Be a Better Artist

Chris Christodoulou

March 27, 2024 12:00 - 3 hours - 230 MB

Chris Christodoulou is a composer based in Athens, Greece, writing music for video games (Risk of Rain series, The Sea Will Claim Everything), movies and other media (audio drama Gospels of the Flood), as well as stand-alone compositions. CHRIS CHRISTODOULOU LINKS: Website: https://www.chrischristodoulou.com/ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/63OPPk7uHFdcpTuOFYpNfV?si=ZChNAaDnQGenP5pdEDnWOw Bandcamp: https://chrischristodoulou.bandcamp.com/ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Astro...

Adam Fligsten

February 27, 2024 12:00 - 3 hours - 210 MB

Adam Fligsten is a composer for games and other media, based in Los Angeles, California. Video game credits include Outreach (Pixel Spill) and Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite, and his music has been licensed to countless TV shows and commercials. He is the founder of Silen Audio, a full service video game audio house, and also now maker of virtual instruments. ADAM FLIGSTEN LINKS: Website: https://adamfligsten.com/ Silen Audio: https://www.silen.audio/ https://x.com/adamfligsten?s=20 TIMEST...

Arnaud Roy

February 20, 2024 12:00 - 2 hours - 203 MB

Arnaud Roy is a composer, music producer, and sound designer. He has written music for video games and films, and is most notably known for composing the music for Amplitude Studios' Endless video game series, Humankind, and Neoproxima. ARNAUD ROY LINKS: http://www.arnaudroy.com/ https://www.facebook.com/ArnaudRoyMusic/ https://www.instagram.com/arnaudroymusic/ https://twitter.com/ArnaudRoyMusic TIMESTAMPS: (00:00:00) - Intro (00:02:18) - The Harp, professional harp players, harp tec...

Peter Dyer

February 13, 2024 12:00 - 2 hours - 204 MB

Peter Dyer is an LA-based keyboardist, producer, and sound designer. He has toured extensively with artists like Mariah Carey, Adam Lambert, Aloe Blacc, & St. Vincent, as a keyboardist, musical director, and sound designer. He is currently in the house band for American Idol on ABC. Notable cowrites include Avicii’s #1 hit “Wake Me Up”, "Shame On Me", & Flo Rida’s “Wobble” & “Can’t Believe It”. He also works as a sound designer and consultant for Sequential, Novation Music, Strymon Effects...

Danimal Cannon

February 06, 2024 05:00 - 3 hours - 229 MB

Danimal Cannon (Dan Behrens) is an artist and musician best known for his guitar-driven Gameboy/chiptune music. He's also a mixing and mastering engineer, and has toured and performed live extensively. DANIMAL CANNON LINKS: Website: https://www.danimalcannon.com/ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0AqwYovalxngrN9eVyiUXg Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/danimalcannonmusic X: https://twitter.com/armcannon Bandcamp: https://danimalcannon.bandcamp.com/music Spotify: https://open...

Why & How You Should Be Vulnerable

December 05, 2023 05:00 - 27 minutes - 32 MB

Creatives need to be open. It's what allows them to see the depth and nuance of life. You then take those observations, and speak of them through your creative medium. But that openness is a two-way street. While it feeds your creativity, it can leave you open to attack. In this episode, we discuss why it's still important to remain open, and how one can manage this state constructively and effectively.

How Complaining is Destroying Your Life

October 31, 2023 05:00 - 37 minutes - 43.4 MB

In this episode we talk about complaining and how it drains your time, energy, and willpower. I discuss my past experiences with it, as well as some of the approaches I've taken to reduce the amount of it, and how it has positively impacted my life.

What are Attitudes?

October 25, 2023 05:00 - 25 minutes - 29.6 MB

In this episode we explore attitudes as tools that you should be able to deploy at will to explore and enforce certain perspectives against the outcomes you want to see in life. Despite our current emotions and feelings, we can choose to act in contrast to those emotions. We can choose to follow a set of actions that support us in moving towards the outcomes we want to see, despite how we're feeling right now. Attitudes are one of the tools that we can use to recontextualize the situations...

Why We Get Stuck In Life

October 17, 2023 05:00 - 33 minutes - 38.2 MB

In today's episode we explore the idea of how learning new things, expanding your understanding, equates to moving around to discover new perspectives. You must not let yourself become stagnant in life when it comes to your mind. You have to keep moving. Learn new things. Garner new perspectives. Observe problems from multiple angles. This is how you revivify your outlook on life and maintain a more realistic picture of what's possible and how to move past barriers. You do so by learning. By...

Using a Schedule to Manage Yourself as a Solo Creative

September 05, 2023 05:00 - 31 minutes - 35.8 MB

We're back. It's been a heck of a year, but for me there can be no life without BABA, so let's go. In this episode we talk about the need for management for creative people, especially for those who work alone, and how you can use a schedule to assure stuff gets done faster, more effectively, and more reliably. BABA interviews will be coming back, so let me know if there's an artist you'd like me to interview. Thanks for sticking around. Your interest means the world to me.

