We were lucky to catch up with Bas Janssen recently and have shared our conversation below.
Bas, appreciate you joining us today. What do you think it takes to be successful?
A lot of things, if not everything, in life is about balance. Moreover, that doesn’t mean there is a perfect balance, that balance ebbs and flows and tips one way then comes back the other way, so everything I’ve learned about “success” is to be taken with a grain of salt and with a lot of self awareness to know what phase you’re in in your career and which swaying of the balance makes most sense in your case. I say you need balance because 1 person will advise ‘Say yes to every opportunity.’ and someone else will advise ‘Know your worth.’ Then you’ll get the advice, ‘Be the hardest worker in the room.’ and ‘Be a team player.’ and someone else will say, ‘Health is wealth’ and, ‘No job is worth your happiness and sanity.’ These are all very contradictory statements, but all valid at the right time and phase in your career. There are many phases in one’s career and I can’t say I know them all by any means, seeing as I still feel like I’m rather early in my journey, but let me see what advise I can offer. The first phase I’ll call ‘newbie’. This doesn’t have to be straight out of college and it doesn’t end after a certain age. It applies any time you’re new to a city, skill or scene. This is the phase where I’d say you want to say yes to every opportunity, unpaid gigs if you have to, gigs where you might feel your capabilities stretched, you’re in unfamiliar territories. But in this phase you need to meet as many people as you can, be seen by as many people as you can, experience every type of gig possible in this field and all the different crowds and types of people you can be around. This is for a few different reasons, but it’s mostly centered around learning. You want to meet and be seen by as many people as you can to get your name and skills out there, that hopefully your name starts floating around the city and people might reach out to you for more gigs instead of you having to find every gig you get yourself. On the flip side, you’re making your own rolodex of musicians if you need to put together your own bands, but also learn a bunch of different personalities, styles, ways of working that you can decide for yourself if you like or not and choose how you’d like to move forward with people you didn’t have the best time with. Move forward knowing their red flags, or keep your working relationship to a certain level being able to see these or those probable problems, or just decide that person and that kind of person I can tell I don’t want to work with, it just creates problems for me. And that’s fine! It doesn’t have to be anyone’s fault, it’s just contrasting personalities. Also, taking gigs that are outside of your comfort zone obviously stretch you to become better at your craft. That sink or swim mentality is also a muscle to train that can save you on gigs down the road and improve your flexibility as a musician and working professional. Similarly, it shows you all the different avenues that you could delve down with your skill set and can broaden your horizons, increase your versatility and well roundedness as a musician and again teach you your options that affords you the opportunity to work out which avenue is your favorite and see if you can blossom it to your own road, town or state! This open mindedness led me to being the head engineer at a Nigerian church consulting for all the other local Nigerian churches that noticed our great setup as well as how I ended up engineering for Young Stoner Life Records deep in the heart of Atlanta, GA and how I joined a Brazilian drumming group named Grooversity that I ended up performing with at Carnegie Hall. When I was in orchestra in Cambridge, England practicing my rudiments on the drums and scales on the marimba, I never would’ve guessed I’d end up doing any of those things, but you don’t have to know! You can pave your own path with a lot of trial and error and creating as many options for yourself to choose from. Lastly, being an easy to work with team player that goes above and beyond can make a huge difference in this phase. You’re just trying to get your foot in as many doors as possible so that you have many options of which you choose to open and being easy to work with and very useful can easily get people thinking about having you around more often! Now you hopefully have a lot of random opportunities that keep you busy and are hopefully adding up together for you to be able to pay rent every month consistently. With this, I pride myself on my versatility and having multiple skills in my arsenal, which can be annoying sometimes when I load my car with my drums one day then get home and have to take it all out to put my sound gear in the next day, have to remember to bring my laptop and hard drive with me to finish a mix on the break, then come home late at night to take it all out and grab all my percussion gear for the following day, instead of just being a drummer that could’ve left the drum set in the car all weekend! But this keeps me more consistently busy that when drumming is slowing down, live sound gigs pick up and then I get some more studio engineering clients and then mixing records or recording drums can fit in the middle because they’re all done remotely and I can create my own schedule.
