We were lucky to catch up with Chris Zer0 recently and have shared our conversation below.
Chris, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s something you believe that most people in your industry (or in general) disagree with?
I feel most people in my field disagree with the usage of samples or loops. In my opinion, good music is good music, regardless of the use of a sample. Proper credit must be given and fees must be paid, of course. I feel that hip-hop (my primary genre in music production) was built off of sampling, so for someone to tell me “You aren’t a real music producer. You just threw some drums on a loop.” bothers me sometimes. If that’s the case, then I just made one of the coolest tracks ever, throwing drums on a LOOP. Now what? I once had someone email me about my beat services, saying that one of my beats was “super lazy” because I used a popular 80s song as the sample for the beat. He called it “unoriginal” and “basic.” A few months later that same beat gets used in a popular animation YouTube creator’s video and the same guy emails me again, asking about the beat. I didn’t respond.
Chris, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. Detroit, with the rich music history that it has, exposed me to all types of music. Hip-hop, gospel, r&b, jazz, etc. As a kid, I always loved music and had a bit of a sensitive ear for it, but I never fully explored it until I graduated high school. The summer after I graduated high school, I downloaded this program called FL Studio on the laptop my grandma got me (love you granny!), watched and studied a lot of music production techniques and theory, and haven’t looked back. Currently, I provide full music production, as well as light engineering services for artists, content creators, or just creatives in general. What I think sets me apart is my willingness to do whatever I want, honestly. To me , music is all about expressing creativity, and I want that to shine through in my work.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
One of the biggest lessons I had to unlearn was that nothing will be “perfect.” No matter how many sounds you may use, how much time you put in on a particular track, it will never be perfect. Even to this day, I’m still unlearning that. I always try to remind myself of this quote: “Don’t make it perfect. Make it you.”
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
I remember back around late 2015, I submitted on of my beats to this beat critique video another producer was doing. I thought pretty highly of him, so I really valued his input. He played my beat on his stream and basically said it was horrible. The mix was muddy, my sound selection was bad, etc. I was crushed. Up to that point, I had never had someone give me criticism about my music like that. I was stuck on it for days and for the life of me, couldn’t figure out where his criticism was stemming from. The beat sounded really good to me at the time. A few more days go by and I’m listening to the beat a bunch of times, then it hit me. I can hear the errors and mistakes I had made a lot more clearly. So I go back in and literally remix the beat. Raised and lowered some faders, equalized and tuned some sounds, switched up the structure, etc. By that point it was a completely different beat. I submitted this new beat to another beat critique and he loved it.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chris.zer0/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChrisZer0_
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCg26B8KZRN_q3aQzEbRuNnQ
- Other: Business Email: [email protected]