I filmed 100+ episodes of this podcast that I'll never release

June 23, 2022 05:00 - 19 minutes - 26.8 MB

It's been a while since I released an episode, but I haven't been sitting on my laurels. I've been tremendously prolific, filming over 100+ episodes of this podcast, but the audio is not salvageable unfortunately. In this episode, we talk about how all creatives can look at these types of "lost and wasted work" -scenarios, and how to orient themselves towards these challenges in the most constructive and positive manner possible. I want to thank you for sticking around, and for tuning in o...

Stefan Runstrom from Circles Drum Samples

February 15, 2022 05:00 - 3 hours - 269 MB

Stefan Runstrom is the owner and founder of Circles Drum Samples, a sample library development company focusing on drum sampling. He's also an audio engineer, a drummer, and is known from the band Tickle Me Pink. We talk about music, business, music business, sample library development, creativity, recording, dogs, life balance, finding the right business partners, marketing, branding, and drumming.

Chris Child – Kodomo

January 31, 2022 05:00 - 3 hours - 248 MB

Chris Child is an electronic music composer and music producer, best known by his moniker/alias Kodomo. He's also an Emmy award winning TV composer, and has contributed music to games like Amplitude and Rock Band. We talk about his path in music, mindsets, philosophies, practical approaches to creativity, some synth nerd stuff, music tech, and mixing.

Kasson Crooker

November 30, 2021 05:00 - 3 hours - 272 MB

Kasson Crooker is best known from his work in bands like Symbion Project, Freezepop, and Splashdown. He has worked for the music video game company Harmonix, and lately joined THX as a Director of Product Development. We talk about his path in music, mindsets, philosophies, and practical approaches regarding it, some synth nerd stuff, music tech and how that inspires to creativity, as well as our upcoming collaboration on Symbion Project's next album 'Saturnine'. http://symbionproject.com/

How Should Artists Use Their Money?

November 15, 2021 05:00 - 18 minutes - 25.1 MB

How you use your money is a massive part of building success and happiness. We often waste a lot of our resources when we're not mindful of what we're doing, and how those resources could be used in other ways to play into building our dreams. In this episode, we explore the concept of 'luxuries' further, and where you might want to be allocating your money in the future.

Growth Will Change Your Relationships

November 02, 2021 05:00 - 10 minutes - 14 MB

One of the fundamental truths of life is change. Everything will change. And to expect relationships to be an exception is foolish. People choose different paths, and sometimes that means parting ways, and sometimes it means redefining the relationship. In this episode we talk about how to orient yourself towards that change in the most efficient and effective manner.

Why Working on Your Dreams Feels Tedious

July 27, 2021 05:00 - 14 minutes - 9.77 MB

We've all felt the immense joy and pleasure of thinking about all the amazing things you'll one day achieve and fulfil. But then the day comes when you actually start doing something about it, and you feel uninspired, empty, and scared. It's so easy to fall in love with your romanticized ideas of how and what it will feel like to finally pursue your dreams, but what is missing from this conversation is a more realistic look of what it will look and feel like once you're in the trenches. Ne...

Should You Celebrate Your Victories?

March 06, 2021 05:00 - 16 minutes - 11.6 MB

You nailed it. You won. You succeeded. But how should you respond that? Go out and celebrate, or take the energy from that victory and keep going? In this episode, we talk about momentum and how to keep it alive in a lasting and balanced way.

Hating Losing VS Being a Sore Loser

February 23, 2021 05:00 - 14 minutes - 10.2 MB

Losing doesn't feel good. Even when you know that in the long-term it's just a part of the bigger game, it still sucks in the moment. However, you shouldn't judge those negative feelings as simply being bad, or you being bad as a result of experiencing them; Emotions come and go, and often we have little say in them, but what really matters is what you choose to do about them and how you handle them. That's what defines our character.

Destroy Laziness by Controlling Your Perspective

February 12, 2021 05:00 - 14 minutes - 9.7 MB

Laziness plagues most of us. But why? In today's episode, we explore perspective management as a tool for curbing laziness, so that you may start to aligning your longterm goals with your actual internal values.

Should You Make New Year's Resolutions?

January 05, 2021 05:00 - 17 minutes - 11.9 MB

2020 turns into 2021, and suddenly we come to the realization that yet again another year has passed by, and the change we want to see in our lives hasn't taken place. While wanting your life to change is great, what we want to avoid is unrealistic and romanticized ideas of how the change WILL happen and what it will FEEL like. In this episode I offer some alternative approaches of how to look at change overall, and how to start applying it more realistically on a day-to-day basis.