But as I was saying, now you have consistency with work and you’re stringing the money together. Now you can start acting on your mental notes you’ve been taking between all the people you’ve met and different opportunities you’ve experienced. You can now choose to start saying no to gigs you don’t like, whether they’re the non paying gigs or just the least fun or the most work and feel the least rewarding. This will be when you’re looking to pick your lanes. This will help you narrow your focus to nurture your greater passions in the music industry, whether it’s down to one of your skills or a certain genre of music or a certain type of gig. Then you can focus your efforts to snowballing your opportunities to bettering your craft in that particular passion, improving your clientele, work and pay. The further you dive down this, the more selective you have to be with the work you take on, the rates you set and/or will accept and this is where ‘knowing your worth’ starts to come into play. You know the quality of work you produce is better than the pool of talent you remember being in when you charged this much and the budgets your new clientele are working in should mean they have the means to give you this much. Similarly, you don’t want x level of clients when you used to charge this much, you want the caliber of clients in this new price range because you know the headaches that come with your previous price range and you see that not happening anymore in this new price range etc etc etc. And the goal starts to become ‘working less and making more’. You’ve paid your dues and you put in the hard hours, it’s time to start building a life where you see growth in your bank account, rather than just enough to make rent and pay for gas and groceries and you want to build in time to enjoy yourself and spend time with friends, so if you can make enough money from your weekend corporate gigs and a hand full of mixes, that means most of the working week is available to have time for the gym, or spend a day in the week with friends and watch a movie or play some golf or something. So you don’t feel the need to add up every $50 gig, 3 times a day every day to feel like you’re doing something!
Then it just becomes snowballing your relationships, resources and opportunities until you’re at the pinnacle of your field and then you decide you’re not fulfilled anymore and venture down a change in field and start your own business for example because you’re making enough money drumming on world tours for big artists etc but owning your own company with this new idea that you believe has the vision to scale way bigger to make even way more money. And then you head down that rabbit hole taking every opportunity to get your company going even though there’s so much capital you have to throw in and your predictions don’t make money for such a long time, but you keep gigging to make enough money to throw back in the company, but only the gigs that pay you the rate you’re worth so that it’s a suitable margin for your business capital and you’re not stuck on the road too much to foster your business baby. And you just keep spiraling that balance. This balance trajectory is not linear. I’m currently in a period where I’m having an easy time finding live sound work, but a hard time finding drumming work, so there’s been times where I’ll take the lesser paying gig because it’s a drumming gig because that’s what I’m more passionate about fostering and growing. So for my drumming I’ll be willing to be more in the ‘newbie’ phase, but live sound work I’ll be more picky because I know the workload and pay rates I am worth and I can get, so I am afforded the opportunity to say no, knowing that something better can easily take it’s places given my experience and footing within the community.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Well I’m a drummer and engineer! I’m from the Netherlands originally, but I began drumming when I was 8 years old, we had just moved to Cambridge, England and I think on the plane ride over, I watched the movie ‘Drumline’ featuring Nick Cannon and decided I needed to start playing the drums! Now that I was in England, I didn’t do any marching drumming like the movie, but instead I was taken down a classical path. I was playing at the back of orchestras and school jazz bands etc. That expanded through tuned percussion and timpani and all the like and nearing the end of high school I felt like should push myself and audition for the Junior Guildhall School of Music in London and luckily I was accepted. This was a huge boost in confidence for me and bred the belief that I could continue to excel with music. The next step was applying for college. I applied to classical conservatories in England, but I was finding myself being drawn more and more to drumming contemporary music. As an alternate option, I decided to apply for Berklee College of Music to see if the contemporary route had any viability for me. Luckily, I was accepted to Berklee as well and I tried my hand at the American route. Berklee was a dream experience for me, getting my hands to work in a huge variety of different situations and opportunities. Playing with a lot of different musicians from all over the world, different genres, different instrumentations etc. This is where I also dual majored in Music Production & Engineering. I didn’t know if I had a great future in it, but I was interested and Berklee just built fancy new studios I wanted to spend time in. I just tried it and saw whether it stuck. A short 4 and a half years later I graduated Cum Laude with a dual major in Performance and Music Production & Engineering and a lot of short nights of sleep. With that expensive paper in hand, I decided to take my talents to Venice Beach. I moved to LA and begun the journey figuring out how to adult. Within a year I was lucky enough to be head engineer at KIDinaKORNER record label owned by producer superstar Alex Da Kid as well as being able to attend the MTV Movie Awards as a monitor engineer for Chloe x Halle for their amazing performance. And now with over 5 years behind me in LA, I have had the great fortune of working for churches, recording and mixing for artists from all around the world and getting to play drums and run front of house in the some of the best venues and resorts in the greater LA area. I even got the chance to take a 6 month hiatus in Atlanta, GA where I had the good fortune of meeting and working for the biggest family in Hip Hop, Young Stoner Life Records. Those countless nights of watching the genius minds of Young Thug and Gunna work as well as pushing myself as a recording/mixing engineer with Unfoonk, Lil Keed and Bslime to name a few. All while making sure I made it to the Covanent Church on time as their Head of Audio and Front of House Engineer for the Gospel Choice Music Awards.
