Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Bas Janssen. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Bas, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?
The funny story about that is that everyone seems to have some single life changing moment where they discovered they were meant for the music industry or their destiny was to be a musician etc. but for me it was kind of a funneling process until there was nothing else I could do. In British high school you choose your subjects and narrow down to only 3 subjects by the time you’re 18. I finished high school with music, music technology and math. Finishing high school and applying for colleges, I’m thinking to myself, ‘Well I’m not going to do math at college, so what else?’. So music it was. Then once I’m at Berklee College of Music, I’m thinking to myself, ‘Well I guess I’m a musician now!’ So I guess my resilience comes from feeling like I have to make music work because what are my other options?
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I’ve been in an interesting ebb and flow the last little while in my career. I started as a drummer/percussionist, learned the studio engineering craft with mixing and mastering and have progressed my engineering to live performances as well. As my career has got going, it’s always been interesting to me where I’ll get a patch of drums gigs and nothing else and then mix a handle full of records and nothing else, followed up with back to back live sound gigs whether corporate/wedding gigs or performances at venues. Recently I’ve been in a spell of live sound gigs between 2 venues in LA as well as a touring band called the English Beat. This has been nice because this has been the first time I’ve had my schedule booked out a couple months in advance and have a fair amount of consistency. The other side of it is that I miss playing drums and feel like I’m missing out on mixing songs when I have days off etc, so I’m thinking to myself ‘Do I need to make content to promote the rest, so it doesn’t seem like I’ve given up on drumming?’ or ‘Should I set up a special discount or incentives for new mixing clients?’ But I think I’d quickly push myself to spreading myself thin amongst work and I’ll get complacent with my live sound gigs and pick up gigs and songs to mix that I don’t have the time to put my best foot forward with. So I’m trying to teach myself the patience of the industry and the natural roller coaster that it is. All I need to worry about is doing the best I can with whatever gig I’ve got on a certain day and make sure my bills are paid. I could worry about trying to redirect my energy/work to move more of my eggs into one basket, but realistically all the disciplines compliment each other and it’s swings and roundabouts in terms of different types of work.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
In college, the quality I was most grateful for was being open minded and saying yes too all different possibilities and opportunities. I was playing in a Brazilian drumming group, engineering different bands/artists/genres of all varieties every night and figuring out how to do live sound at an African church convention. From that, I picked up a huge variety of nuances within music and when to use what techniques where, but also learned myself of what I did like, what I didn’t like and figured out what I was really passionate about. It’s made my path through college and post much more clear. I know what I want to say yes or no to, nuances I should implement to fit in to different situations/cultures better and stick out like a sore thumb less and make much more diverse possibilities of income streams in ways I never would’ve predicted pre or during college and beyond.
To close, maybe we can chat about your parents and what they did that was particularly impactful for you?
The easiest answer is their support and the most obvious example is their financial support. Giving me the opportunity to attend Berklee College of Music and the doors blew wide open from there. Above that, they still make sure to offer real world/adulting advice and perspectives coming from a more traditional/conventional background that they had which are things that definitely don’t come naturally to me with a non traditional career path to help me build stability, margin for error and foresight which is rather uncommon in my field.
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