We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Vinny Svoboda a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Vinny, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?
I was very fortunate to start my musical journey at a young age through my elementary school orchestra program. This persisted through middle school, high school, and eventually getting my degree in Music Performance with an emphasis on classical upright bass from the University of South Florida. I didn’t realize how fortunate I was to have that early experience until I started teaching music myself. Learning music through structured curriculum isn’t necessarily better than learning music on your own, but it inherently keeps you working at it. You have teachers not only keeping you accountable, but also giving you real-time feedback to help you hone your craft. If you’re pursuing music on your own, there’s always the chance that you’ll get discouraged and put the instrument down, never to pick it up again.
Throughout grade school and even in college, I wasn’t necessarily skating by, but looking back, I feel like I could have sunk my teeth deeper into the concepts that were shown to me. Since graduating from college nearly a decade ago, I feel like I’ve had more of a lust for learning which I wish I had while I was studying under amazing instructors. Luckily, the music community in the Tampa Bay Area is very giving with knowledge so my personal feeling of having to play “catch up” so to speak has been mitigated for the most part. I’ve been teaching music for the past 4 years or so and that environment has forced me to dig into concepts I remember glazing over when I was younger. That has been a cool experience for me because not only am I coming to better understand the craft, I have experience to convey these concepts to others in a meaningful way with tried and true context.
Vinny, 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?
At the core, I’m a musician. It could just end there but through my experience, I’ve come to love many facets of the industry by happenstance. I’ve always been a problem solver which has taken me down different avenues. For example, when I was younger, I wanted to figure out a way of recording my ideas, but I wanted the end product of these ideas to sound as full as possible from a sonic perspective and just a general musical perspective. This of course lead me down the rabbit hole of learning how to play different instruments to compliment my ideas that started on the bass. This also lead me down the path of learning the art of recording itself. Flash forward fifteen years later, I have a pretty solid understanding of how different musical instruments function in an arrangement. I’m also able to track, mix, and master these works with a pleasing result. If it’s bass recording services that the client needs, my two main passions combine to see their vision through.
There was a lot of self-experimentation with all of this at first since it was a problem I wanted to find a solution for. Audio engineering wasn’t really something I thought of as a career path back then. It was simply just, “Hey. I like doing this for myself.” There was a turning point where I was asked to record someones project and things took off from there. I already knew I liked the attention-to-detail aspect of recording/performing. However, it was a whole different thing when I had to pay attention to details coming from someone else’s brain. There’s something magical about that exchange.
With the advance of technology and how intuitive it has become for anyone to record themselves, the requests of me have pushed more into the bass tracking realm. I like this because it goes back to the “problem solver” aspect of my personality. I see every new song as a puzzle I need to weave through competently harmonically and rhythmically. The cool thing though is that this puzzle has multiple solutions. At that point, it’s all up to taste.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
The two main things that make me smile after a job well done are making people smile with my contribution to the art at hand, and having the satisfaction of knowing my work behind the scenes paid off and I accomplished something I could be proud of. There’s a cyclical aspect to this. If the product was received well, it pushes you to work harder for the next time you’re going out there and presenting yourself.
In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?
Speaking generally, I think there’s this sentiment of “get a real job” from the community when it comes to being a musician, or any creative really. I think it’s gotten better over the years. Social media has peeled back the curtain on what it takes to do what these creatives do. I’ve learned a lot about other fields that I never really paid much attention to or wrote off entirely. I’ve recently gotten into photography and that’s been a whole different world of creativity that I wasn’t tapped into before. Turns out it’s not just point the camera and shoot. I wouldn’t have necessarily stumbled into the minutia of it all had I not done research, asked questions, and experimented myself. I think if you don’t do these things, it’s very easy to write off the field, dumb it down, and say, “Eh that’s easy. Anybody can do that.”
Back to the music industry, all the general public tends to see is the performance. Even the recordings themselves have been simplified to random playlists from the streaming service of their choice. I think people that aren’t musicians recognize that there is more to it than that at this point (again, social media peeling back the curtain), but not to the point where musicians are given respect from the masses no questions asked. I wish that the general public would respect music as an art to the level that modern cinema is for example. Everyone is talking about the new Marvel movie, or the hot new show on Netflix. But a small cover charge to see people creating sounds in real-time in front of your eyes and ears is somehow still a tall order for some. Both fields require massive amounts of work on the back end to execute properly and I just wish we would get rid of the general “get a real job” sentiment when it comes to being a musician.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.vinnysvoboda.com
- Instagram: @vinnysbass
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vinnysvobodamusic
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/vinnysvobodamusic