We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Alec Durand a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Alec thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?
in 2014, it hit me like a bolt of lightning. Form a young age I was making art and creating things all the time. I’ve been doing sketches and drawings from my earliest memory. As elementary-aged child I got into formal art lessons and also took a few years of piano and guitar. While I enjoyed the feeling of success I got from progressing in my music lessons, it felt too much like school and there wasn’t any creativity happening. I was being classically trained so I only ever learned scales, theory, and wrote memorization type stuff. I didn’t make it far enough to learn songwriting or creating music of my own, so ultimately I quit out of boredom. As a young kid I loved listening to music and was exposed to an eclectic mix of genres and styles by both Mom and Dad. Dad had a Merle Haggard tape on Cassette we would listen to, among other things on the radio such as Three Doors Down – Kryptonite (one of my childhood favorites), Eminem – Slim Shady, and Kid Rock – Bawitdaba to name a few. I still remember dad manually turning the volume down for the curse words. Fast forward a few years into my teens and I had collected a few CD’s: Guns n’ Roses – Appetite For Destruction (from my Mom’s old CD collection), Maroon 5 – Songs About Jane (a gift from Mom), and a burned CD of about 15 A Day To Remember Songs that a high school friend made for me. I also had several different iPods and went through the era of pirated music through LimeWire, Napster, and other sketchy music downloading services. By the time I was in high school my tastes were all over the place, from Rap to Country to Classic Rock to Pop and everything in between. I didn’t really have a specific genre that I stuck to, I just loved great music in general. In my later high school years I discovered Heavy Metal, and I went through a phase of listening to exclusively metal music. This was about the time that I went to my first ever live concert, Shinedown opening up for Avenged Sevenfold. As I was heading into college I randomly stumbled upon some of the most influential EDM tracks of our time. I saw the music videos for Skrillexes “First of the Year” and “Bangarang” on Youtube. Initially I thought these videos and the music behind them were super cool, but it didn’t click for me that this was actually a real genre of music, I just thought they were some really neat videos. This brings us to 2014 where I got a 1 year Pandora One subscription for Christmas. Somehow, Pandora recommended “UKF Dubstep” radio and “Monstercat” radio, two of the biggest EDM record labels still to this day. Once I heard the energy, uniqueness, variety, and thrill of EDM I was instantly hooked. I was enthralled with the way that the music elicited such a roller coaster of emotion with every single song, and the way they created music with instruments and sounds I had never heard before was awe-inspiring. I would listen to my Pandora EDM stations for hours every single day. The “lightning-bolt” moment came when I was doing some research on the artists I was listening to and found out that these songs were being created entirely from just a laptop. It was an earth shattering realization to learn that I didn’t need expensive gear, expertise with and instrument, or a million-dollar studio to make music just like the songs I was so captivated by. In that moment, I knew I had to do this. I knew I had to get a laptop and the software and I knew had to become a prolific EDM producer. This specific form of art spoke to me like none had ever done before and the only way to dive deeper into those emotions was to learn the craft and express myself and my creativity to the fullest through these songs. Almost 10 years later, completely self taught, I’ve signed record deals, won multiple remix contests, and amassed over 100,000 streams across all platforms. There are no signs of slowing down and more and bigger opportunities are constantly coming my way.
Alec, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I answered how I got into this craft in Question 1. I create several different thing. I make emotional, high-energy electronic dance music that is intended to be played out in live DJ sets. I also make digital art and videos to go along with the music. Regretfully I have not come very far in the visual digital art aspect yet but it is a work in progress. Secondly I offer music production lessons for all genres of music producers. I mix, master and produce music as a service as well. Through a combination of producing and audio engineering, as well as coaching on these subjects, I help self-taught music producers accelerate their learning curve greatly and learn to get the sound they hear in their head coming out through the speakers in as short a time as possible. As a completely self-taught producer, I had countless pitfalls, mistakes, and confusion throughout my journey. Knowing what I know now, one of the greatest things I can offer to my coaching clients is showing them the most direct path to their goals and helping them avoid all of the confusion and mistakes I made when honing my craft. Additionally, I offer my clients the “sound” they’re looking for. As a result of my skillset I have a highly trained ear and I can reverse engineer any sound. So I am not limited to EDM and as long as I have a reference track as a starting place I can producer, mix, and master any style of music. The thing I am most proud of is how I started from absolutely zero knowledge and skill in music production and built what I have built today, purely from deciding to never give up no matter what. I used discipline, drive, and sheer force of will to put in the hours needed to become an adept music producer and audio engineer. No one made me do this or even cared if I did, I just did it because my heart was so pulled in the direction of being a music maker that I knew I would regret it forever if I didn’t give it my all and try and make something of it.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
The first EDM concert I ever attended changed me. The feeling of enormous bass in my chest, the far-out and trippy visuals that coincided with the music so perfectly, the build-up of tension and the release of the bass drop that caused the hold crowd to bounce in unison. Is was almost a religious experience that caused my hair to stand on end and my mind to swim with possibility of what audio-visual experiences have yet to be created. That feeling and that night set me on my journey to create music, emotion, and experiences for others. My mission is to give that same feeling of inspiration and wonder back to as many people as I possibly can. I’m forever grateful to the artists who inspired me to do what I do, and the best thing I feel that I can do with my art is to do the exact same for others who are in the same place I was 10 years ago.
Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?
The resources that I didn’t discover for years but that accelerated my learning and success more than anything else were song breakdowns from EDM artists that I aspired to emulate. Before I found this, I would just search random topics or questions on youtube or google and find whatever articles or videos popped up. There was useful information there, but it was disparate, non-specific, and most of the time not the information I needed. What I was left with was a giant soup of about 10% relevant information and 90% confusing B.S. that wasn’t necessary for the style of music I wanted create. The lesson here is there is no better way to learn a thing than by watching someone great at the thing do the exact thing. For example, if you wan’t to learn how to hit a baseball, you don’t need to be learning about which cleats are the best, or how the fields are conditioned, or what length and type of bat to purchase, you just need to watch a professional hit a baseball and explaing it to you over and over again. Then go out and try it for yourself! Watching successful EDM artists who made songs like I wanted to make, make the songs in real time and explain it as they go taught me more and got me better than any other type of learning. If there’s any skill at all that you want, the best thing to do is identify an individual who is doing that exact thing well, and only learn from them. But keep in mind learning alone is not enough. Watching and learning is about 20-30% of your improvement. The other 70-80% is doing. Once you’ve identified a source of knowledge for your craft, make sure to immediately go and do the thing that you just learned. Spend about 30% of your time learning but the other 70% should be physically implementing the the skills you just learned. It’s very easy to get stuck just reading book after book or watching endless tutorials but never actually doing the work necessary to improve your skillset. Avoid this trap at all cost!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.nembusstudios.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nembusofficial/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NembusOfficial
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@nembusmusic
- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4h7o1sBdsJkEkGNRZuJlhn?si=Z2cVmi3ERbqQRNr2ekPTsQ
Image Credits
Russell Alexander Caldwell Durand (Me)