Andrew Siemon is a writer, music producer, and guitarist, and is the creator of both Producer Society as well as Traveling Guitarist.
My Career Story
I grew up in a small farm town out in rural, Ontario, Canada. Even though there wasn’t a whole lot to do and I didn’t like it at times, now I look back at it from a different perspective.
As someone from a similar background will tell you, that size of town brings with it a certain type of job. I worked on farms, in factories, and in construction very briefly. It taught me the importance of having a good work ethic for which I feel pretty grateful.
Not only that, but it’s hard to complain about working in an air-conditioned office when you’ve done physical labor all day for months at a time. Some people spend their whole lives doing that kind of work.
I spent a good portion of my time playing the guitar, jamming with a buddy of mine, and getting into all kinds of trouble before I finally left for Mississauga in 2011, to get my Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science.
I specialized in Political Science and French was my minor, although, I probably should’ve just stuck with Political Science. Against the backdrop of all of this, I was always playing the guitar and I always had a fascination with music. I took guitar lessons from when I was about 10-years-old until I was 18.
I started out as a grunge fan but it was Metallica that really got me into the musician side of music, so to speak. I bought all of the Metallica transcription books that I could find and worked at them all of the time.
Eventually, I got into more bands from that genre and then that was it. During my time at University, I never stopped playing guitar but ended up slowing down as the years went by. I studied music theory for around a year, I did a test for Advanced Rudiments and managed to get that certificate.
Once I graduated from university, I moved to Montreal because I had it in my mind that I was going to learn French better. I worked in the nightlife industry for close to two-and-a-half years and admittedly I stopped playing guitar during this time. I finally discovered Garageband which played a huge role in getting me back into music.
I spent two years with the software, really learning the ins and outs of it, until the point where I had a reasonable grasp of the skills required to make music. I noticed that, other than a few YouTube tutorials, there wasn’t a lot of information out there.
During this time, I was getting into online content creation and marketing which brought me to WordPress and the first website I ever made. After building my first site – which was more of a general blog about a little bit of everything – I started creating Producer Society in 2018 using the skills that I learned from the first one. When I discovered Income School, I realized what was possible and got really serious about it. That’s where we’re at now.
These days, I’m primarily focused on musicianship and music production but if I’m not working on that, I’m working on something else. My goal with this website is to cut the learning curve in half for other people looking to learn how to create music with a DAW.