Humanities
Describe your job – what do you do? Bubele Booi
Job history 2016 - Present Record Producer & Songwriter Noble (Los Angeles) 2013 Assistant Sound Designer Sterling Sound (Johannesburg) =Academic history 2018-2022 MMus in Music Technology NYU Steinhardt 2014-2017 BMus in Music Technology University of Cape Town
Bubele worked alongside Beyoncé on her song “Find Your Way Back.” Listen to the track here.
126 | YO U R CA R E E R G U I D E 2022
I’m a record producer and songwriter. Every day we get into the studio and write and record songs with artists. Additionally, we occasionally get the chance to do music for screen (i.e. documentaries and short films). My favourite part of writing music is that moment when the song seems to materialise out of nowhere and you know it’s special and everyone starts dancing around the room.
What advice would you give to music technology graduates starting out? Don’t wait to start your career until you’ve graduated. Start now. It’s likely that no one will ask you for proof of qualification, but they’ll always ask for proof of competence. So use the edge that education gives you to enhance your competence beyond that of your contemporaries in order to gain more career leverage.
Once in the industry, forget any notion of ‘rules’. You can craft your own path – there’s no one way to do it and no one way is the same.
How have your degrees helped you to get where you are? My degrees helped prepare me for the fact that nothing is handed to you easily in the creative job market and it’s all about synthesising disparate elements to formulate something new – much like research.
What has been a highlight of your career so far? I think the highs and lows are incredibly big in the entertainment industry so I try not to put too much focus on them as a source of happiness. My biggest highlight is getting to do what I love and getting to do it from a studio with windows (a rarity).
