Whynot Jansveld | How to Thrive in the Music Industry

Whynot Jansveld | How to Thrive in the Music Industry
October 18, 2021
Whynot Jansveld | How to Thrive in the Music Industry

Im really happy that I decided to diversify more: it all interconnects. Whatever I do in mastering seems to inform my composing, and that informs my bass playing, and the other way around.”

Whynot Jansveld is a great example of a modern musician navigating and thriving in the constantly changing environment of the music business. An accomplished bassist, guitarist and vocalist, he has an extensive resume of gigs/tours and recordings with artists including The Wallflowers, Richard Marx, Butch Walker, Natasha Bedingfield, Sara Bareilles, The Weepies, Gavin DeGraw, Lana Del Rey, Jonatha Brooke, Wayne Krantz, Vertical Horizon, Crash Test Dummies and many others. Top producers like Linda Perry, David Kahne, Neil Dorfsman, John O’Mahony and Butch Walker all call on him for their productions. As his career progressed he added composing, and now mastering to his offerings, providing a lesson to us all in how to establish a more balanced and secure career by expanding your skills.

Coming To America

Whynot took some guitar lessons as a kid growing up in the Netherlands, and even toured for a little while in the group Up With People, which brought him to the US for the first time as a teenager. After finishing studies at university back home, he realized that he wanted to pursue music full-time, and discussions with a few friends who had gone to Berklee School of Music in Boston convinced him to attend. He relates, “I grew up on pop music and rock, and while there were some great music schools in the Netherlands, I don’t think there was any other place that was inclusive of all those styles. I thought I’d go for a semester, and that turned into a year, and then I stayed for three and ended up graduating.”

While the school gave him many musical skills that have helped him in his career, he shared that, “I do believe that just living it, meaning go to a city where there’s a flourishing music scene and just be in it and living it is as good an education as going to a school is. But I don’t think I would have just packed up my stuff in Holland and moved to a city in the US and tried to make it on my own, so having a music program as an anchor was less risky, or bold. I met so many incredible people there that I’m still friends with and continue to work with. And I learned a whole lot of stuff there.”

Towards the end of his time at Berklee he started doing gigs with a lot of singer/songwriters in New York City, so moving there was a logical step waiting for him upon graduation. He spent 16 years in NYC virtually living at the Bitter End the Bitter End, the Living Room and Rockwood Music Hall; often playing three sets a night, four nights a week with a vast array of artists. That amount of work taught him a lot of skills about learning songs quickly, how to serve the song selflessly, and how to get along with so many different players and artists.

All the clichés are true”, he states. Have the skills, be prepared, and have a good attitude”.1

Introducing Technology to His Workflow

Whynot shares some of his process: “I’ve had to learn so much music over my career, so I got really fast at writing charts — mostly chord charts with some relevant notation for cues and figures. Once I’ve written it out, then maybe I play it back once more while I check what I wrote down. Then I can just listen to the song a few more times over the next couple of days to really let it sink in and I’m ready to go. I don’t even grab my bass during any of this until I’m in the rehearsal space with the artist. It’s better that way; I can learn stuff as easily on an airplane as I can when I’m in my home studio because I do it all in my head.”

Whynot uses his own musical shorthand to navigate his live performances. He calls it "Gig on a Page."

Having an iPad changed my life; Im sitting there with my notation software taking up most of then screen, with a small window for Apple Music and Im getting it all done.”

“You develop your own shorthand… I have this thing I call a Gig On A Page; once I’ve gone through this tune-learning process I use a form of shorthand for the song structure. V is a verse, C is a chorus and maybe I add the beginning chord of each section, so on the gig I don’t have to memorize everything, but I also don’t need to have long complicated charts for every song. It’s like a personal cheatsheet/reminder where the whole tune has to be on one line of text.”

Another Leg Of The Stool

Whynot had a busy touring life in various bands, but as is so often the case, that work had its ups and downs. “There was a time that I was a little bit afloat”, he recalls. “The band I was in had broken up after six years together, just after we had moved from NY to LA. So I actually took a job in my friend’s studio, helping keeping things running. He has company here in LA called Founder Music, that’s really successful, and I’ve known him for a really long time, since my NYC days. He’s the guy that got me into composing. I worked at the studio for almost two years, and during that time he just threw me into the deep end, getting me to do demos for various things. So I owe this part of my career to him pushing me into it right away.”

Tools Of The Trade

Whynot keeps his home studio rig pretty simple, using a Macbook laptop with as little hardware hanging off it as possible, so he can take it on the road easily. “I use a very small, compact audio interface for portability, and bring a USB mic in case I need to capture some live percussion, or even a reference vocal. My approach to recording bass is almost embarrassingly an after-thought to whatever else I do. I’m a fan of just plugging the bass into a good interface and anything else I need is in the box. I’m not a purist for purism’s sake, I just think it sounds good. I do set up a send and run it to a bass amp plug-in to thicken it up a bit and get that burly sound that I like. I might use a little compression, but often I don’t.”

