We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Tyler Callahan a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Tyler, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. One of the toughest things about progressing in your creative career is that there are almost always unexpected problems that come up – problems that you often can’t read about in advance, can’t prepare for, etc. Have you had such and experience and if so, can you tell us the story of one of those unexpected problems you’ve encountered?
There are numerous issues that creatives face, but I don’t see many articles about mental health as it relates to producers and engineers. Many of my heroes in this business such as Andrew Scheps, Greg Wells and Serban Ghenea are seen talking about how to make your song (or someone else’s song) realize its full potential. I haven’t seen any my heroes talk about how much a toll doing music or engineering full time takes on your mental health and self worth. Naturally, I didn’t expect to face self doubt and imposter syndrome when I first took the leap into doing music full time. When you grow up loving music, you tend to do it whenever you can, so you spend all your spare time playing guitar or singing or learning more about the thing that brings you so much joy. Once you decide you want to do it as a job, then everything starts becoming more serious, you start seeking out opportunities that you may not have sought out otherwise or even known about. Eventually you find yourself with enough opportunity that you did it! You can finally quit your day job that you loathe to pursue music full time, and you think that THEN you will be actually happy with yourself and all your problems will disappear. Except, they don’t. They don’t just blow away into the wind, you actually find yourself with even more issues than before. Questions like “am I actually good enough to do this?”, “Am I just really lucky?”, and “do any of these people that I’m working with actually care about me?” start to creep in. It becomes a scary place for a while at the beginning, and I’m still navigating a lot of these feelings and questions myself. It’s only recently I realized that I’ve got to tie my own self worth to something else aside from my job. It’s very important to find your group of people within the music business and nurture the personal friendships that aren’t solely based off the fact that you’re working together at the moment. It’s only after realizing this important lesson that I started to feel better about myself and the people that I decided to surround myself with.
Tyler, 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’m Tyler Callahan! I’m a recording engineer/mix engineer/record producer and audio book editor (and anything else you’d like me to be too). I started in this business when I was 14 years old and I played a small festival in my home town with my old guitar teacher in front of a small crowd. Ever since that day I was HOOKED. I went to Full Sail after I graduated High School and pursued a degree in Music Production because my small home town of 1,100 people in rural Illinois didn’t really have much opportunity for me to realize what I thought was my full potential. After I graduated college I moved to Nashville and interned at Sound Kitchen Studios where I cut my teeth as an audio engineer while I worked different events all over Nashville and delivered food. After I left my internship I became an assistant for an engineer, then I became one of the house assistants for Sound Kitchen where I got to work with great artists like Rita Springer, Dante Bowe, and Jon Reddick and also work on recording the score for amazing games like Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War, Destiny 2 and Halo: Infinite. I still assist over at Sound Kitchen from time to time but I’m also a house engineer at Gnome Studios where I’ve had the privilege of working with artists like Cody Carnes, Doe and Greya and producers like Dwan Hill and Austin Goodloe. I’ve mixed some records for some very talented artists like Faren Rachels, Sarah Allison Turner and Anthony Quaid. I think that there isn’t TOO much a difference between one mixer/producer to the next, but the main difference that I think people care about is how much love I put into every project and the way that I treat each project like it’s my own song or piece of art.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
My main goal as I continue on my creative journey is to serve other people around me the best that I possibly can. A secondary part of that goal is to show everyone that I come across and work with the love that I think every person on this planet deserves. A secondary goal is to serve each project uniquely in order to serve it the best, whether that’s hiring out musicians to play everything or lodging up in my own home studio with the artist and knocking everything out between us. I really don’t think that there are any rules when it comes to creating.
How did you build your audience on social media?
I should start by saying that I don’t have a massive audience on social media, but the small one that I do have has been built on authenticity. Authenticity in a digital age is a subject that there have been many lectures about within the last 10 years as twitter/instagram/Facebook has evolved. I think that people really care about hearing the struggles and life of a real person that they can identify with, not someone that’s living a “better” or “ideal” life in comparison to them. It’s always bugged me when I see influencers posting things that put themselves on a pedestal, whether directly or indirectly. I think it’s so important to be honest about the good and the bad things that happen inside your life, and letting your audience come to you as a result of that honesty.
Contact Info:
- Website: tylercallahan.me
- Instagram: instagram.com/tycallahanmusic
Image Credits
Kelley Cronin Clayton Corners