We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Dylan Heidt. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Dylan below.

Dylan, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Have you been able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen? Was it like that from day one? If not, what were some of the major steps and milestones and do you think you could have sped up the process somehow knowing what you know now?

Initially, I started both mixing and producing music out of necessity for myself and the artists around me; I started doing both of those things on a daily basis around the time that I was thirteen years old. I grew up about thirty minutes outside of the Twin Cities and was one of the first, if not the only, person in my area to have a solid recording studio (and I use the term studio loosely here) at home.

As time progressed and I got better at both mixing and producing music, a lot of my clients began to bring me more work, either through word of mouth, or by simply bringing their friends, acquaintances, etc… to the sessions that we were having at my house around that time.

As I got older and my online presence began to grow, I was able to leverage platforms like Instagram, Twitter, etc… to start mixing and producing music for artists remotely that I had met and established relationships with online. Whether I was living in Minnesota, or California at the time…I had clients everywhere, from New York, to Florida, Ohio, Georgia, Tennessee, etc… the list goes on.

Having established myself so well online and looking at the sheer number of projects that I was both mixing and producing on at the time, I quickly realized that I didn’t need to be working a traditional job to support myself and pay my bills anymore and for a span of about 4…maybe 5 years…I was living solely off of my ability to mix and produce music, which obviously was an incredible feeling, because that’s all that I had ever really wanted to do with my life.

Nowadays, I’ve stepped back considerably from the mixing side of music and focused my attention solely on the production and songwriting side of things and while that decision ultimately caused me to take a pretty big hit financially, it has made me infinitely more happy than I was when mixing music was a large part of my business.

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

To really delve into my career as a music producer, songwriter and musician as a whole, I always like to start at the beginning and tell people that I grew up in a home that probably valued music a little more than most others. Some of my earliest memories are of my parents playing records around the house; everything from what most people would call Classic Rock of the 60’s and 70’s, to the iconic Motown sound that essentially shaped the R&B/Soul genre as we know it today, Reggae from the likes of Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, all the way to Country classics from Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Marty Robbins and more; there was never an absence of music in my life as a child.

In elementary school, I began playing the guitar and shortly thereafter I taught myself how to play the bass guitar as well. I don’t really recall when the first time that I got behind a drum kit was, but once the drums entered my life, I knew that as soon as I felt comfortable as a drummer, I needed to become at least semi-proficient as a pianist as well…and that’s exactly what I did.

Fast forward now to high school, I had already discovered and fallen deeply in love with both Hip-Hop and Electronic Dance Music (EDM), but I had yet to try my hand at learning how to produce (electronically), or sample and I knew that if I could do both of those things well, I might actually be able to make a go at having some sort of career within the music industry as a songwriter and producer. Through much trial and error, I eventually reached a point (shortly before graduating from high school) where I felt comfortable with what I was doing as a producer in both the Hip-Hop and EDM genres and began to release some of what I had been working on (tirelessly) for months on end…thankfully, many of those releases were incredibly well received and some of them were even picked up by media outlets like EDM.com, ThatDrop.com and some others.

Realistically, without those first handful of EDM releases getting the attention that they did, I don’t know what the trajectory of my career within the music industry would look like today. The opportunities that I was presented with and the doors that were opened for me, based solely on the success of those early EDM releases, was invaluable.

Present day, most of my work is that of a music producer, studio musician and songwriter, although I have been on nationwide tours in the past as a guitarist as well. I’ve produced for and co-written songs with artists in nearly every genre under the sun, but my most well-known work lives within the realms of Neo-Soul, R&B, Reggae and Hip-Hop.

In 2023, I launched my very own solo project (artist name Lost Gold) which lives exclusively on the BandCamp platform at the moment. I’ve released 20 records to date and am aiming to release another 20 (at least) throughout the course of 2024.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

I think the main thing that has helped me to build my reputation within my market is that I always overdeliver when it comes to whatever it is that I’m working on for my clients. When you make the decision to work with me, I’m never satisfied with, “good enough”, whatever I’m delivering to you has to meet a certain expectation that I’ve set for myself and my work, I know that my work is something that I’ll have to stand behind and live with forever…especially because my work is going to outlive me and I know that to lower, or lessen, those expectations would be to go against everything that I believe in as not only a creative, but as a human being in general.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

When I was coming up as a musician in my local scene, I really did not enjoy what was going on in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis/St. Paul), whether it was me looking at things from a musical point of view, or from the experiences that I had had in the past with certain local musicians. Eventually, I reached a point where I wanted nothing to do with what was going on at home and that led to me basically leapfrogging the entire local music scene…something that I would recommend no artist coming up do now…but at the time I had thankfully built a large and strong enough community outside of Minnesota to where I was still able to get plenty of work as a session musician and tour with some of the bands/artists that I was working with at the time outside of the Twin Cities. I still don’t have the greatest relationships with a lot of the bands/artists that are out now in Minnesota, but I have made an effort to reach out and play shows, do studio work, etc… with the ones that I am on good terms with.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://lostgold.bandcamp.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/prodbylostgold/
• Twitter: https://x.com/prodbylostgold_

Image Credits

Kirk Cedric
Brayden Mills