Meet Eric J Campbell of EricMakesMusic in Cumberland

Today we’d like to introduce you to Eric J Campbell.

Eric, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I have been studying music and songwriting my entire life. I started learning instruments at the age of six in New York City. By high school, I was proficient at drums, piano, violin and saxophone.

I considered majoring in music in college but my parents talked me out of it. So, I studied electrical engineering but music was still my greatest passion.

After working a number of years as a project manager for a large consulting firm, I left to figure out how to make music my full-time income.

In 2007 I moved to Atlanta to pursue music opportunities but it would take almost five years before I started seeing any success.

In 2011 I started building relationships with music sync libraries. They started pitching my music to music supervisors on various TV shows. Fast forward to today and my music has been placed on dozens of shows including Revenge, Shameless, The Deadliest Catch, Greenleaf, Keeping Up With The Kardashians, multiple episodes in the Love & Hip Hop and Real Housewives brand and lots more.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The road has been anything but smooth. I moved to Atlanta with three months worth of income in my pocket expecting to “make it” pretty quickly. A few months later, I was evicted from the basement apartment I was leasing and spent the next two years bouncing around from place to place trying to find a way to be stable.

My stable income came from starting a practice teaching music lessons in private homes. Within a couple of years of word of mouth advertising, I had about 30 students and a couple of teachers working for me.

I lost numerous opportunities on the road to getting stable because I didn’t have the ability to focus on pursuing them.

But once I was more confident about income coming in I was able to devote the rest of my time to writing music for sync licensing opportunities.

EricMakesMusic – what should we know? What do you do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
I produce music and write songs for sync licensing. This includes music for television, film, advertising spots and movie trailers.

I create music in multiple genres – especially urban-influenced pop music, hip hop, and hip hop influenced orchestral compositions.

What I’m most proud of (and what sets me apart) is the network of collaborators and sub-contractors that I’ve built throughout the years. With all the projects and TV shows I’ve created music for, I’ve accumulated a strong network of singers, musicians and composers that I enjoy working with (and vice versa). This diversity of reliable talent allows me to be able to expand my offering to cover just about every style of music imaginable. (Country, rock, opera, gospel, electronic, folk, acoustic, etc.).

What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
My proudest moment so far has been working on the TV show Greenleaf. For most shows, my music is added to the show after it’s already produced so I worked pretty much in isolation. But for Greenleaf, I was part of the music production team. I was responsible for songwriting and one of the two vocal producers for the show. I got to work with great team of musicians and vocalists to pull the music together for each episode of the 2nd season. I also got to work directly with the actors as they executed the music portions of the show. It was amazing to see how a television series actually comes together.

In the end, I had numerous original songs placed on the show that season and two songs included on the original soundtrack. That soundtrack went on to win an NAACP Image Award for Gospel music and was also nominated for a Grammy. It was truly an honor to be a part of that.

Pricing:

• Sync License Consulting starts at $75/hour

Contact Info:

• Website: ericmakesmusic.com
• Phone: 404-914-1500
• Email: ericmakesmusic@gmail.com
• Instagram: @ericmakesmusic
• Facebook: facebook.com/ericmakesmusic
• Twitter: twitter.com/ericmakesmusic
• Other: soundcloud.com/ericmakesmusic

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