Meet Martinius Solum

 

We were lucky to catch up with Martinius Solum recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Martinius , appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

My resilience mainly comes from the love of what I do. There’s nothing I want to do more than to make music and to be honest, doing anything else would never have made me truly happy. The reason I’m able to push through hard times, is because to me there are really no other options. The joy I find in making music is what makes me able to endure the hardships.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

As a musician, I wear many hats.
I moved to LA to pursue a career as a film composer. I’ve had a deep love for film music ever since I was a young teenager, and it represented a completely different part of the musical spectrum than what I was mostly listening to at the time. I immediately gravitated towards the more melodic scores, with wonderful themes, and I consider myself a melodist rather than a colorist – a colorist in music is someone who’s more interested in textures and sounds rather than melodies and themes.
I’m also a guitar player and singer/songwriter, and that’s what I’ve been focusing on through most of my career, before taking a serious step towards film music a couple years ago.
At the end of the day, I love making music and using music to tell stories, wether through songs or as film music.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

I would say that having good social skills is something you can’t do without in this industry. You can be the best in the world, but nobody wants to work with you if they don’t like you as a person. As musicians, as creatives, we’re in the people business. I’m not saying that I’ve mastered this, far from it; I’m more in the introverted side, but I enjoy working with other people and they enjoy working with me, so being a good and fun person might sometimes be even more important than what you can offer artistically. That being said, don’t stop honing your skills!

Curiosity is also something that is incredibly important. When taking on a new project, wether it’s producing a song or a film score, I always try to find an angle that spikes my curiosity. “What happens if I combine these two instruments?” “What happens if I put this effect on this synth?” I try to always keep that child like approach to creativity.

Lastly, I would say pure talent and/or skill is very important as well. You have to be able to deliver. You can have great people skills and land many jobs, and you can find interesting approaches to each project, but it will never take you further than that if you can’t deliver a product of high quality. Know your way around music theory, know your main instrument, and preferably other instruments as well (or at least have knowledge about them if you don’t know how to play them), know your DAW (Digital Audio Workstation such as Logic, Ableton, Cubase etc.) so that you can work efficiently.

Easy peasy.

Awesome, really appreciate you opening up with us today and before we close maybe you can share a book recommendation with us. Has there been a book that’s been impactful in your growth and development?

A few months ago, I finished Rick Rubin’s book. It’s called “The Creative Act: A Way of Being”. This book has had a truly profound impact on me, not only as a musician, but as a creative. He has a very spiritual approach to creativity, which is very interesting. I read it with a yellow marker and marked passages and sentences that stood out to me as I was reading it.
“Your trust in your instinct and excitement are what resonate with others” – Rick Rubin

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Image Credits

Daniel Kivle, Xioayi Ying, David M. Giannamore

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