I use Spectrasonics Omnisphere and Keyscape all the time.”

“I was doing a record with this singer, and after we had finished the basic tracks she really wanted us to be part of the overdubs and other production. So I brought in my mobile rig and my friend recommended that I get Omnisphere and Keyscape to have them available. I set up in a corner of the control room, and while they were doing some guitar overdubs or whatever, I would have my headphones on and playing around. When they were finished I would say, ‘OK, I’ve got some cool stuff to check out’ and it all worked. There are so many great sounds, and I’m no great keyboard player, but with sounds that good my ideas came across really well, just sprinkling some pixie dust onto the production.”

“I don’t have Trilian (yet), but I’ve used it at my friend’s studio – that character setting on the acoustic bass is rad. And I don’t play acoustic bass so I will probably end up getting it. I have zero hangups about using bass stuff, I mean I use plug-ins for every other instrument, why would I have a problem with using it? And there’s so much more in there than just electric basses… the Chapman Stick, the synth basses.”

What are the challenges of composing music on a laptop, especially when youre on the road?

“That’s a really good question. I think the main challenge is finding the time to work, and finding a good space to work in. If you have a hotel room and a day off that’s great – go for it! I like to use regular over-the-ear headphones, not just earbuds, and I bring a mouse to work with. Having all my samples on an external drive is a bit of a pain, and for my next upgrade I want to get a MacBook that will have a large enough internal SSD that will hold all my samples. Which will mean I’ll probably need an 8 terabyte drive (laughs)! But I’m seriously willing to spend that money, because that will mean that laptop will be my entire workstation — all I need are my headphones and I can just go.”

Enter Mastering

I go for big, beautiful and dynamic, not overly processed or hyped, and I only fix what I feel needs fixing. A simple concept to be sure, but apparently elusive enough that I have made some people very happy so far.”

The third leg to Whynot’s career stool was the least expected for him. “I never thought I’d have the skillset to do anything like that, and I just fell ass-backwards into it”, he recalls. “A buddy of mine had some recordings that he had mastered by a reputable mastering house, and he wasn’t happy with how they sounded, even after getting one revision from them. We were just talking one day, and since I was using many of the same tools on my tracks, trying to get them to sound as good as they could, I said, ‘I’ll give it a shot, if you want.’ So I did and he ended up super happy, we continued to work together on his stuff, and then he told a couple of other people, and they told some more and that’s how I got going.”

His viewpoint on mastering is simple, “It’s another set of ears to judge the music, deal with the loudness while keeping dynamics in place, and fix any problems, (like EQ inconsistencies etc.). I’m listening to your track; if I hear something that I think could be better in the mix then I’ll say so. I think mixing a track is much harder and more time consuming, but mastering is an important final step and in the end worthwhile to the people and the project.”1

Giving Back

It was a very unique and emotional experience for everyone involved.”

With the multitude of gigs, sessions, tours and recordings that Whynot has been involved with over his career, one stands out as a unique, and richly rewarding experience. “There’s an artist I’ve been playing with for a couple of years named Mary McBride. She covers the globe and while some of the gigs are concerts, others are appearances at a school, or such places. She calls them the Home Tours.

We are giving back to communities that don’t have a lot, or for people in need. One project we did here in the States was a songwriting workshop with prisoners doing serious hard time in Louisiana. All the participants were in the workshop voluntarily, and we worked with them to help tell their stories through music. Find out what style of music they’re into, get some lyrics together, and working with them to create a song. It was really something… it seemed to be really impactful to them, that someone would take the time to do this for them. We’re going to go back soon and go into the studio and record the songs that we worked on, and then bring those tracks back to the prison and add their vocals.”

Coda

“You know, I’ve recently been speaking to a lot of my musician friends, and coming out of the pandemic (hopefully) there’s a lot of pent-up creativity, work, and projects. It’s like somebody just flipped a switch and now you’re busy! I describe my situation as three tiers that I’m currently occupying myself with. One is bass-related, and that includes gigs in town, and tours and recording, then there’s my composing/recording, and then there’s the mastering work. The bass stuff and the mastering is predicated on someone calling me to do work, and the composing fits into whatever time is left over. I’m very grateful that I didn’t just rely on touring for my career/income; for those people it’s been very tough. In this day and age everyone is adjusting to the shifting ground of the business. They need to broaden their horizons, pivoting, adding a new skillset. And I wish them all the best of luck!”1

1 taken from:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xTCGDj5-g8

Written by Jerry Kovarsky

Jerry Kovarsky is a music industry veteran who has worked as a product/brand manager, marketing director, product developer and demonstrator for Korg, Ensoniq and Casio over a 30-plus year career. An accomplished keyboardist/synthesist, Jerry has been a passionate advocate for making music with keyboards and likes to live at the intersection of technology and art. He is the author of Keyboard For Dummies, and writes a long-running monthly column on synth soloing in Electronic Musician Magazine, as well as monthly blog columns on keyboard musicianship for Yamaha and Modal Electronics.