We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Darius Hatcher a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Darius, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?
So I started out early at the age of 8. My parents made my brother and I take lessons, I was learning guitar and he was learning drums. We had a lot of fun playing but neither of us really took it too seriously which was met with disapproval from our dad. He made us stick with it and my brother and I eventually went in different directions with it. He quit and I wanted to keep going but it wasn’t until high school, when I was playing in my school band, that I started to take things seriously. I remember mapping out what I had to learn to level up on guitar with some guidance from my band teacher and after doing the work for the first time I remember something just clicking in my brain. I had already been losing interest in my other hobbies and things and the world of music proved to be so expansive that one day I just woke up and knew I just wanted to be practicing. So that’s I did. I spent hours on my guitar learning songs I liked and I even began to teach myself piano through YouTube. I would come home from school, get my homework done, and just spend hours in my basement practicing piano or in my room practicing guitar. It was all I wanted to do really and I developed pretty quickly after that. I don’t think I could’ve sped up the process by practicing for longer or anything. I think I could’ve had developed even quicker by having a teacher showing WHAT to practice because a lot of my time was spent doing what I thought I should be learning. But the building blocks of the technique was unclear to me so I had to figure it out for myself. I think the most essential skill that I developed during this time for me was self discipline when it came to my craft. Spending so much time learning to do what I do by myself, I now know what it takes to become fluent in something and that knowledge definitely transfers to different parts of my life too. When I need some discipline I have a way of tapping into that a bit and focusing harder.
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?
My name is Darius Hatcher, also known as Sariud. I am a producer, guitarist and rapper from Philadelphia. I enjoy just learning and delving into different forms of art and disciplines for the sake of exploring. And even incorporating that knowledge into what I do as a musician. I’ve been playing guitar for about 13 years now, which I learned early in life through a teacher. Im a self taught producer, starting in GarageBand and now being fluent in Logic, Ableton and Protools. I make and sell beats and also offer my services as a guitarist. I can sit in for live bands for almost all genres and styles of music. I feel like my style of beats and sampling sets my music apart. It has a very bold and eclectic feel to it that I think can be instantly recognizable. I’m most proud of the fact that I’m able to create music in such a unique way and want to share that with people. I want people to know that when you work with me you get a specific tailored experience and a very different energy than what you hear from most rappers/producers nowadays. I want to be able to create new sounds and push new ground on whatever I’m working on and make things that make people stop and think about what they’re listening to, lyrics-wise or sound-wise. I’m planning on dropping my first project soon and I have so much more in the works and I’m ready to show people what I can do in a larger form than just single songs.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
I think the most rewarding aspect of what I do is how fulfilling it is to show your work and have people like it. For me I’m such a shut in and perfectionist when it comes to my music that when I finish something (if I ever do lol) it really feels super close and personal to me. It’s really like your critiquing who I am when I’m given some criticism on my work. So when people like my work it can really be a great feeling, let’s me know that my work has appeal outside of my own head and that’s what I want ultimately. I want my work to be given the platform to be critiqued and interpreted by people because that’s how I see art. It’s timelessness is ultimately about the ways in which people can take it to mean different things.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
I feel like there’s already so much being done at the consumer level of art scenes and things like that. Artists are working hard to be seen, and I feel like people who take in that art are doing more than ever to adorn and patronize said artists now too. I think as a society, a thriving Artist community lies in the hands of larger entities and corporations with power in different respective industries to give different people a chance. I look around in Philadelphia and there are so many amazing artists and minds here, ready to work their hardest. A lot them are comparable to the some of the best artists with the biggest platforms I think. There’s so much untapped potential in places like these and I think the people with all the power need to tap into these kinds of places more often. Distribute the playing field evenly and give smaller, more local artists a chance to show the world what they have. I promise if that happened, the landscape and even zeitgeist of art in so many different places would be so different. And different for the better, stepping away from all these over saturated markets and oligopoly in industries across the board.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @sariuddd
- Twitter: @Sariuddd
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@sariud4771
- Other: TikTok: @sariudddd