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

Hi Tyler, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

With our team whatwedoin? our first objective is to make art that’s true to our heart. We often feel we sacrifice the amount of “likes & plays” going against what’s popular to make what we feels significant to us. I think it’s so easy to get caught up in measuring your success based on the approval of what other humans think of your work but at the end of the day, we are the ones who have to perform these songs and live with them as your legacy to the world.

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 got into producing music in a very unusual way because I did play any instruments growing up or come from a musical household. As a kid, I was always influenced by music so whatever I was listening to my style matched the same as a teenager, I was obsessed with I Tunes and My Space and how you could discover so much music that was one click away. My love of music eventually ended me up at the Conservatory of Recording Art and Sciences in Arizona and then in Los Angeles at Serenity West Recording Studios in 2012. Since then I have been using that ear for the sound and quality I gained growing up and apply it to the records we work on today.

My sound has now evolved with a team under the name of whatwedoion? which is a collective of Jazz, Funk, R&B, Soul, & hip-hop musicians all bringing their sound together under one umbrella where we make the best songs we possibly can for ourselves and other artists. With such a collective of talented musicians, we really try to focus on writing and producing for artists of any genre. We pride ourselves on being able to start with a silent room and get an artist all the way through writing, producing, recording, mixing, mastering, cover art, promotion, & release all in-house.

We really feel genre-less in the fact that we can tackle anything that we decide we want to work on which really sets us apart from a lot of other music producers. I have been engineering for about 11 years now and producing at a high level for about 5 years now. Our Musical Director graduated from Denver University in Classical Jazz on alto saxophone, our vocal producer is the frontman of a band that headlined the Colorado Avalaches New Year’s Eve show last year, and our guitar, bass, drummer, and vocalists are top-tier playing 1-3 sold-out shows every week year around. Not many other production houses can capitalize on every aspect of releasing music for an artist.

We love what we do and we would love to do it with you too!

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

For me, the most rewarding is being able to impact someone in a positive way. It might impact the listen which is our hope on every record that we make but more often than not the ones who are positively impacted is the artist themselves. Being in the studio can be a very vulnerable place where a lot of thought and emotions get swirled around and you need to be able to capture those moments as soon as they strike, that’s what call the “magic” in music. Watching the artist’s face when that magic is played back to the off the speakers and seeing their reaction will for me always be the most rewarding part of music.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I think one of the biggest pivots I have had in the musical journey is going against what the popular belief is and I stopped taking in money for recording sessions and only started working with people I really wanted to. The path for a local recording studio where I’m from has typically been to book sessions with as many artists as possible, knock out the record, and move on to the next one which I did for the first 8 years of my career and I grew to hate it. So in 2019 I really had to take a look at myself and ask what in music do I really want to do and every time ( still to this day) I come to the same answer “I want to make high-quality music with the highest level people that I can”. That became a really hard goal to achieve when I was booked up with all my time working on records I could not believe in so I took a step back and worked on achieving a higher level by working with better musicians for free and have been able to grow into a system that is more successful I ever could have hoped for.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://linktr.ee/whatwedoin
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/whatwedoin.music/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/whatwedoinmusic
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEK49LDuzVZfGSaT0YWfAmQ

Image Credits
All Photos: Erik Branom https://www.instagram.com/erikbranom/