Why I Finally Gave Up on the 'Dubstep Dream'

The Original Indefinite Hiatus Announcement from late 2024

“After a lot of internal reflection over the past few years, I’ve decided to put this project on an indefinite hiatus.

The demands of graduate school, combined with various personal circumstances beyond my control, have required me to redirect my focus. Moving forward, I want to dedicate any time I spend with music to evolving as a producer on my own terms. This means stepping back from local shows and events for the foreseeable future.

I want to thank everyone who has booked me in the past, shown support, or has come see me play over the last 8 years. You’ve made this a truly special chapter.

For one final celebration, I’ll be playing direct support for FREAKY at Culture on New Years Eve. Let’s run it back one last time.”

In this article, I am going to be providing additional context around this decision.

Why I Originally Quit

The decision to quit wasn’t just as simple as waking up and deciding “I am done”. It took most of 2020 to 2024 before finally pulling the plug on my “DJ career”. I am going to break down how this all happened by year.

2020

Prior to this year, I had put any career ambitions with bass music aside to finalize my Bachelor’s degree with the intention of picking it back up and going all-in once I graduated. My last semester happened to be during the COVID-19 pandemic and the idea of “playing shows” completely dropped off the radar (COVID could be it’s own article - stay tuned).

During that time, I enrolled in Defyre Society (a music production online school now defunct) in order to increase my music production skills so that if the world ever came back, I’d be ready to chase my dream. I also spent additional money on lessons with Ace Aura, SQUNTO, Kompany, Protostar, TenGraphs and a few others in an effort to get better.

I also started my first engineering job and had to learn how to navigate that world on top of being relocated 2 hours away to Amarillo away from my wife (fiancée at the time) in Lubbock. We were planning on getting married that year but had to push back due to COVID. I would drive back 2 hours every weekend to see her and then come back for work during the week. Majority of my week nights were spent in Ableton Live trying to get better at music.

2021

2021 hit me with a wave of opportunity. I had joined a few producer discords and was watching twitch. I entered in a production contest in the Kill The Noise discord server. Mainly wanting to make music friends and also get better at working with people.

One of the surprises of the challenge is that someone from the discord would get a chance to work with not only Kill The Noise but Bro Safari and Tasha Baxter as well. I didn’t think my name would be selected at all but to my surprise, it was! Tasha pulled my name out of the hat and I immediately freaked out. I had listened to all 3 of these artists since 2011. We immediately hopped on a discord call and got to work, sending ideas back and forth. It was such a surreal experience and in my brain I was just like “yeah, it’s all finally happening”.

Below are a few of my favorites from each of them as well as the song we got to work on together.

The world also opened up enough to where my wife and I could finally get married. She moved to where I was at and we bought our first home. I also started graduate school around this time (this will be it’s own article). Immediately, my free time started to get split 3 ways - Time with the wife, music production, and graduate school work. Despite the split in time, I was extremely desperate to make it all work.

2022

2022 was another year of change. I got my current job that allowed me to work remotely and easily context-change from work to everything else. I started doing more dedicated lessons with Nasko.

The first few in-person shows started to come back and I ended up on some smaller local shows as well as support lineups for PhaseOne and Sullivan King. The one thing I started to notice coming back to shows was how out of place I felt. I was lot more self-conscious then before. I would finish the set feeling like I had bombed and then had people coming up to tell me it was the greatest thing they ever heard. This would be a pattern across a few different smaller shows.

The later half of the year had it’s own issues when a few members of my wife’s family had some medical issues. I ended up having to cancel a show I was on opening for Borgore because of it.

For the latter half of 2022, “making music” being put fully on the back burner again due to the amount of outside personal/health issues of my wife’s family members that I did not anticipate on top of trying to maintain good grades in grad school.

2023

Given what had happened around the end of 2022, it became immediately apparent that my wife and I needed to get back to the Lubbock area. First half of the year was the last of our time in Amarillo. We ended up moving back right at the end of May and got settled back into Lubbock.

I kept continuing to get better at music and continued my lessons with Nasko but couldn’t dedicate as much time as I wanted to due to graduate school and the responsibilities that came with that. On top of that, I kept feeling “out of place” as the electronic music scene that I used to recognize started to change.

2024

2024 started off strong. I ended up on a support lineup for Oliverse and enjoyed that set a lot but even then, I still felt out of place. I had a few other shows that were very similar but could not shake the feeling that I was kind of a fraud. I knew for a fact that I could play anywhere in Lubbock/Amarillo or anywhere else in Texas and do well. It’s the equivalent of replaying a certain level on a video game, I knew how to beat it and did beat it. Why was I still playing it instead of leveling up to a new game?

Around this time, a lot of issues involving my wife’s family started to rise up and eventually become a full blown debacle that involved the court system (hence the “various personal circumstances beyond my control”). This ended up causing a lot of emotional stress and disturbance which once again put any thought of me chasing a music career to the side. For the remainder of 2024, I stuck it out with grad school and being a “rock” for my wife as we traversed all of it (we’ll see if I decide to talk about it on here, I am on the fence). This situation wouldn’t end until April of 2025.

I ultimately decided due to all of this that it was time to be done with the local music scene and just stick with getting better at music production. I didn’t have the bandwidth to try and navigate those relationships and my music simply wasn’t good enough to justify any larger bookings. Also, I was starting to see other DJs larger than I am call it quits due to the economics and stress of touring and if they were having issues then I would surely hit those same bottlenecks at some point. I just didn’t see how it was worth it any more and the “dream” died. I put up the announcement post and played my last show on a support lineup for FREAKY.

Where I Am At Now

In 2026, I am still keeping at it. The only goal I have with music production now is to get NOISIA, Space Laces, or Skrillex-level good for it’s own sake. I plan to release some of that music on website but I don’t have any major expectations for it. If I ever get some immediate signals to tour or play shows, I’ll consider it but ultimately my focus is on getting better at music as a side hobby as opposed to ever considering it as a career thing.

I also look at the current state of the expanding dubstep scene and don’t relate with a lot of the “let’s take an old hip hop lyric and throw a saw bass underneath it” mentality which seems to be a lot of it now (there are outliers obviously).

Another thing that I have considered even more now is that the financials of it just don’t work any more. A lot of the top artists are consistently in the red for events they throw and shows they play. After they pay their business manager, touring manager, crew, any flight expenses, etc. there’s not a lot left. It’s just not as sustainable as it used to be (if it ever was). Take it from these folks (highly recommend reading the entire Guilt Chip thread, very similar experience).

Doing what I do for work as a software engineer, I write software, do some programming and other technical things and I get paid and that’s about it haha. I have also been more personally rewarded from software engineering and AI/ML because it’s allowed me to put a roof over my head and allotted me more opportunities that I could even dream of. EDM never did that for me. Being a highly technical and skilled person gave me the “ability to execute” and build a full life. I still have a lot of passion for bass music but not enough to fully pivot from what I am doing now to make a career out of it.