Community Highlights: Meet Daniel Weidlein of BioSoul Music

Today we’d like to introduce you to Daniel Weidlein.

Hi Daniel, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I’ve been fascinated by music as long as I can remember. There was a little old upright piano in our house from the time I was very young, and even before I had any lessons, I would go try to compose little songs on it as soon as I could climb up onto the bench. I begged my parents for lessons, and they finally caved when I turned six. When I entered elementary school, I fell in love with the saxophone. I asked my parents if I could switch to saxophone but they told me it was too big for me and I had to stick to piano, but that they would consider it if I was still interested when I got to 5th grade. Fast forward to the first day of 5th grade, and on the way to school, I asked my Mom if now I could switch to saxophone. They picked me up from school and took me straight to the local music shop and rented me my first saxophone. The rest, I guess, is history.

I fell in love with jazz and devoured as much of the music and the culture as I could, primarily as a saxophonist, but still playing the piano as well. I ended up moving to LA to go to USC to study saxophone with Bob Mintzer and became enamored with the recording industry out here. I’ve maintained my love of jazz and the saxophone, but as I was finishing school, I felt the pull to become a studio rat. I built a very makeshift studio in the garage of a house I rented with a bunch of college friends and built up a client list of folks that could look past the DIY nature of the studio.

Fast forward again, and I now own a very robust studio—BioSoul Music—where I write, produce, and engineer music for a wide variety of artists. I still like to imbue much of the music I make with the jazz sensibility (robust harmony, a sense of playfulness, continuing in the lineage of historically black music), but I have produced records from pop to country to hip-hop to classical and almost everything in-between. The studio is a haven for smaller format acoustic recordings and features a Yamaha C7 piano and a truly hybrid analog/digital signal chain.

With my own music, I now write long-form chamber music and will be debuting a concert-length choral piece, as well as a multi-disciplinary dance piece that captures the life cycle of a forest with the HOLDTIGHT dance company in 2024.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Haha. That’s a good one…

In this town, it seems like there’s someone always better than you. And it takes a lot to accept that and roll with it. That was hard for me, coming from a small town where I was “the best” at what I did. But I’m grateful for the ego check and the ability to work with master musicians at every turn of my career in LA. What it has allowed me to focus on is the less tangible parts of music making, and those are the areas that I really shine. I love helping to facilitate other people’s journeys in telling stories. I think of the writing process as a form of therapy, and I deeply appreciate being able to hold space for the difficult parts of life with my collaborators in the name of meaningful art.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about BioSoul Music?
BioSoul Music is a recording studio, a production company, and an aspiring label. The name comes from a merge of the words biological and soul and was a word my friend Ryan Amador and I came up with to describe our music back in 2016. We both love r&b and soul, and especially neo-soul, but felt that none of those genres really captured the essence of the music we were making at the time. We both like to feel music deeply in our bodies, and I like to use as many acoustic sources for my music as humanly possible so the word “biological” felt right. Thus, BioSoul was born. I co-opted it to use as the name of my business because I believe that everything I work on should be rooted in the organic, in the analog, in the REAL. I want artists to feel like their most authentic selves in this space. I want them to feel comfortable to try things and to be UNCOMFORTABLE while pushing their boundaries. I want room for magic.

BioSoul Music is a place to develop a sound, not just to get a quick recording. But it also looks really great on camera, and we do a lot of live video recordings for various projects.

What does success mean to you?
This has changed a lot for me over time, and I’m actively going to therapy about it. I used to use the obvious benchmarks of success that we have in this industry…Grammy nominations, Billboard charts, financial gain, etc. And to an extent, I can’t shake that. I’ve only had a couple of projects hit the Billboard charts, and I have yet to gain a Grammy nomination. But what I realize is even as I have little wins in those “counting stats” columns, I don’t feel any better.

So, what I’m actively working on to redefine success for myself is how I make people feel, and how I allow them to make me feel with music and in the collaboration process. Success to me is changing somebody by allowing them to look at the world a little differently at the end of a music-making process. Success is seeing somebody tap into a childhood memory because of a melody I played. Success is feeling a deepening of my relationships because of the parts of myself I unpacked while writing a new song.

Pricing:

• $175/hr for studio time
• Custom quotes for full production/songwriting/mixing/mastering

Contact Info:

• Website: www.biosoulmusic.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/biosoulmusic
• Other: www.danielweidlein.com

Image Credits
Taryn Dudley Chris Owens Frank Hobbes