We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Adrian D’Souza a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Adrian thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
The process of becoming skilled as an Artist takes on many layers. In this interview I’ll be sharing my secrets on learning the craft of a Professional Musician / Producer / and Composer. It revolves around creating great cover and original music, building a loyal customer and fan base, succeeding on many social media platforms, creating a professional website, developing the necessary technical skills and experience on the instruments, and working independently as an entrepreneur in today’s fast paced, competitive market.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I started my musical journey at the tender age of seven. My father was an avid musician who was enthusiastic about starting me in music lessons at a young age. I started up on keyboard instruments, but by the age of eleven, I realized the electric guitar was the coolest instrument I ever saw and heard. I knew from that day I wanted to focus my time on mastering the electric guitar.
At the age of fifteen, I got on stage with my teacher at the time, David Bacha, who was an accomplished guitarist in his own right. I remember him teaching me a lot of lead work. I had my first performance at that time with him in front of a small audience of fifty people. We jammed to a track by B.B.King called “The Thrill has gone”. I played lead guitar, and he played the rhythm guitar parts. The truth is the thrill had just begun.
It was after that age I had been preparing for university as I wanted a backup career in case the music industry didn’t turn out. I went to the University of Toronto and specialized in corporate work, computer science, philosophy, and accounting etc. For many years after I graduated, I worked as a corporate professional. But the corporate industry wasn’t my “calling” in life.
Thirteen years ago I returned back to my first love, which is music. During this time, I became a self-taught guitarist, learning music from any means I could. I would watch electric guitar video tutorials, and learn songs from guitar tab. I immersed myself in recording, and what was born was my YouTube channel and consequently, performances of a plethora of guitar cover songs. I also released a few improvisations and solos on my channel over the years.
My YouTube channel has been running ever since, but I knew I had to do more. Around the time of the covid pandemic, when there were lockdowns in my city, I decided to create my own albums of original ambient music. I launched my Bandcamp website and released a couple of albums and a few singles, both original material and some cover music. I was well on my way to expanding my musical skills, genres, and gaining momentum in the Entertainment Industry.
Over the past couple of years I launched my Twitch.tv website where I performed several live stream concerts. I have temporarily stopped performing there while I produce as much new material as I can, after which I will do more shows. Performing live stream is convenient to getting experience in front of a live audience before landing any major gigs which will follow suit.
My social media was booming, At this time I also dedicated my Instagram account to my musical goals posting up clips of my guitar performances, as well as photographs of days in my life, to give the Instagram audience a feel for what I’m about.
With all this traction you’d think I’d stop there, but this year I also launched my own personal website which acts as a landing page where people can find my social media, watch embedded YouTube video performances, and embedded live stream Twitch.tv concerts, purchase my latest album, view my photographs, and personally get in touch with me through my website contact form.
Now the journey is progressing further. I’m currently working on what I call the “Performance Series”. It will be a series of guitar instrumentals of mostly cover music of famous rock bands and artists, which will be recorded on YouTube over the next few years and then performed livestream on Twitch.tv and eventually, at actual gig venues in my city. I want to delve outside the realm of being primarily a Recording Artist and motivate myself to becoming more of a Performing Artist as the future evolves.
The great thing about music is its mostly creative work. You can’t think too logically about it. Guitar playing is neither a hobby nor a career for me. It’s more a lifeforce — something I simply must do.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
Working as an artist gives me the ability to express myself in the ways I want. For example, I choose which music I like to learn, record, and perform. I make my own hours. This allows me the flexibility to organize my life in a way which is less stressful and more conducive to getting things done.
I don’t work a traditional 9-5. Sometimes I’ll be on the guitar in the afternoon, sometimes the evenings, and sometimes I’ll wake up at 3 am with enthusiastic ideas on songs and projects and work on them while they’re still fresh in my mind. You see you can’t force creativity. It must flow naturally with as little resistance as possible.
Learning musical skills is a lot like how a baby learns. A baby watches, imitates, and then experiments. When approaching music I approach it, learning like a baby. I don’t know how a project will turn out ahead of time I just play like a baby and discover new things without thinking about them.
If you recall this is how we all learned when we were young. Then they sent us to college or university, and offices etc., and we were told how to think, where to sit, how to dress, how to talk, who to socialize with. Wtf? Before you know it, you’ve lost yourself and the creative process ends. You wake up to the everyday grind and you’re just a puppet on strings, controlled by the world around you.
In the entertainment industry creativity comes from freedom of expression. Anytime you are working with too many rules, it’s hard to be creative. You must play and learn the way a baby does. Only then can you set your mind free.
How did you build your audience on social media?
I will focus on YouTube for this question. On YouTube it’s hard to get an audience just by uploading videos for 99% of musicians out there. You really must interact with the community.
I found by liking people’s videos they would like mine, by subscribing to channels I had interest in, others would subscribe to mine, by genuinely commenting on a performer’s work I would be getting feedback from them with loads of advice. My videos were watched by many producers and agencies around the globe, many live bands here in Toronto who contacted me, and countless individuals asking for advice on how I get my signature sound. My audience was becoming my fanbase. I also made many genuine friends from YouTube who live in countries all over the world. Over a decade later and we still keep in touch.
Over the years I also wrote a lot of blogs on various forums, where I attached links to my YouTube channel and other social media. Most of the forums are in the music industry, but I also write on forums in other industries. To date I had written thousands of posts, and in each one I had left a link to my social media sites in my signature. That brought in loads of traffic.
With the advent of initiating a presence on YouTube, Instagram, Bandcamp, Twitch.tv and my Personal Website, in addition, to doing interviews in worldwide magazine publications, my fanbase is increasing, and my social media is automatically growing by leaps and bounds.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.AdrianDSouzaRocks.com
- Instagram: www.Instagram.com/u2adrian1000
- Youtube: www.Youtube.com/u2adrian1000
- Other: www.electrical-storm.bandcamp.com
Image Credits
Adrian D’Souza