Learning to Enjoy the Pursuit of Long-Term Goals

December 30, 2020 05:00 - 20 minutes - 14.4 MB

It's no mystery why we choose short-term pleasure over long-term dedication. The rewards are here, now, guaranteed, and pleasurable. But every time we choose those over our goals and dreams, we delay our arrival to them. In this episode I propose some ideas of how to stick to those long-term goals, and how one might even learn to get pleasure and happiness out of the process of pursuing them.

How to Structure Your Day for Success

December 22, 2020 05:00 - 22 minutes - 15.5 MB

I've been disappointed in my performance lately. I've fallen out of habits that have previously been very lucrative for me. And I miss those days. But I know not to take it too heavily, because falling off the horse happens all the time. That's just life. What matters the most, is learning how to get back on. And a big part of that is setting up your day strategically. By simply designing your day in ways that you find inherently motivating and complementary, you get so much more done, and r...

How to Deal with Any Challenge

November 21, 2020 13:00 - 19 minutes - 13.6 MB

The biggest hurdle when facing an obstacle often is that we refuse to accept what's in front of us. We didn't expect it, it makes us uncomfortable, or it doesn't fit our inner narrative of what we think 'should' be happening. It's this refusal to accept whatever's there that stunts our growth. We always think it's going to be something different. We think this is not what things are supposed to look like. But life will always be like that. Reality is complex and unpredictable. In this episod...

How Financial Stress Affects Creativity

November 13, 2020 07:00 - 24 minutes - 16.9 MB

Financial stress is still stress, and a very strong one at that, as money has a hand in almost everything. As we talked about in the previous episode, stress puts you in survival-mode, and that will make accessing creativity increasingly difficult. In this episode, I share some of my basic concepts of how I think about money and expenses, and how those relate to pursuing a creative career as a musician. The information in this episode is not financial advice. I am not a financial expert. I a...

Define and Prioritise Your Goals in Music

November 05, 2020 07:00 - 23 minutes - 16.2 MB

When real life bears down upon you.. When you struggle to find time and energy for music.. Working on it can feel more like a depressing reminder of what you can't have, and it's very easy to feel overwhelmed and consider just ditching music altogether. But of course, I won't let you do that. In this episode we touch on a number of topics, but primarily focus on defining, categorising, and prioritising your goals so that you get CLARITY and CONTROLLABILITY back into your own musical journey.

When You Have No Energy to Write Music

October 22, 2020 07:00 - 19 minutes - 13.6 MB

Real life can be hard and taxing. You get home from work, and you don't have any juice left to fire up the DAW and get to work. We've all been there. It's a tricky beast to figure out. But we CAN do so much about this. In this episode, I lay out some fundamental perspectives and concepts for you to brew and contemplate on regarding your mental energy.

Should You Write Music for Yourself or for Others?

October 07, 2020 05:00 - 21 minutes - 14.4 MB

There are several theories of 'How to make it in music' out there. Some say you have to tread your own path, some say you have to study others in order to be able to figure out how to succeed. In this episode we inspect both perspectives, and in fact explore why you should explore and integrate BOTH approaches to your career as an artist.

Is Sensitivity a Weakness?

September 27, 2020 07:00 - 20 minutes - 13.7 MB

Sensitivity is what allows artists to pick up information and patterns that they can leverage to create their art. But if your art isn't currently producing you any financial or other benefits, your view of sensitivity can turn on you, seeing it more as a curse and a burden. In this episode we talk about how that's not true, and how every single trait in us is a double-edged sword.

When Your Music Isn't Working

September 20, 2020 07:00 - 20 minutes - 13.8 MB

We've all been there. Sitting in front of the computer or our instrument, and feeling frustrated, hopeless, useless, or all of the above. Worry not, there's a solution. There's always a solution! https://beabetterartist.com/

How Can Creative People Find Stability in Their Life

August 29, 2020 11:00 - 13 minutes - 9.32 MB

Artists are notoriously known for their instability and turbulent emotional life. But why exactly is that, can something be done about it, and why would you WANT to do something about it? https://beabetterartist.com/

How to Find Stability in Your Life

August 29, 2020 10:00 - 13 minutes - 9.32 MB

Artists are notoriously known for their instability and turbulent emotional life. But why exactly is that, can something be done about it, and why would you WANT to do something about it? https://beabetterartist.com/ (https://beabetterartist.com/) Support this podcast

How to Overcome Crippling Self-Consciousness

August 22, 2020 07:00 - 14 minutes - 10.1 MB

Self-awareness is undoubtedly a superpower. When used correctly, it's the key to tremendous success. But what should you do when it turns on you? How to stop being overly self-aware and self-conscious in situations where it doesn't help at all? In this episode, as I walk through the streets of Florence Italy, not only do I explain, but also apply some of the techniques and approaches that have helped me overcome paralyzing self-awareness. It's not "just a part of who you are", and yes it can...

Be a Better Artist

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