surrounding yourself with good people.
We heard all about how Ben looks at song writing. He gives us a great rundown of his own music production. We get to hear from mindset, to idea, to creating, editing and publishing, all of the steps he takes to create an album.
15 Things To Think About If You Want To Become A Singer
- Listen to a lot of music, from multiple genres. Some just for enjoyment and to get the vibe, but also to identify song structure, and learn to recognize different elements that appear in songs.
- Focus on songwriting. Even though production can make something, almost anyone sound great, it’s still the actual song that is most important. Focus on writing things that resonate with your audience and always work to get better at songwriting.
- The most important element of writing the song is creating relatability and connection with the listener. They should be able to use the themes, but put their own people, experiences and emotions into the story.
- Songwriting success is a lot about repetitions, you just have to write your first one hundred songs as quickly as possible, listen to and read other songs, but most importantly write as much as you can, read them back and continue to improve.
- When it’s time to sit down and create, make, or get an instrumental and then hum different melodies over top of it, and once you find a rythm that sounds good, start adding words to it, especially finishing words that you might want to rhyme.
- The most important part of a song is the melody. You can create a song, and people might know zero of the words, but if they get the melody stuck in their head it can still be memorable.
- From those first lyrics and energy a concept, themes, and story will then develop.
- You’ll learn bars, song structure, and chord progressions over time, but essentially most songs will fit a similar structure of 8 bars for a verse, 4 bars pre-chorus and 8 bars for the chorus.
- Steal like an artist by studying what others have done that works, appreciating what you connect with and borrowing ideas that you then make original.
- Always writing to instrumental, even when you’re coming up with ideas can be helpful because it keeps you cautious of the number of syllables and phrases you can fit into your song.
- You don’t need a fancy studio to be successful. You can add pieces to the production over time, as you make money invest in your instruments, software and tech that will help you create. But people can make good music from a phone, or tablet these days and improve equipment and spaces over time. In fact, it’s probably best to scale your gear with your creativity and abilities, because it will be a better fit as you continue to level up.
- The basic equipment you should start with is a device that can run a digital audio workspace such as GarageBand, Logic Pro, Ableton Live, Pro Tools, or any of the others depending on your budget. If you are recording vocals you will want a half decent microphone, but just as important understand a little bit about the acoustics of the room you record in. The microphone can be plug and play, for under a couple hundred dollars to start.
- Once you have a song you are happy with, similar to a podcast these days, if you would like to share it across many different streaming services, then it’s best to use a distribution service that will send your track out to all of the different platforms.
- When it comes to marketing your music, it’s important to create a community. It’s also really helpful to make micro content, clips and shorts that could go viral. Share the melody, parts of the hook, snippets from your lyrics, as well as behind the scenes making it and the meaning of the track as much as possible.
- Pre-saves and downloads on day one are also huge for artists. The more your audience hops on a track before and right at the time of release, the more momentum it gives the algorithm and the more a streaming service will help serve your song to new audiences for you.
Memorable Quotes
“That’s all you can really do in this industry, you just gotta learn as you go.”
“Music and sport have the same overlap benefit for me. In both of them, when you’re playing sports, or making music, it’s the only thing you can focus on at that time, so it’s really a form of therapy.”
“There’s never been a better time to be an independent musician. But there’s also never been as much competition. So it’s kind of like a double-edged sword.”
“Every artist steals. You kind of have to copy what other, similar creators are doing, but make the work original and your own.”
“If you want to get into music, you just have to start, realize it is never going to be perfect, and that goes for people who have been at it a long time too, you have to keep going.”
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