Gwen Holt: Songwriting Coach to Music Producer
A jack of all trades when it comes to music, Gwen Holt is a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, producer, Berklee trained songwriter, and private music teacher.
If there is one HOME member who utilizes and squeezes every drop of juice out of all the programs offered, it’s Gwen. This is her HOME story . . .
Being self-employed,
I work from home. Before I joined HOME, most opportunities I had to meet potential collaborators and clientele involved going out to concerts and bars.
However, when you go to concerts, you don’t really meet people. You mostly hang out with the people you arrive with.
My second option, going to bars to meet people, wasn’t much better. But when I first came to town as a songwriter, that was the thing to do.
Everyone would hang out in certain bars or restaurants like The Longhorn or Figlio’s/Sammy B’s, to meet people. And that’s cool, but you can very easily turn into a broke wino doing that! Plus, it’s usually other songwriters that you meet there. And back in those days, it was very male-dominated.
If you were hanging out at a bar as a woman, it was nearly impossible to make clear you were a serious songwriter looking for quality co-writers, not dates.
HOME is very unique.
I had never heard of anything quite like it before, so I was very excited to join.
There are very few places like HOME where the range of people you meet is so broad. I meet producers, writers, performers, up-and-coming artists, bands, attorneys, publicists, and marketing people.
That variety is much more helpful for what I’m doing now, which is quite a lot of different things. And HOME gives me access to all those people in a space where I can get to know them.
The people I’ve met have become my friends, and I see them nearly every week.
I’ve met people through HOME Online Activations - a lot of those during the pandemic, of course. And there are networking events, shows, and educational workshops, to name just a few of the benefits offered.
I’ll never forget the moment I discovered the Feedback Sessions. That was definitely my favorite HOME resource right off the bat.
I identify mainly as a songwriter, so to have other songwriters/producers give intelligent productive feedback on songs, arrangements, and mixes was both really helpful and an ”oh I’ve found my people!” moment.
People in the HOME community think the same way that I do.
They understand that there is more to songwriting than writing a song. When the production is lacking, you’re in trouble; production is part of the songwriting - especially nowadays.
It’s a big world out there.
There’s a lot of competition, so you want to get every edge that you can. The lyrics, arrangement, production, performance, mixing, mastering, etc. are all opportunities to improve the song. That’s the way the people at HOME think, which makes it a really exciting community to tap into - to get some quality feedback, and to give quality feedback as well.
In that particular group, I can offer the multi-instrumentalist perspective, and I have a strong songwriting background.
I studied at Berklee College of Music, graduated, and took all of the commercial songwriting classes. I’ve written hundreds of songs. However, despite having produced and co-produced about a hundred songs, I’m not an experienced recording engineer.
Others in the Feedback Sessions have much more production and engineering experience, which makes their feedback especially valuable to me.
It’s a really great, symbiotic opportunity that provides the perfect avenue for collaboration.
I feel like I am able to contribute something to what they are doing, and they are most definitely contributing to what I’ve been up to. All the various resources and people that HOME brings together have helped me start releasing singles that I’ve been sitting on for far too long!
‘Some Old Dylan’ is one song I’m working on with Allan Fine, who is helping to engineer and co-produce it with me. I'm also working on a music video for it, and now I’ve started to make an entire swamp-blues-Americana EP in my home studio, co-produced/engineered by Allan Fine as well.
Allan and I are also bartering lessons. He’s helping me strengthen my engineering skills, and I’m helping him strengthen his vocal/songwriting skills.
HOME has also given me more exposure to the type of clientele I’m looking for as a music teacher, vocal and songwriting coach, and producer. I love working with both touring and up-and-coming artists, bands, and songwriters. I’ve also been able to do more pre-production, which I love.
And the HOME Live Room is so multifaceted - from helping me stream live shows on Facebook to putting on a recital with 200 people. I organized a festival with 7 of my student bands there.
It would have cost me a fortune to rent a similar venue for a show like that.
But with a member discount, it was half price, which helped a lot. Plus, its location right in East Nashville, near Five Points, is perfect.
Even though I teach music and give online lessons from my home studio, I have taken my students into HOME for various things. I teach bands—adult bands and kid bands. We do classic, rock, pop, and whatever people want to do.
When we’ve written songs, I’ve taken bands to HOME and recorded them. One we did with Ian Osborne, and of course he did a great job of recording and co-producing that. Allan Fine mastered one and also did excellent work.
The HOME Community ties you in with a lot of talented people who work together really well in so many different ways.
Other than that, the friendships that I’ve built have been the big win. No matter how you look at it, creating, performing, and releasing, music is a tough road that can be frustrating and isolating. Especially nowadays with streaming and the pandemic, it’s a challenge to make a significant amount of money as an artist.
All the aspects of the journey are not exactly easy, so to find other people who are crazy enough and passionate enough to get on that road—and stay on that road—is something really special!