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AN ORIGIN STORY Peet the ‘Jazz Prodigy’

By Lina F Boothby

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our-year-old Peet never dreamt of becoming a musician. As a matter of fact, he never wanted to be anything special. He was supposed to follow his surgeon father’s footsteps to the bleach smelling hospital corridors.

He only started to play the violin, because his mum thought it looked cute in his hands. But he got the hang of it and went on to win every possible national classical violinist competition in the country. All of a sudden, there weren’t enough shelves in his room to hold his trophies, and he started to dive into the deep seas of musical creativity. At this point he was six.

He was still in primary school, when he came across a basic sound editing software at his cousin’s house. It could create all sorts of pre-made loops and musical elements and arrange them in any particular order.

This new world of creativity captivated him so much, that he sometimes forgot to pour milk on his morning cereal. His aspirations grew every day and soon he couldn’t think of anything else but music production.

One week a family friend came around for a Sunday roast and brought Sony’s ACID with him. This was the first software that Peet could do whatever he liked with. He started turning all the levels up and down, pushing all the buttons, playing around with sound effects on their family PC, driving his parents absolutely crazy. His mother says: “It was a madhouse. The same beat on repeat for days.” His father says: “He strived for excellence.” Peet says: “I felt intoxicated from the endless options.”

It didn’t take long until he grew frustrated with not being able to record. Seeing his

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agony, his father surprised him with a small studio microphone and a two-channel mixer for his 12th birthday. “It was like getting wings. I could record whatever, whenever I wanted and use my own music to make my own tracks.” Peet went absolutely crazy with musical experiments for a while. He spent all his waking hours piling up sheet music, humming tunes, jotting down lyrics.

He finished his first official studio album ‘Go’ when he was 13 and he started to give his CDs out to people for feedback. “I think you really need feedback to keep you going. I always tell beginner producers to send their music to people they respect. Mum and dad are great, but you need professional advice and constructive feedback. You get some responses from your fans as well, but you can’t start experimenting on them straight away.”

Releasing his first album was a massive milestone in Peet’s career as a produc-

“Hearing the nuances in music is still my superpower” er. “I think it is important to always learn, and experiment as a musician. Most of my knowledge comes from being thrown into the deep end in my studio, solving problems that I have never encountered before. I had to analyse everything. What did I do right?

What did I do wrong? Eventually I learnt my lessons and didn’t make the same mistake twice.”

Spending all his saved up pocket money, he bought some studio monitor speakers and suddenly he could hear things that he

THE PEET PROJECT

could never before. “Hearing the nuances in music is still my superpower,” he says.

While working on his bedroom studio, he started looking into soundproofing. It was in a Monday maths class, when a classmate mentioned a soundproofing mat sale in town. The local radio station underwent some refurbishment and they sold all the mats and sound trap elements for peanuts.

Peet sneaked out of school during first period, bought half of their stock and packed his room with them. “It was a revelation for to have a silent bedroom during both recording and mixing.” While other teenagers were enjoying ‘seven minutes in heaven’, fifteenyear-old Peet entered his song to a national remix competition, remixing a Sub Bass Monster track. It was around that time that he fell in love with funk-jazz, so he packed his remix with a lot of rhodes, bass slaps and acoustic claps. The stakes were high; the winners got onto the maxi album of Sub Bass Monster and their music was played on several radio stations. The first two winners were the two biggest music bosses in the country, and third came high-school freshman Peet, an absolute nobody.

Out of nowhere, industry big dogs started asking questions about him. He received countless emails complementing his crisp and fresh style, praising him for bringing some acoustic funkiness to the industry palette. People called offering him mixing jobs, and suddenly Peet was on the top of the electronic music producer lists. Artists looking for a break asked him for advice.

He describes this as a season of enlightenment: “This was when the lightbulb flicked on in my head and I felt like I have arrived.”

He thinks his break was due to his jazz piano theory lessons. “I had the good basics of music before, but I was trained as a classical violinist for over ten years and I knew little about pop or jazz music.

It was during those lessons, when I finally understood why music never sounds like how I want it to. It was all down to harmonics.”

He was eighteen and fresh out of highschool when he started his own band, the Peet Project, with his pianist friend, Adam.

The Peet Project is a smooth jazz band, but

“The key to becoming a great producer is to have a very wide perspective of the world of music” they decided to be audacious and add violin to the instrumental palette, which is almost alien from this genre. With this project, Peet conquered the stages of Budapest and started performing professionally.

Peet says the key to becoming a great producer, you must have musical intelligence. You either need to be an active musician, or have a very wide perspective of the world of music. A producer needs to have an extensive knowledge about the use and role of musical instruments, the different musical trends, h o w

everything should sound together and be willing to constantly learn and experiment with music. You don`t have to orchestrate as a sound engineer, it is enough to be able to work with sampling and have a wide spectrum of insight into the music industry.

However, if the sound engineer is a musician themselves and have a harmonics background they have the advantage of being able to help musicians in tweaking their music during the recording process. They can say: the guitar needs to move up an octave, that the singer’s harmonies don’t work well together.

“You don’t have to be regularly on stage, but a basic knowledge of keys or guitar can be that plus that makes a good producer,” he explains.

Peet has released ten albums so far with the Peet Project and he is nowhere near finished. Three years ago, he bought his own recording studio where he works as a fulltime sound producer. His back wall is covered with framed articles and photographs.

In one of them, Peet is shaking hands with Oasis chief engineer Gene ‘The Machine’ Grimaldi, the overlord of sound engineering in Los Angeles. “I sent him ‘Night is Falling’, one of our singles, for mastering and he asked me if I wanted to work with him regularly. He looked at a map to find Hungary, only because he liked how my music sounded. These are moments that are like mini Christmases for me.”

The Peet Project’s latest album ‘Love’, officially out this summer, is already on the Smooth Jazz lists. ‘Love’ was born during our tour in the US. T h e band was doing shows

in front of 10 thousand people at the LA Jazz Festival in 2013, when they started thinking of releasing a new album.

However, the band soon faced some serious difficulties. “Touring for weeks was an enormous change for all of us, because we weren’t used to the scale of crowds, or being away from home so long. It was different food, constant interviews and cameras in our faces.

It was such an emotional and physical strain on most of the band members that three out of five of us left straight after arriving home. They weren’t prepared going big.”

It took Peet a few months to get over the break and look for new musicians. This time he was a lot more conscious in choosing the right people, who had certain qualities in them, like durability, willingness to sacrifice, readiness for touring.

“Some people are amazing musicians but they aren’t made for touring and success and you can’t plan long term with them,” he explains.

“Some people are amazing musicians but they aren’t made for touring and success” The new Peet Project spent most of their time together, first doing gigs and practicing the repertoire, and not working on anything new. “’Love’ was always in the back of my mind, but first we needed to focus on becoming a team.” This time Peet was a lot more conscious about planning forward, taking PR seriously, building their relationships with touring offices. The project is about to go on another US tour with ‘Love’.

Now, 23-year-old Peet is freshly married to his high-school sweetheart. When I ask him about his future plans, he sighs.

He still takes too much on as a producer. He barely sleeps when a project deadline hits.

“Sometimes I think, I can finish something on time, not realising that I depend on other people keeping deadlines too. It happened before, when I had four songs due in a day and three of them I haven’t even started yet, because I didn’t the tracks didn’t arrive to work with.”

He says, finding the balance between work and private life is essential for a sound producer, because they have to deal with a lot of stressed people, who are also pushed by deadlines. “You don’t have to be a superhero, but it is very important to be able to properly plan a work-diary so you don’t accept jobs that you can’t finish,” he shares his advice.

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