We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Eric Mitchell a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Eric, appreciate you joining 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?

I’ve been making a self-employed living via Eric Mitchell Audio for over a decade, now. This was never the intended destination, but ultimately where my path lead me. My original goal within music as a career was as an artist and for the first decade or so of that journey, I was strictly a guitarist in a band writing songs collectively. Teaching myself solo songwriting and thus all the other instruments, singing, production, engineering, etc. was all born of necessity along the way because for me it was more efficient to put the time into learning those things myself than it would be to put the time in working jobs I hated to make the money to pay other people to do it for me. Fast forward a couple decades later and here I am making a living from music as was the original dream, just filling some alternate roles.

From the day I decided to really turn this into a living, it was very scary leaving the stable income of a “normal” job. Ultimately, I chose to let the work speak for itself and I partnered with a few relevant artists (along with the notoriety of my own past musical endeavors) to do some work for them on the house to get my name as an engineer and the quality of my work out there. It just grew via word of mouth from there; I’ve never run ads.

In regards to the timelines and potentially speeding up the process, I think that’s especially difficult to quantify within creative careers. There’s an immense amount of sacrifice and time required, but even then being good doesn’t necessarily equate to work. You have to find your own niche and a means of spreading awareness towards your existence for potential clients to even consider you. I actually feel like putting a timeline on that, based on my experience anyways, is dangerous. By that I mean, my internal goalposts constantly had to be moved. I always thought I would be further along than I was and now after realizing it took 20+ years, my internal timeline was WAYYY off lol. But, all the times I had to manage those mental goalposts was demoralizing and required a lot of energy to overcome in those moments.

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 Eric Mitchell and I am the sole force behind Eric Mitchell Audio. I’m a multi-Billboard top 20 audio engineer and producer. I first got into music as a therapeutic activity playing guitar in heavy bands. I pursued this intensely all throughout high school and thereafter until eventually making a shift into electronic music where I toured for 5 years as 1/2 of a project called Nu.F.O. I was the main producer and engineer of all the music and covered secondary lead vocals. We had a lot of success with this project very quickly with only our 2nd show being at House of Blues and similar sized venues thereafter. Finding myself on such large stages as a relatively new vocalist and being a generally introverted person actually wound up leaving me feeling like I’d worked real hard to get to that point only to realize I wasn’t enjoying it. The stage fright was real and trying to sing when you wanna puke is hard haha. But, because of the success of the project and the engineering I was doing for my own music, this was the point I began pivoting away from performing and doing more of the audio work behind the scenes.

I’ve set myself apart by being an anomaly. I make the process easy and affordable with top results that usually cost significantly more. By that I mean, typically an artist must enlist the services of multiple people to cover all the bases, but I cover them all and 99% of the time, that’s what I’m doing for my clients. While most professionals have only dedicated enough time in their lives to become pro in a single lane, I have sacrificed immensely to have been afforded the time to do so in essentially every lane of this process. From songwriting, to session play on any instrument or vocals, to production and recording, mixing and mastering, live engineering and playback, web and graphic design, branding, video editing, audio and video workstation builds and beyond…I am literally a one stop shop whose work competes on the highest of levels in every aspect.

I think my most proud moments thus far have been making the transition from working for others to self employment, working with a band for the past 6 years that I listened to growing up and who inspired the musician I am today (glassjaw), working with and becoming a part of Head Automatica, working on some of the new Fever 333 material, winning 3rd place in the Mix With the Masters worldwide engineering contest out of over 600 entrants and launching a new audio software/hardware company called Kaptive Audio.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

This will be getting a bit uncomfortably honest; I touched on it before where I mentioned it requiring a lot of mental effort in those moments where I had to push my mental goalposts back…

For those non-creatives reading this (because I know creatives will already inherently understand), imagine that your dream doesn’t have a set path; you can’t just finish high school, get a degree and start your career. You have to work shit jobs that aren’t fulfilling, you don’t enjoy and don’t care about “working your way up the ladder” within to have the money to fund the pursuit of your actual creative dreams, but you also have to have the energy to put the proper time into those dreams on top of a full-time job.

So as a part of human nature, you start to set goals and those goals come with time expectations i.e. “I want to be doing xyz 5 years from now.” And so every day the motivational force driving you out of bed to the shit job and keeping you off the couch when you get home from it is the belief that if you put the time in and do the work, you will reach those goal posts. So when that 5 years comes and you’re nowhere near where you thought you’d be, then it’s 8 years, 10 years, 15, 20…the amount of times those moments come up and you have to fight dark thoughts and depression, at least for me, was brutally often. Sure, now that I “made it to the other side” it’s easy to look back and see how and why it was all worth it, but literally up until the moment that line was crossed, I didn’t know when I’d cross it if even at all. That’s a hard weight to live under, especially for such an extended time. You start questioning your entire life, the choices you made, the path you chose, etc…it can get dark.

So, I think anyone who finds success within the creative field simply has resilience in the DNA by default.

Can you share your view on NFTs? (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

I think NFT’s and blockchain technology have the potential to really change the landscape for artists and creatives. Say, for example, we consider a big problem like ticket scalping; if tickets were NFT’s and/or sales were tracked and verified on the blockchain, scalping could be eliminated or reduced exponentially. It also provides a means for artists to deliver content directly to fans and foster community around their art more easily. I know it’s early and lot of what has happened in that realm has been laden with scams, but I see the potential value proposition for the technology in general as a positive.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.ericmitchellaudio.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ericmitchellaudio
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ericmitchellaudio
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/EricNUFO
• Soundcloud: https://www.soundcloud.com/thedecorous