We were lucky to catch up with Vinny Svoboda recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Vinny, thanks for joining us today. Earning a full time living from one’s creative career can be incredibly difficult. Have you been able to do so and if so, can you share some of the key parts of your journey and any important advice or lessons that might help creatives who haven’t been able to yet?

I am lucky enough to say that I am a full-time musician! I’d like to think my overall journey to get to this place is similar to others in my field, but I’m sure I have some unique twists and turns.

I’ve known since I picked up my first instrument (violin) around 10 years old that I wanted to figure out a way to do this music thing all the time. Going through high school and college, music alone wasn’t going to pay the bills so I needed a form of “traditional” employment. However, at this stage in my life, music definitely was not on the back burner. While I was in college working towards my bachelor’s in Classical Upright Bass, I remember wondering how I’m going to square these two lives; actively pursuing music at the college level, but working various food/customer service jobs at the same time. The last regular job I had was in retail. The entire staff ended up getting laid off (luckily with a couple months notice) and this is when I decided to take the plunge and see if I can pull this full-time musician thing off.

If I could go back in time knowing what I do know, I would have taken the plunge much earlier, without the outside force of a lay off pushing me. I’ve always been interested in diversifying my skill sets into whatever I found interesting. It turns out that’s a key pillar of making this full-time musician lifestyle work. Had I known this secret earlier, I wouldn’t have been as anxious to stay in the “comfort” of a traditional job.

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 background and context?

In a sentence, I consider myself a freelance musician with an emphasis on electric/upright bass.

At my core, I love providing foundation and structure to help realize an end goal. I find myself having this characteristic outside of music as well, so being able to provide my services to aid something a fellow musician is passionate about is a win-win in my eyes.

I like to think I’m a well-rounded enough musician to have quality input on a project that may fall outside of my principal musical instrument. It would be a disservice to just show up, play my part, and leave (unless this is the strict instruction from the client of course!). I want to get into the weeds and see what makes this song tick, which will in turn inform me of what makes the artist tick!

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

I think about this a lot. Sometimes the thoughts are as simple as “I wonder what it’s like to just have all weekends off?”. Sometimes the thoughts are as complex as “I’m at any given time essentially working 5 different jobs. I wonder what just having one consistent job would be like?”

These questions I ask myself from time to time are essentially pondering about how different of a lifestyle being a musician is compared to someone that has a “9-5” lifestyle. Even just from a scheduling angle, I feel like there are rubs when it comes to planning get-togethers, vacations, major life events. I try not to get too down on myself about it but the guilt trip is there sometimes!

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

I guess it technically started before I was actively on social media. I wanted to record musical ideas I had swimming around in my head but I also wanted them to sound halfway decent. This was the start of my descent into the rabbit hole that is audio engineering. I later coupled this with getting into videography. Turns out this combo is a prime pair of skillsets for building an audience on social media. It was (and still is) an obsession with making high quality content that I would enjoy watching/hearing. The fact that these bass videos resonate with people is a happy cherry on top for me!

If I had any advice, as cliche as it sounds, it would be to create what you want to create when you want to create it. If you want to follow a trend for the algorithm reach, that’s all well and good, but put your own spin on it. Anything that you can do to give yourself satisfaction will win over just pumping out content because you feel like you “have” to.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.vinnysvoboda.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vinnysbass
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vinnysvobodamusic
• Youtube: www.youtube.cob/vinnysvobodamusic