We recently connected with Sebastian Olaya and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Sebastian thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

I’m a pivotal moment in my musical life right now. I’ve spent several years working on diverse projects with people, mainly producing tracks or mixing records that have already been made. Although this is very fun and perhaps even my comfort zone, I’ve realized that saying ‘yes’ to everything has made me constantly too busy to explore what my own internal voice as a music maker and record producer is. I want to explore that now. I want to go all-in and develop my own artist persona, as well as get known more as a writer.

In a way it feels like I’ve done it all backwards, because I have a lot of friends who started first pursuing an original project and that led to other work. In my case, I have always been a very social person, so naturally from the beginning I only wanted to be involved in other people’s music.

What’s challenging for me is that I have somehow been very good at staying busy. I always have a predictable number of inquiries for mixing (and that’s awesome, please don’t stop hitting me up!!). But I’ve decided that for the next few months I will focus primarily on making my own project. I see this as ‘taking a risk’ because it means I will devise a rule for myself to not be always avilable. That means I probably won’t say yes to as many other projects, and that in turn means entire rhythm of my life will change.

All things considered though, I am ready. I see this next period of my life as something that will launch me into a new stage of music connections. It’s like the next level of my own videogame.

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.

My name is Sebastian Olaya and I am a record producer and mix engineer. I’ve been involved with music in one or another since I was 10 years old, when I first began taking guitar lessons. A lot of the work I do is working with songwriters and artists to either take a song from demo to full production, or from full production to final mix.

I am curently based in New York City and do a combination of freelance work, as well as producing and mixing for an independent music collective.

I always joke that I have had 1000 musical lives. My trajectory in music started with classical guitar, then alternative rock, then jazz, experimental electronic, pop, hip-hop… and now it’s a little bit of everything. From the mixture of all these influences, I think what really sets me apart is not the ability to decipher and imitate different aesthetics, but rather to imagine and combine them. I really believe that a lot of the coolest experiments are born from applying the ‘spirit’ of one thing to the ‘form’ of another.

I think if I had to describe my approach in a single word it would be “precise”.

My favorite color is somewhere in between turquoise and cyan.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

One concept that I have been thinking about recently is that of value.

In other industries, it’s easy to quantify the value of something based on variables like the cost, the time invested… Music (and art in gneral) is an interesting field because sometimes it can be SO subjective. There are definitely hard skills (e.g. audio editing) that can be quantified, but at the end it’s always hard to put an exact price on creativity.

So how do we do it? Well, I think that’s one of the big questions that us creatives are trying to answer our whole lives. In a way it’s not that different from entrepreneurship –if you open a restaurant, how do you convice people that your food tastes good?– except that art often is less tied to functionality.
From that point of view, I think it’s worth it to develop something REALLY unique that no one else can do. To the outside view it might seem like the only worthwile pursuit in music is trying to have a #1 song. But having something very niche can be just as beneficial. If you can get just 100 fans to follow what you do for the rest of their lives, you’re honestly going to be okay.

So to get there –this is the part that may seem counterintuitive to other industries- sometimes it IS a good idea to focus on that weird, not super polished, maybe even ‘ugly’ project. The key is to have a plan. How are you going to reach the people who will be into that very specific thing? And of course, this may lead to a few feedback loops of reinventing your product –but I firmly believe the value of the product is intrinsically there from the beginning, as long as its honest.

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

I really enjoyed “The Third Door” by Alex Banayan. It’s funny because it’s actually a business book, although it’s written as a story in first person. The book talks about how succesful people tend to get where they are by creating their own path, which is never the most intuitive path.

I think even just having a name to that concept is really helpful, it definitely has opened my mind to always looking for that ‘third door’ in any goals I have.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.sebastian-olaya.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/sebastian.olaya.3000
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastian-olaya/