We were lucky to catch up with Javier Busquet recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Javier thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Are you 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?

As a full-time musician earning a living from only music it can feel like juggling many roles and schedules. For the past couple of months I’ve had three steady schedules teaching music at three different schools in the East LA area, as well as having private students at home and online.

Teaching is something I picked up during early pandemic as a way to supplement the gigs I wasn’t doing anymore and the opportunities for writing music for advertisements became very unreliable. I found that I really enjoyed doing it through Zoom and after things started opening up again, I decided to keep doing it in-person at schools.

I still play gigs in a couple of projects and compose for short films and ads whenever the opportunities come, but not having to rely on those has been a nice change as I don’t feel anxious about where my next paycheck will come from.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I was born in a small town in Argentina that didn’t have much to offer outside of school and sports, so I spent a lot of my childhood drawing and playing video games. It wasn’t until I was eleven or twelve that I picked up my mom’s old acoustic guitar and learned my first riff that led me to discover the world of music. I became obsessed with the instrument, so much that I forced my school friends to learn one too so we could form a band and play gigs around town. For the rest of high school I performed in different bands and learned how to sing since I wanted to play my own songs and didn’t know any singers. When the time came to choose a career I knew that I wanted music in any shape or form to be my path. So I auditioned for Berklee College of Music and left home when I was eighteen to study in Boston.
In college I was exposed to many disciplines within music, including production, sound design, film scoring and sound mixing. I learned from every branch as much as I could and when I graduated in 2016, I felt ready to embark on my professional career in LA.
As soon as I moved it was hard finding work as a lead composer or producer, so I ended up working an assistant job for TV composer Brad Segal (The Bachelor, Dancing with the Stars, America’s Got Talent), where I learned a lot about scoring music for TV and the business of it. I also started playing gigs around the city and meeting amazing musicians and life-long friends, who also got me into the film side of the business.
After working as an assistant I decided to try being a freelance composer/musician; I did lots of music for advertisements, produced and recorded for other artists, played weddings and private events, and started recording my own music. I worked on similar projects up until the pandemic when everything slowed down in the business and I tried my hand at teaching online. Since then I’ve been teaching consistently at schools and privately while still playing shows and composing for different media.
When I got the opportunity to write the music for a short film I fell in love with film scoring and wanted to make it a staple of what I do, so I started taking more and more projects where I could fully use my creativity in aiding the emotion and message of a film to connect with an audience. I think my strength as a composer lies in my understanding of so many aspects of music from having been a professional songwriter, a producer and a huge movie nerd.
What I offer clients is a composer for multi-media projects, someone who’s not afraid to try new approaches and workshop their ideas until they’re happy with their vision and would let me make it a reality. The way it goes is we usually meet online or in-person, discuss their project and what they need for the music, and I’ll give them a turnaround time for the first draft. Usually by the second draft they’re happy with it and I’ll send all the files to incorporate into their film/project.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

While I was in college I took classes with some professors who wanted us to write music that sounded like what was “popular” at the time. Something I had never done until then. I went on a streak of writing songs that had the elements of music that was on the radio; fast tempos, repetitive melodies, big choruses. And it was a collection of songs that I not only don’t like hearing back but really didn’t like the process of writing. I think there’s definitely value in studying music that a lot of people resonate with, in picking apart techniques they used to make it sound the way it does. But if at the moment of sitting down to create you’re already setting an expectation of what the result will do to an audience (e.g. be mainstream), you’re not allowing your true taste to shine. The thing that only you in this whole world can bring to the table, the complex set of influences and life experiences that make your voice unique.
So even when I meet with a client to discuss what they want the result to be, I always let my intuition guide the key decisions while writing the music. When we listen to the first draft they’re usually pleasantly surprised with any aspects that I took in a different direction than they originally wanted.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

The most rewarding thing about being a creative is how much depth the lifestyle gives to other aspects of otherwise mundane things. Like making coffee in the morning or taking a shower, things that you can go on autopilot for are usually moments when I’ll use my creativity to enhance the experience by trying a different pouring style or singing gibberish that could turn into a song or idea. I think it’s the inertia from using presence and the five senses while writing and composing that carries over to other activities. It generally just makes everything more interesting if looked at from the same perspective of curiosity that is necessary to create things, and for that I’m very grateful. It also doesn’t hurt when you share you work and people resonate positively with it, a sort of feedback loop that brings forth more and more art.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/javibusquetmusic/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@javibusquetmusic