Hello Conrad,

My name is Kaylee and I am doing research for my 8th grade school assignment. We where asked what was our career choice and I chose music producer.

I wanted to know how you got started as a music producer and what advice can you give me? I have been taking piano lessons since I was seven and music is just a big part of life.

Thank you for my time,
Kaylee

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Hi Kaylee,

I got started as a music producer by doing a series of telephone on-hold music libraries for GTE and Contel. That was my first “pro” production assignment. This was back in 1989 - MIDI had just been released. The telephone company wanted classical music but didn’t want to pay royalties of MUZAK fees, so I sequenced Bach, Beethoven, Vivaldi and Mozart on my computer. At the time there were no midi libraries available like they are today, so it was a little cutting edge for corporate use back then. It started with one full length CD and ended up being a four CD library that was sold by a third company. By the time the project was done I had used all the money from those projects to buy computer gear. Inadvertantly I had started building a recording studio.

For the first CD I just did the programming and a seperate engineer and studio did the mix-downs. By the fourth CD I was doing the mixing and engineering myself.

My advice is to get serious with your piano lessons - study theory and as many styles as you can. If there’s a style of music you don’t like, that just means you need to study it more. Keep your eyes open for the opportunities that are around you. If you don’t see opportunites, then study and practice until you do.

Hope that helps.

Conrad

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