The Brilliance of Andrew Huang (interview/video essay)

to be a musician of any genre in this day and age is both exciting and a bit daunting at times the pace at which the world is changing and always including technology social behavior and culture really affects how musicians make music make a living and make an impact with the growth and popularity of platforms like youtube videos have taken form as a new kind of stage for any artist to showcase their work among the best i've seen utilizing all the potential possibilities of these modern forms is the work of andrew huang not only does his music span a multitude of styles and genres but he constantly expands the boundaries of traditional music performance and production with his skills as a multi-instrumentalist vocalist producer composer and sound designer [Music] what also stands out about his music is his endless stream of innovative and creative ways of making music whether it's to turn all kinds of ordinary objects into instruments in his song challenges perform impressive feats such as wrapping without the letter e making a midi unicorn or his use of modular synthesizers and all kinds of other devices to invent new sound worlds [Music] behind his brilliance is a lot of passion endless hard work strategy and a good heart every morning i wake up and i'm excited to make some new music i was lucky enough to chat with him recently about a variety of topics related to his career as a musician youtube personality and some of his thoughts on being a musician in these current times i want to talk to you about that i'm still just a guy uploading youtube videos you know i didn't get into video until uh several years ago but i've been doing music my whole life and it's been cool to have a completely new dimension uh to explore creativity in are you at a point where you consider that whole thing the video aspect of it your instrument yeah i think that's a key part of the experience of so many of the things that i create and at the very beginning i kind of felt like well it's not pure music or whatever but you know eventually i kind of realized that that was sort of uh just a construction anyway there are times when a piece of music to me is just that oral experience and then other projects where it's just so intertwined with the visual that it really neither could stand on their own so one great trick that i learned that i jus is is such a habit to me now is that uh you always should have a bigger thing going that you can procrastinate and you you fill all the procrastination time with smaller stuff so i'm i'm always avoiding working on something that's harder or bigger and and i avoid it by working on something that's easier so it feels easier to be working on whatever i'm working on i have buffers built into almost everything that i work on but those buffers are actually the main chunk of work on a different project so it because i work in so many different genres and with so many different approaches if i want to take a break from writing a folksy guitar song i can go into editing a vocal on an edm track or something and it's like a completely different feeling and mindset and it doesn't feel like like more work in a way it's it's quite rare for me to have a day where there's only one project that i'm working on that happens a few times a year it's usually like if there's a big shoot that needs to happen you know a lot of different stuff has to happen within the same time frame on the same set whatever that'll be a full day dedicated to a project uh most recently uh i did some instagram stories around this breaking down my vocal production process but i'm working on this really poppy song and so that necessitates a lot of vocal production so it's like multiple layers of vocals that were already recorded but you know i had to clean them up tune them find the right reverb for each one and then just so many steps so that was like an eight-hour day of just touching up and polishing vocals i can't get over how big this tripod is that's i think for me all work is also practice in that sense um you know i think i didn't get good at making youtube videos by editing things and you know trying to do the same edit over and over but just because i made a youtube video twice a week for over a year and you know all of that was practiced for the next one and i you know i'm releasing these things but um yeah they're both the practice and the product [Music] and then we're back to our original sound [Music] you know we're really lucky i think in this day and age there's there's so many bad things you could say about the cycle of endless content and you know that whole idea but we're also lucky that we can release something that's completely off the cuff or it's half finished or that's not even something that we're willing to pursue more but it's just like oh this was a fun thing that i tried i can throw it out there other people can connect with it or get something out of it or it's just you know i'm in their feed again reminding them to go back to my youtube channel or whatever and i think without the instant distribution that the internet gave us we couldn't have that level of sharing right um and so a lot of the things that maybe are a product for me now would have just been practice back in the day would have been like oh i'm iterating on all these different ideas i'm trying stuff out here is the best possible version of this that i could release because i know i'm gonna have to put time and money and energy into just marketing that for it to be successful and now it's just like i'll press a button and 5 000 people will like this we're still for the most part strangers sharing stuff with strangers but i think there's a deeper level of connection there you just get to see someone like try something [Music] i try to put in i've