A lesson from Deadmau5

Last weekend Chris James took a chance. He basically cold called the world famous Deadmau5 and it worked. Chris' vocals are going to appear on an upcoming track and it's all thanks to a single tweet. 

Via pandodaily:

Rather than locking himself away from the world for days to return with a new track in hand, however, deadmau5 introduced a bit of a twist to his workflow: he’d stream it all live. Every glorious minute of the process, from the sampling of the audio (including using the sound of him clapping on his own bare bum as one of the tracks) to the surprise attacks by his cat Professor Meowington would be streamed to anyone who cared to watch.

As the track came together, deadmau5 mentioned that he’d need to start figuring out what to do for the vocal track soon — and that’s when things started to get really, really cool.

Having been watching the stream throughout and wishing he could be a part of it, up-and-coming house producer Chris James took the mention of vocals as a challenge. After tying together bits and pieces from the stream with working samples that had been released throughout the weekend, James came up with lyrics (also inspired by the short story) and began laying his tracks on top of deadmau5′ work.

 He finished up, exported, and, on a whim, sent it off to deadmau5 via Twitter.

So what can we learn from this? Take a chance. You've got nothing to loose. Who do you want to work for? Now pick up the phone and call them. Not a friend of a friend of a friend who works in the mail room. Go right to the top. Do you think Chris' story would have had the same ending if he'd gone through Deadmau5's management company?

All to often we put Creative Directors on this pedestal, but the fact remains, they are just regular people too. And more importantly, they were students once too. 

If it is to be, it's up to me.