Building The Sounds Of The Future With Multimedia Artist Ben Barr

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Following your dreams and building things are goals we all share, despite generational differences. It is no different with today’s guest, multimedia artist Ben Barr. Stephen Jaye interviews Ben and they talk about how he got his start as a musician and as an entrepreneur. Ben also talks about his future plans as an artist. Listen in and be inspired by Ben’s journey. --- Listen to the podcast here: Building The Sounds Of The Future With Multimedia Artist Ben Barr In previous episodes of this show, we've talked a little bit about the different generations that we encounter, both in the workforce and in our places where we go and how each generation has different experiences, different outlooks and sometimes different ways of communicating. We've always had some pretty positive discussions about how to go about understanding one another as opposed to driving one another. One of the things that I've been encouraged by an emerging trend is amongst the generation behind mine, Generation Z or iGen, that has been referred to in some circles, has had a pretty interesting desire to do a lot of the things that we talked about on this show. There seems to be a strong interest in starting up businesses or starting up something, building something on their own. Representing this particular group of people is the man that produced the intro and outro music to this show, Mr. Ben Barr, who has a multimedia company where he does several different things, including music lessons, video production and producing music for shows. Ben, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. How is everything going for you? Great. Things are going well. I'm excited to be on the show and have a conversation. You're in the Gen Z category. You have your multimedia business. What brought you into that? What got you interested in doing that and made you decide that rather than just a hobby or something you do on the side, that you're going to turn it into something where you're going to make money off of it and produce things for lots of different people? It was an accident. I was just interested in music. I loved it as a hobby when I was younger. I never intended it to be a business, but when I was thirteen, my mom was teaching piano lessons. I've been classically trained on piano. Since I was little, I'd been taking piano lessons. She needed help teaching, so I started to help her teach and take on some of her students. That became the first business thing that I did. It was totally by accident. I even think of it as being a business. I thought of it as a service that I was trying to provide to help educate people. That's where it started for me. It was teaching piano and loving music. How old were you when you first decided you loved music? Is this something that happened at 4 or 5 years old like you see a lot of people? As soon as I could walk, my parents made me learn instruments because both of them are musical too. I got a piano right away and then later, I played the French horn for a couple of years. I played the drums a lot and the guitar. I loved music, but the classical music and stuff was boring. I wasn't into that as much. I was eight years old or something when I was messing around on my dad's iPad. I found the app GarageBand and I was making music on that. I thought that was the coolest thing ever. It was like a video game but way better. That's what got me into the music production side of things. Out of curiosity, what kind of music do you generally enjoy? I enjoy a lot of kinds of music. I like some pop music, a lot of rap music. I've been a big Twenty One Pilots fan. Their newest album wasn't as great as I've heard, but I still like it. I enjoy it. I'm interested in any kind of music. I've got open ears. Country music is harder for me to swallow, but I like all other kinds of music. There's always going to be a differential on some types of music and others.