Meet Ty Baron

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ty Baron.

Hi Ty, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
My first experience of Los Angeles was in early 2016 when my band at the time, Plum, briefly moved here by way of Denver. We were all in our early twenties and were attempting to live out our romanticized notions of “rock n’ roll”. All four of us moved into a small warehouse space on the edge of skid row inside of a factory where a few other musicians were living at the time. The room had no running water, and we built bedrooms out of plywood. We played almost four shows a week around the city for a few months. They were small shows, but we were gaining momentum. Unfortunately the reality of our “rock n’ roll lifestyle” proved much less romantic than the idea and the grim condition of our living space broke the band apart. I found myself in a dark place and was forced to move back home for a period. While back home in Colorado, there was something about Los Angeles that, even despite the initial setbacks, had captured my imagination. I found myself daydreaming about the city while I drove Lyft rides around Denver all winter to save up money.

In the beginning of 2017, I spoke with one of my former bandmates. He had been living in Orange County with his parents at the time and told me he had met a cool group of musicians with connections to a few big bands and that they were going to build a studio together. He suggested that I should come back out, and so on a whim, I packed up my car and left a few weeks later. Not knowing anyone else out here and still being mostly unfamiliar with the geography of the city I ended up moving to downtown Long Beach into a seedy apartment that didn’t care to check my employment status. I didn’t find myself particularly connecting with Long Beach and so I spent most of my days looking for work or reading books in the parks.

Eventually, I caught wind of a job opportunity through a friend of the musicians building the studio. The job was a personal assistant for a major movie producer. He was leaving the role and was looking for his replacement. I jumped at the opportunity and started making the daily commute of around two hours each way from Long Beach to Silverlake to pick up my new boss. Initially, I was starry-eyed. The meager pay, unpredictable schedule, and loosely defined set of responsibilities didn’t bother me. I distinctly remember on one of the first days of the job, having dropped her off at an appointment in Beverly Hills and driving around by myself with the top down in her convertible and feeling like I had made it.

Unfortunately, this feeling didn’t last long. The daily four hours of commuting time started to weigh on me and many of the stereotypes about assisting a Hollywood executive began to prove true. Our relationship became toxic and abusive. The week I finally found a room to rent in Los Angeles with the friend who had gotten me the job, I quit working for the producer.

I was jobless again, but I was elated to finally be living back in LA. The house was on the edge of Highland Park in a little patch called Garvanza. It was a very bohemian setup. Everyone that lived there was an artist of some kind and there was an old hippie guy called Smokin’ Joe living in a tent that looked like a vintage VW bus in the backyard. I built a recording studio in my bedroom and began working on music again.

During this time, I met my now fianceé and future record producer in one night at the now-closed ‘No Name Bar’ off of Fairfax in Hollywood. Within a few months, Jordan and I were pretty much living together at her apartment in Eagle Rock, and Omar and I had begun to work on a record based on the demos I had recorded for what would become my music project, Vases. Omar was an assistant engineer at the Boulevard recording studio in Hollywood (which itself has a very storied past) and was able to get us in for cheap if we recorded through the night. I got a job as a caterer for productions and would often wake up at 3-4am to make a 6am call time, work all day, and then go to Boulevard to work on music until 2-3am that night. It was simultaneously one of the most grueling and rewarding periods of my life.

While working on this album I started to develop an interest in visual art and graphic design. I started painting and doing small design projects for musicians and friends. When the album was finally done, I played my first show in February of 2019. My second show was scheduled for late March 2019. When covid shut everything down I, like most people involved in the arts (and generally), found myself in a crisis. I wasn’t working and finally had an opportunity to reflect. With Jordan and I now officially living together in a hole-in-the-wall apartment in East Hollywood I found myself craving stability for the first time in my life. I felt like I didn’t have the necessary skills to get a job I would be happy in, but, in a weird way, I felt that despite the chaos, Covid had given me the gift of time. I threw myself fully into graphic design. I made a course curriculum for myself based on articles I read online and worked through it rigorously for months.

Although I was improving dramatically, I could sense that having a more guided education would be hugely beneficial in both formalizing my skills and giving me credibility. I did some research and spoke to a few friends in the know and it was a resounding consensus that Artcenter is the best school in the region if you want to work in graphic design. I spent months putting together my application for the master graphic design program. I was so resolved that Artcenter was where I needed to go that I didn’t apply for any other program.

The day I got the acceptance letter to Artcenter was one of the happiest I can remember. Having never taken my education seriously when I was younger I went into the program feeling I had something to prove. The school is notorious for being one of the most rigorous art programs in the country, if not the world, and it lives up to that reputation. I devoted myself to it fully and worked 12-15 hour days for almost two years straight. It was incredibly strenuous but equally rewarding. Not only did I feel my skillset grow at the school but my character and my sense of self-worth. I emerged from the program this Spring feeling like a new and more complete version of myself than when I entered and the difficulty of the program only made graduating with distinction feel that much more rewarding.

I took a full-time job right out of school at an agency called Watson Design Group that I had interned at the previous summer. The agency focuses on digital ad campaigns for movies and television. The work is fun and interesting and the other employees are incredibly inspiring. The level of talent in all aspects of the agency is extremely impressive, and in many ways, I feel like I’m back in school again (except this time getting paid rather than paying for it).

Jordan and I now live in an apartment that we love in the Hollywood Dell neighborhood just west of Beachwood Canyon. I am playing music again now that I have time after finishing school, and we have been spending much of our time planning our wedding, which is next May in Topanga Canyon.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I think the biggest struggle for me has been one of identity. As a thirty-year-old looking back over my twenties, I think the struggle to understand and define my identity is what lead to most of my successes and failures throughout the decade. I spent many years convinced that my identity needed to be rigid and fixed, that I needed to either be this or that. I saw things in binaries. You’re an artist or a square, you’re nice or you’re mean, you’re good or you’re bad. I think this set me back for a long time. I kept myself from trying new things because they didn’t conform to whatever rigid definition of myself I was adhering to at the time. While I’m still far from perfect, I’m grateful that I’ve pushed myself to stop seeing things this way. I feel much less of a need to repress my interests or curiosities about anything and ultimately just feel much more comfortable in my own skin.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
My vision for my work artistically, now that I am out of school and have more time to pursue it is to combine everything I have learned about visual art and design with my music. During my time at Artcenter, along with honing my graphic design skills, I developed an interest in 3d animation. I became fascinated with the ability to create complex and realistic 3d scenes on the computer and devoted a good portion of my thesis project to this practice.

Since graduating, I have developed an obsessive interest in synthesizers and creating music through synthetic sounds. What I’m ultimately working toward right now is putting together my interest in 3D animation with electronic and synthesizer-driven music. I am hoping to create audio-visual pieces that will utilize both in equal parts to tell emotional and compelling stories. I am still not quite to the point where I have all of the necessary equipment to begin this undertaking, but I am optimistic that I will very soon.

I have an existing musical project called Vases and I am planning on continuing to release my work under this moniker.

Ultimately I guess I hope that this comprehensive approach could be what sets me apart but really I just want to do it for the love of creating, the act of which is a reward in and of itself.

What’s next?
Aside from the wedding and the artistic endeavors I mentioned in my previous answer, Jordan and I are currently planning a trip to Japan for this November. It will be our first trip out of the country together after five years of being together, and we are extremely excited.

Beyond that, my plans are mostly focused around learning as much as I can at my job and pushing myself to create more art more often and to share it more readily. I’m hopeful that just by opening myself up and putting more of myself out there that new and unexpected opportunities and experiences will present themselves.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.tybaron.design/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vases.la/
• SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-544175094