Neil's Coffee Consultancy
Believe it or not, I wasn’t always the spinner of plates in the local music industry. I spent my 20s travelling around europe managing music projects. A lot of this involved sitting around drinking coffee in swanky locations and exchanging wisdom with someone on a specific problem.
Scratch that. Pretty much all of it involved sitting around drinking coffee and waxing lyrical. I gave it up because I wanted to be more hands on and create things that weren’t documents and spreadsheets.
This said - I am particularly good at sitting around taking bollocks and drinking coffee. Before the pandemic I was a mainstay at the coffeeshops of the west end of Glasgow listening to a musician tell me about their latest project. Sometimes it translated into work and sometimes it was just about networking and building relationships. Either way I liked hearing about what people were up to and putting my tuppence worth in about how best to do it and who best to work with.
The pandemic killed this and it was one of the aspects of my work that I missed most. Luckily we all discovered zoom, and I’m glad to say that I still have at least one zoom a week to keep my skills up incase nattering becomes an olympic sport.
How does it work?
This is basically my pitch to give me a shout if you want to get a coffee. You don’t need to be hiring me. I don’t need to know you. We can do it virtually over zoom or we can meet in Glasgow or Greenock. If you have tunes for me to listen to or documents for me to read. Send them over before hand. That’s it. There might be follow up where I introduce you to a third party or I bring someone else along, but that will be project specific.
Why?
There’s a great value to this part of the creative process. Your idea is good enough that you’ve continued chewing on it once you’ve come out the shower and you are ready to start a basic plan of how to achieve it. Once the bare bones are there, it’s great to have someone to bounce ideas off of. It can be quite daunting putting it out there, so it has be quite informal. Other people can help you see the broader picture to realise the ridiculous holes in your logic which would be obvious if you weren’t so close to the project. In the same vein, you can also miss incredibly obvious paths to success which have been complicated by repeated iterations of the idea.
Why me?
By the age of 14 I’d abandoned the need to be centre of attention and decided that it was much more rewarding to be part of a team, so I just enjoy making things happen. I studied sound engineering and was happy to play bass and drums while peacocks stood up front.
It isn’t entirely altruistic. If you are successful and I know you, then the success is closer to me. For years I’ve worked off the adage that the closer the money is to my pocket, the more likely it is to go into it. I don’t see the success of others as a threat. I see it as an opportunity. The more people who I know and who know what I can do, the more work I get.
I’m a natural polymath. As a straight B student at everything who struggles to focus enough to be A+ at anything, I can cover a lot of creative bases and know how lots of different things work . So I can usually tell you who can best get a job done for you.
I’ve been around the block a bit. I’ve generally done or seen done or been part of a team who did most of the things you want to do. If I haven’t I’ll tell you.
I also spend most days sitting at home editing. Working from home is great for me, but I get next to no “water cooler chat” and this is an attempt to recreate that because I think it is essential for the creative process.
I’ve extended my skills by being a mentor for a variety of charities in the music industry such as Help Musicians. I’m also a qualified Mental Health First Aider thanks to the Music Support charity, so I’m not afraid to ask how your mental health is.
How much does it cost?
Well it doesn’t really cost anything. That’s kind of the point. I think it would be polite if you paid for the coffee, either literally or virtually but don’t let that hold you back.
What can I do?
You can see all that from this site. My main sources of income are sound production and recording, music videos, live videos, photography and trumpet playing and horn scoring.
So hit me up here, Facebook or instagram and start the ball rolling.