Having worked with names such as AJR, Cody Simpson, Dana Williams, Sexton, Arnetta Johnson, Niu Raza, Charlie Heat, Derek Dixie and brands such as LIFEWTR, Prime Video, Aveda, OPI and Ethika has afforded me the opportunity to open my own studio now in partnership with Music Mayhem called Camelot Studios. A facility fit with industry standard equipment from brands like Neve, Avid, Universal Audio and supported by Monheim Microphones and On Stage Stands. This facility is perfect for tracking vocals at the highest level, but also recording a band. As I said, I’m a drummer so I’m going to make sure I take care of my fellow comrades!
I pride myself on a wide, versatile musical knowledge and proactive perspective to how I work. Having been on many sides of many different musical situations, at the front of the stage, back of the stage, engineering at the computer, assisting an engineer, being in the booth, I know what people have expected of me in all those different situations and I’ve take mental notes of what I have and haven’t liked from other people I’ve worked with in the positions that I also have experience in. So I pride myself on thinking in every perspective I can when making decisions or, if it’s just one on one work, always thinking ahead in the other person’s perspective to fulfill their needs and keep the session moving and the energy up and keep a positive team atmosphere going.
So please reach out to me at @Radioactive_8reakfast on Instagram for any booking needs at Camelot Studios and I will personally take care of you!
Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?
I believe it’s word of mouth. That may not be the fastest way, but I believe it’s the most authentic way to grow solid clientele of repeat customers. This can go hand in hand with social media through personal accounts, tagging, shoutouts on posts and stories, but obviously running ads as well can be effective. I base this off a restaurant opened by Manny Marroquin. He is one of the world’s top mixing engineers in history and through the pandemic he decided he wanted to open his own fine dining restaurant. This restaurant happens to also be amazingly acoustically treated, with unheard of noise cancellation technology and a state of the art performance stage for live music that is fully connected to his recording studio next door to make live albums of these performances at his restaurant.
Since opening, his restaurant has had no issues with bookings, clientele and shortage of performing artists. This is all with him admitting that he never spent any time, effort of money on marketing. He just has such a solid network, reputation and community he’s built in his mixing career that everyone knew, if he put anywhere near as much effort into the restaurant as his mixing career, it would be a very good restaurant. As such, he has performance residencies with Robin Thicke, Sabrina Claudio and Allen Stone; serve premier class food and drinks and have no shortage of customers.
With that being said, that’s what I hold in the back of my mind to hold this philosophy. Build it and they will come. People want to find something they like and go there or do that again and again instead of taking the risk of trying something new and not liking it. Therefore word of mouth breeds solid clients because their trusted source told them to trust my studio and they trust their trusted source’s opinion over that of a cold ad where there could be misled by pictures etc.
Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?
As I am from the Netherlands, that means I’m an immigrant. With that I’ve had different complications or hurdles with immigration that are often stressful and not secure or straight forward. That even culminated in a time where I had visa applications rejected and I had to go back home to move in with my parents while I was still renting an apartment and had all my belongings in LA. I didn’t know when or how I was going to get back to LA or if I would have to find a music career in the Netherlands. I was still mixing a few records while I was home, but I had to figure out a solution on how to get back to my career in the US. Luckily I did and I live to fight another day!
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/radioactive_8reakfast/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/radioactivebreakfast