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

JaKuna, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. 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.

My first approach was when I was 14 years old. I was in school, a friend of mine told me he wanted some beats to practice his freestyle skills, so I opened my first DAW (FL Studio) and started learning from videos I found on YouTube. I just did it for fun. Long story short, when the pandemic arrived at my country, I was in 4th year of University, so the government locked us down, and that was the time when I decided I should give it a shot, and learn how to produce music the right way. Spent every day of lockdown learning and producing, nonstop.

If you want to speed up your learning process, I totally recommend buying specific courses for the skills you are lacking at the moment, and for your specific genre you want to focus on. Don’t waste your money/time on skills that don’t apply to your objectives, for example, gear. You CAN produce extremely high quality tracks with some budget headphones, there’s no need to spend money on expensive gear.

Music production, in general, has 3 stages: Creative Process, Mixing & Mastering. I would say the most essential skill you have to learn is mixing. You can have the most brilliant ideas ever, but if they are poorly mixed, they will just fall apart. In simple words, good mixing stops your songs from feeling amateur and makes them feel professional, and that’s a game changer.

You will encounter tons of obstacles during your artist journey, but the main obstacle during that learning phase was creative block. Sometimes you just want to make music, but you open your laptop and just can’t… you stare at the screen for hours and literally nothing happens. It’s frustrating, but trust me, every artist goes through this, even the best artists out there.

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?

Hey people! My name is Javier, but you can call me JaKuna. I’m 24 years old, I’m from Chile, and I’ve been making music professionally for about 4 years now. I got interested in the EDM scene after seeing my favorite DJ’s perform live. My mind was blown by the energy, the lights, the ambience, etc… that I just said “I wanna be there one day”.

That’s how my journey started, which lead me to play in different clubs & festivals, the latest one being Creamfields Chile 2022, which was an absolute dream come true (I still can’t wrap my head I was going to play in the biggest EDM festival of my country). Of course, this wasn’t achieved overnight, it took time, work, patience, and a little bit of luck.

As I stated earlier in this interview, the artist journey is not easy, it’s fully packed with obstacles. Worked an entire year at a Hospital just to be able to invest in my project, like visuals, branding, gear, etc… And right now I’m still not making a living out of this career, but that’s just part of the game. As they say, high risk – high reward.

To this day, the style that I’ve been producing is like a mix between Tech House/Bass House. I love the idea of having tracks that people can dance, but at the same time they can jump and scream, and that’s because the way I produce is by having a solid groove in my tracks, but adding that little extra spice of heavy bass and weird synths & FX.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

The risks you take. Sometimes you think about a plan in your mind, that you want to execute no matter what, you tell your friends and family, and they will 9/10 times try to convince you it’s a bad idea.

For example, if you decide you should leave the country at a certain age, they will start trying to convince you why you shouldn’t do it.

Also, you will leave some people/friends/family behind, because they just don’t line up with your objectives in life. My advice is to surround yourself with people that are in the same page as you, so you can grow with them, learn with them, and aim for the same objectives.
So yes, you will likely lose friends and family, and they will probably never understand it.

My advice is to trust your guts, just do whatever you feel is right, and take the risks.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

Seeing people’s reaction to your music and shows. There’s absolutely nothing more rewarding than playing a track you made from scratch, and seeing people dance and having a nice moment.

I remember when I started making music, friends & family telling me they liked my music was a good feeling. But, even a greater feeling was when a complete stranger sent me a DM through Instagram, saying he loved my tracks.
That is just on a whole different level, because you were able to influence a complete stranger with just your music, and he even took the time to write you a DM just to let you know that he likes your music,,, it’s just unreal. And remember, at that stage you most likely don’t have a huge amount of followers.

Of course when you improve and keep making music, more and more people will like or hate your music, but you always have to remember that first person that got a positive impact with your music.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jakunamusic/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jakunamusic
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/JaKunaMusic
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZj8rFLhcMhi6NnK8glXV4Q
• Other: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1mdjmXuJlRJU5FStmWInos SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/jakunamusic

Image Credits
All my pictures were taken by my best friend @tamashii.cl He has been my photographer since the beginning of my artist career.