We were lucky to catch up with Anders Johanson recently and have shared our conversation below.

Anders, appreciate you joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

I’ve been playing music since a very young age, but around the age of 15 or 16 I really started to take it seriously. When I was first starting out there wasn’t a lot of quality resources for someone getting started, or at least none that I could easily find. Many of the skills and techniques I had to learn came through experimentation mixed with a good amount of stubbornness, but the barrier to entry was certainly there. On top of struggling to find resources for leaning how to make the music, many of the sounds available for musicians to use came with price tags that just seemed astronomical to me at the time (and still do). A lot of times I’d spend a couple hundred dollars on something that I ended up not using in the ways I had anticipated, and that was a huge bummer for young me.

Now that I’m several years into my career as a musician, I can confidently say I’ve watched hundreds upon hundreds of YouTube tutorials, read through pages and pages of forum posts and Reddit threads, and poured over more articles and blog posts than I could ever try to count. Not all of them were helpful in the ways that I was looking for, but there were plenty that propelled me further and answered my questions. I felt like the time had come for me to create the hub that my younger self was looking for. Not only am I compiling all of these helpful resources into one place to make the website that I would’ve been thrilled to find when I was starting out, I’m also designing sounds and sound packs that are useful and affordable – something I certainly would’ve been thankful for at the beginning of my journey.

In this day and age with so much content being created from thousands of incredible creators, the saturation of input almost creates a different barrier to entry in that there is now too much of it. My goal with Field Tone Audio from the resources side is to pool together all of the various posts, videos, guides, and tutorials that I have found to be particularly helpful so that other musicians and producers will be able to find the answers to their questions quickly. In addition, I’ll be using years of audio recording and processing techniques t0 create useful sounds at a low price point. This way people won’t have to sacrifice quality for affordability, or spend a lot of money on something they hardly use.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My name is Anders Johanson, I am a film composer and music producer from Austin, Texas, and I am the founder of Field Tone Audio. I’ve been playing music for about 15 years, and in that time I’ve toured the United States playing music in bands, I’ve composed music for some high-profile YouTubers and Twitch Streamers as well as for films that have won awards in American film festivals, and I’ve spent more than a fair share of time reading blogs, watching videos, and playing with sound.

Rather than just sit with this information and knowledge that I’ve collected over those years, I decided the best thing I could do would be to give back to the music community. This will be expressed in two ways – products and resources.

First, from the products side. As I’ve gone on my journey as a musician I’ve spent money on things that I don’t use, on sample packs and sound libraries that only end up having a handful of useful sounds, on things with confusing interfaces full of features that don’t benefit the flow of creating music, the list goes on. I know that there are many times when you want to load up a sound and have it work without needing to dig through presets and menus. Field Tone Audio creates products that do exactly that. We make quality sounds at an affordable price point that work with musicians, not against them, which ultimately leads to more people having access to good sounds that allow them to make great music.

Second, from the resources side. My ultimate goal is to provide answers to questions – even if the answers come from another company. I want Field Tone Audio to be a company that points people to other places where somebody else may have done something really well. A lot of companies are inward-focused and want to sell you on their products and their platform, but Field Tone Audio wants to help you find what you’re looking for, even if that means buying a product from someone else or adding a view, subscription, or follow to another creator. We won’t be afraid to tell people “Hey this creator makes cool stuff and they made a really useful thing that solves this problem, go check them out.” In fact, that’s a lot of what will be happening on our Resources page. I would have loved to have stumbled upon something like that at the beginning of my journey.

By doing these things through our products and resources, Field Tone Audio will develop into a central hub for musicians and producers. People will be able to find useful sounds from Field Tone Audio or get pointed in the direction of another company that might fit them better. They’ll be able to find curated resources that help improve workflow or solve a problem. Everything I wish I had when I was scrolling through pages of forum posts at the start of my music career.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I think the thing that most illustrates my resilience in this entire process is the fact that this even exists in the first place. When I was starting to put all of this together, I didn’t know how to do the majority of what was necessary to take it from idea to reality. I so badly wanted to provide this space to creators that I spent hours and hours learning to do things that I had little to no experience in at the beginning. I had never written a line of code in my life, and now I have developed several fully-featured products that took a lot of coding to make possible. I had never built a brand identity or learned how to make a cohesive, multi-dimensional entity out of one written concept, but I was able to figure out how to do that. I’ve never been much of a graphic designer, but I learned how to do it for this.

This entire platform comes from the “if they wanted to, they would” mentality. I craved something like Field Tone Audio when I was a young musician. I wanted to make it, so I did.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

I’m sure I’m not alone in that there have been times when I’ve gotten really excited about discovering something new, only to learn that the initial capital f0r the business came from a source that the average person would not have access to. It’s hard to be encouraged about an idea when the cost of making it happen is insurmountable, and the people who came before you had some extra help from a connection or circle that not everyone has. Those people are still doing amazing things, and I’m sure we’d all be thankful to be in their shoes and have supporters like that, but it just isn’t the case for many. I’m extremely proud to say that everything about this platform is a result of my own hard work and the things I did pay money for were paid for without any external assistance. (The only exception being a Patreon page where people contribute money monthly, though that amount currently is only enough to pay monthly web hosting fees.)

The idea of bootstrapping something on your own is a nice sentiment for sure, but it also comes with an extremely helpful perspective. I now know a lot of every aspect of what running this business will require, so when the time comes to one day expand my team, I’m familiar with a large percentage of what goes into their role. I know what will be expected of designers and coders, what will have to happen with social media content creation and editing, and especially what goes into product development and design.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.fieldtoneaudio.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fieldtoneaudio
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fieldtoneaudio
• Twitter: https://x.com/fieldtoneaudio
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@fieldtoneaudio