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

Tim , appreciate you joining 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.

I have been a musician, singer for most of my life since the mid 1960’s. I am mainly known as a guitar player and singer for The Chocolate Watchband. I didn’t get in to being a producer until the mid 1980″s. I was performing and teaching music full time and someone asked me to produce their project. I had connections with a local studio and we recorded the project there. My experience as a performer helped me to know how to produce the artist. I am a multi instrumentalist so I understood the what each instrument needed. My experience as a teacher helped me to coach the vocalist. That project went very well and i went on to do several more. The owner of the studio told me that most people can’t afford a producer and engineer and suggested that I learn to engineer. He offered to train me, so I took him up on it. I learned a lot and started doing both. This was in the days of recording tape, but things were going digital and it was a whole new world. Many of the skills that I had made the jump. I got an offer in the early 2,000’s to produce an artist who was recording on Pro tools, the latest digital format. Fortunately he had an engineer, and I could focus on producing. The project went well and opened the door to me working there and learning Pro tools. In 2007 I opened my own studio and we have been very busy every since.

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?

I started playing guitar when I was about 8 years old and got into my first band at 12 years and there has been very little time in my life that I haven’t been in a band. When I was in high school our band The Sun Downers was one of the most popular groups and we played a lot of school and college events. After high school I was in a group called the Good News and we played the Filmore and several great venues. That group didn’t last and there were several more before I got a call from a friend that was in the Chocolate Watchband, they had just lost their guitarist and he wanted me to join. I came into the band on Tuesday and Saturday afternoon we were playing in front of 40.000 people for the Fantasy Fair in northern CA. We had a good run and I left the group because of conflicts with management. I went on to do several groups until the 1980’s I had my own group Tim Abbott and Space. We had a self produced record that did well but we never attained major success. In 1999 a promoter wanted the Chocolate Watchband to do a reunion date in San Diego and that turned in to a 20 year run of dates in Europe and major festivals. We also produced several albums. In the last two years I have gone back to being a solo act and I have produced several songs that are out on Spotify and other platforms under the name Tim J Abbott

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

As a producer one of my greatest frustrations is working with talented people who make great music that never gets heard by a broad audience. When I went back to being a solo artist again almost 3 years ago I new how important getting promoted properly was, but with my schedule as a producer/ engineer was too much to take on the task. So I asked and associate that was helping keep our studio booked to help me with promoting my music. He said that he didn’t know how to do it, but I knew because of his marketing skills that he could learn. We worked together to get my music and videos promoted and had amazing success. After two years I’m at about 500,000 streams with Spotify and 250,000 views on my videos with YouTube. I told him that we should do this for our other artists and we started promoting several of the artists we were working with. Some have done very well and others moderate success. There are no guarantees what is going to make it in music. But what we have learned is if you don’t do something with promotion, nothing will happen. We have had great success getting artists on play lists and managing their campaigns to maximize results. There has been a big learning curve to doing this right, but I’m very happy with the results. One thing that I advise every one of our artists is to save money for promotion!

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

One of the most challenging things that has happened to the music industry has been streaming. In some ways it has given more people a change to get published. But on the other hand the revenue opportunity has been significantly impacted. With vinyl and CD sales there was a good profit margin and there were many successes of artists selling CD’s out of their trunks or at the the product tables of live dates. Also online sales were, in many cases pretty decent. Even with the advent of digital downloading there was money to be made. But now the streaming percentage is so low that it takes huge numbers to show any profits. Congress is working on several creator fairness acts, but progress is painfully slow. We have connections to major classic groups that are telling us that they can’t afford to create new albums, because it would take years just to cover production costs. So they are resigned to touring and sync with television and movies of their classic songs. We really need a major breakthrough for the music industry to survive. There are so few at the top that are very successful and the rest are just getting by or giving up. One thing that I tell all the people that I work with is to do music because you love it. Not because you want to be a star.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://KingdomVoiceProductions.com
• Instagram: timjabbott
• Facebook: Tim J Abbott
• Linkedin: Tim Abbott/ Mark Kenoly

Image Credits

Photos by David Greenfield