been starting to try and build in for the following week or two what i need to be working on and actually putting it in the calendar which i think is something that a lot of freelance people go through is like well i work myself i make my own hours so the work will get done right but um i definitely know that you know projects take less time than you think or often more time than you think so i try to really just make blocks where i know that i need these hours there's different stages of working on something different stages of creativity and so for instance when i'm at the point that i'm um mixing a song i'm not going to change anything about the composition it's just i've already made those decisions and they're completely off limits to be now maybe in some crazy rare case i'll have a flash of inspiration and realize something could be completely different and better but generally i've already you know that part is final to me that part's finished to me already you're very organized very systematic it's not just this but how you approach things yeah well i learned that over time because there used to be a lot of like flailing around and back and forth and and feeling good about putting work into something because i just tweaked things around and experimented being effective towards the ultimate goal of having this piece of music that i'd be proud of and ready to release took a different mindset we live in a society with internet with access to information and as musicians we put ourselves stuff and ourselves out there say that all that that was gone no internet no ability to have an audience say that you're just in a room would you do things differently make things differently i think about this a lot because i think there is this mistaken maybe notion that uh the art that we love and appreciate so much is somehow pure it's somehow like the product of this one person who had a vision and they created it and shared it with the world and you know that's true to some extent but i think everything almost everything that's out there in the world for us to consume has gone through some kind of polishing has gone through some kind of refinement to be more presentable at least if not more marketable able to make more money able to have a bigger impact i think that the pressures of let's say let's just say it's capitalism the pressures of making a product that's going to you know ship that's going to move units that leads to like beautifully crafted pop songs something that's incredibly catchy where every second of it has been thought through and then at the same time i think the act of creativity is so much more enjoyable when it's when it's freer from some of those constraints so i think if i were completely on my own not having an audience a lot of that refinement would be removed but yeah i don't know it's a tricky question great answer so this friday i leave for boston and uh it's gonna be 10 days with no email no meetings no human contact no social media i made it extra extreme for myself by saying i wasn't gonna have any human contact like i'm not even gonna go to a grocery store and talk to a cashier i'm planning all everything in advance so that i won't actually speak with another human being i'm gonna send my wife one text a day to let her know that i'm alive still i'm optimistic about not turning into a crazy person but i think it'll be a challenge are you as much of a workaholic as andrew i don't think there's anyone who is you're just insane you're next level i really like like i work pretty hard like he just he blows everyone away are you a homebody yeah i mean i have these amazing studios so when my youtube channel grew the most uh in 2016 2017 i guess i was posting every monday and every thursday uh and i was waking up every day with the sole focus of building a youtube channel so that was great in so many ways for growth um for for training myself to be even more disciplined than i normally am with work uh but it was not sustainable what are your goals for the channel now i'm figuring that out again um the channel you know back in the the most explosive phase of it was really about exploring all these different interesting facets of music that i just didn't think people thought about or talked about a lot of the video work has taken me away from doing more of the music that i'd really like to do so in some way the music is gonna take my original music is gonna take more of the focus for me but as far as a concrete goal with you know what the youtube videos are gonna look like or where i hope to take them that is tbd at this point [Music] we're i think we're lucky to be in this generation oh yeah yeah yeah i think you i think you feel the same way this sort of optimism for music in today's world yeah with the ability of nearly anyone to be able to create something you know even with limited tools there's quite a bit of power in what's accessible to people in being able to reach an audience um and also just in being able to define for yourself what you want to do you know i don't have to perform it was great for me um i don't have to release a certain amount of things but i'm also free to release a huge amount of things um so i think we're we're just beginning to see the possibilities now that this new kind of openness and connectivity that the internet has given us is allowing for [Music] i'll turn it so it happens more gradually

Channel: Nahre Sol

Views: 120,538

Keywords: andrew huang, andrew huang video essay, andrew huang interview, music producer, found sounds, music cover, song challenge, rapping without the letter e, andrew huang 4 producers, sound design, modular synthesizer, vocal production, youtube music, musician life, behind the scenes

Id: wVi1xWqfUlo

Length: 13min 31sec (811 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 10 2019