We were lucky to catch up with Hi-keif recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Hi-keif thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

This is an interesting question, as I have a tendency to learn things and forget the process or what it was like to not know once I do. I can recall that it has been a lot of just doing it — practice shall we say. I used to spend time taking bits and pieces of information for YouTube or Instagram and applying them until they made sense to me, and even invested in a music producer online course. Although, I often went into those wanting to learn something specific and not really being taught, so it went back to more “just doing it” by experimenting and practice. So going back, I would’ve spent more time just seeing “what does this do?” and critically listening to train my ear from a much earlier stage.

With that said, listening has always been the most essential skill — in music, and in life in general. As well as being able to not be emotionally affected by feedback, whether positive, negative, or none at all.

The biggest obstacle that stood in the way of learning more has always been having other responsibilities, whether school or occupation. Not being able to fully invest in a craft by devoting all “work” time to it can put a dent in inspiration and extend the timeline for mastery. I’ve done a pretty good job of mitigating that, although I do believe my skill set now after 7 years could have been reached much earlier in a perfect world scenario of being able to focus solely on music production. There is also a large degree of gatekeeping in the industry, which has been somewhat broken open by online courses and other resources, which has become a double-edged sword in itself. Either work under an established producer for free and learn similar to an internship/apprenticeship or pay for each upsell to get more information from a course.

Hi-keif, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I had a strange path into music production. I’ve always been drawn to music and heavily influenced by it having grown up in the church choir, being in band in middle school and learning guitar in high school. I even hosted a concert in my duplex for my friend who was a rapper at the time (and a M.D. now lol). It wasn’t until grad school after years of my high school friends joking about making a mixtape that I wanted NO part of, that I took their joke seriously and bought a bunch of music production tools with my refund money. Low and behold, they were not serious and I didn’t know any artists who were, so I just using my self to practice. Now here I am, after years of exploring the industry, I found that production and composition is what drives me the most, and that servicing clients that need music for the media productions suits me more than working with artists or being an artist myself.

I offer personalized, made-from-scratch sounds for Podcasts, YouTube channels, TV&Film. My service can be considered “white glove” in that I handle all of the aspects from composition, mixing and mastering, and editing (when desired) to fit music into a production. I feel like myself, and my multi-genre influence is what sets me apart from others in this lane.

To be honest, my proudest moment in Music Production was when Deonte Epps, Co-Host and Producer of The Duo: Sports and Stuff podcast asked me to make music for his show. He initially asked me to make an intro, although I had no idea where to start and he ended up finding what I thought was a perfect intro I could have never imagined. Then upon creating new segments, starting with the Nerdy News Segment, he hinted on the show a soft request for music. As soon as I heard him say that in the episode, I immediately jumped on my computer and created it within an hour or two and sent it to him on 5/5/21 as an early birthday gift. Seeing his and Dane’s reaction on the show was literally the best, and a mind blowing experience hearing my music serve a function in a production further proved to me that I have what it takes to make music that can be placed on TV shows and in films.

And this was without any references. I most recently created music for a YouTube channel, and my client sent me 3 wildly different songs and asked for a combination of them. As is my specialty, I give myself a deadline and beat it by a few days (spoiler alert for any potential clients), and was able to work with the client to create a desired product with elements of all 3 tracks. In short, I know the vibes.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy. This book cut right into the meat of habits and setting goals. Two of the most poignant quotes were “We are what we repeatedly do” and “Nothing creates internal stress and trauma more than when what you’re doing on the outside is incongruent with your values on the inside.” It really put into perspective that following a passion or chasing a goal is literally a matter of repeatedly taking the steps to achieve it.

Those two quotes alone could be the whole book, but I also understand two quotes would be a hard sell and not the best business decision.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

This is a very utopian ideal I will admit, although I think individuals spreading out their attention a little more and being more exploratory with their interests would support artists and creatives. What I mean by that is being less celebrity obsessed and essentially being spoiled by the already shiny, polished and well-funded products and expecting anyone who is in the same field to produce results that are exactly like that.

For example, I personally believe that the best music on Spotify is from comes from artists with anywhere from 1000 – 250,000 listeners; and even some of our favorite big-time artists have a large percentage of their fan base that considers their early work their best. It’s strange that people acknowledge that the creativity and rawness in early career products are better than the polished, industry standard copycat products, yet continue to feed the copycat beast.

My friends joke that I’m a hipster, although there is an element of freshness in indie films and music that is missing from productions made by corporate giants with teams of hundreds (film/tv) or 10-20 songwriters/producers. It’s like going to a specialized Mom & Pop shop instead of getting the super convenient and cheap grocery store product. I’m biased, although small business is where a lot of the best ideas come from and are often stolen. It makes more sense to just support the multitude of the independents.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: Instagram.com/say_hi_keif
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5flL4unRWvWVBGlF8pPkqg
• Other: https://linktr.ee/say_hi_keif