Making it in the music industry requires perseverance. Many times an artist will face rejection, dismissals, and disinterest in response to their music and vision. However, giving up after facing such disinterest will only impair an artist’s career. Through my interview with Thomas Shaw and Ryan Henderson, the duo behind Project 46, I learned that the drive to succeed ranks as perhaps the most essential attribute in creating music.
Responsible for hits like “Last Chance” and “Reasons”, Project 46 only formed a few years after Ryan and Thomas met through a mutual friend. Hailing from Canada and initially producing music over Skype, the two evolved and gradually became masters of the progressive house genre. Their bond speaks to the growth of musical opportunity in the digital age, proving that two initial strangers can come together and create music which inspires people around the world.
Event Review
The Canadian duo kicked off their “Collide” tour at Phi Kappa Tau’s “Oasis” party at the University of Florida in Gainesville. This party elevated the standards of typical fraternity parties; the entire house fit a beach/tropical theme, outfitting the area with sand, a hookah lounge, and glowing streams of water. Christian Kline, a brother of the Fraternity who organized the event, excellently fused the rave and beach atmospheres into a groundbreaking party.
Up-and-coming DJ Klimax kicked off the night with an impressive blend of electro and big room house. Local favorites Vass played next, mixing a variety of trap and future bass favorites and even including tracks from Skrillex’s new album “Recess.” After much anticipation, Project 46 manned the decks to a very sold-out crowd. Navigating through a catalog of their hits, unreleased IDs, and big room anthems, Ryan and Thomas demonstrated an understanding of DJing normally seen in artists with years of experience. Project 46 captivated the crowd and gradually raised the energy throughout their set, leaving everyone spellbound as “Last Chance” appropriately closed their performance.
The night had just begun after Project 46 finished, though. An afterhours experience provided an amazing bookend to the event, filling two rooms of local talent and even a surprise guest appearance in the form of OWLSA-signed Wuki. Both rooms focused on showcasing the wide range of local talent in Gainesville and capped off an unforgettable night.
Interview
WRR: You two met through a mutual friend. You guys actually aren’t from the same city, you hadn’t met until a few years ago. Who is this mutual friend we are indebted to for the creation of Project 46?
Ryan: Toby K.!
Thomas: No one’s ever actually asked us that!
Ryan: Toby K was a mutual acquaintance.
Thomas: I had never met him before!
Ryan: He asked me multiple times, “You gotta meet [Thomas]!”, I said I was too busy and eventually me and Thomas linked up and the rest is history.
WRR: Most duos are usually made up of lifelong friends or relatives. You guys only met a few years ago. How do you think that impacts your creative process?
Thomas: It makes us more unique because the more people work together the faster they will find a process. It’s weird, we actually have very similar personalities so we found that process pretty quickly.
Ryan: It changes too. We’re making an album right now and the process of the album is a lot different than the process of our first few singles. The process of us working together is always changing.
Thomas: Our adaptiveness helps us a lot.
WRR: We’re all excited for your new album! Is it coming this year?
Thomas: Hopefully! That’s the plan.
Ryan: It will be submitted in April and it’s signed to a major label we can’t mention yet. They will release singles and go from there.
Thomas: There’s a plan in place. We don’t know the exact date yet. It’s bigger than us. (Laughs)
WRR: We’re all looking forward to it! (Laughs) You two would usually produce over Skype since you two are from different areas.
Thomas: That was before, now we’re touring so much and are always on the road so we’ll just hop on the laptop and go to work.
WRR: So being on the road actually makes things more convenient in that way.
Ryan: Our first six months we were broke, I lived on one side of [Canada] and [Thomas] lived on the other side of the [Canada]. Project 46 wasn’t making any money, so the only thing we could afford to do was pay our internet connections and use screen sharing on Skype. I heard they don’t have that anymore!
WRR: You have to pay for screen sharing on Skype now! (Laughs)
Ryan: (Laughs) So we probably couldn’t afford Project 46 back then!
Thomas: We’re lucky, timing was key!
WRR: Ryan is from Waterloo and Thomas is from Vancouver. What are the best parts of your cities?
Thomas: Vancouver I’d have to say everything! (Laughs) Sushi is a big one. The environment, like natural landscape, mountains, the water, and clean air. It’s not overpopulated, lots of things I love about Vancouver. If I had to pick one it’d be sushi. (Laughs)
Ryan: Waterloo is a student town a lot like [Gainesville] and I think the people of Waterloo are the best. It’s a pretty big party city. The sushi sucks there, though. (Laughs)
WRR: You guys don’t reveal why you’re called Project 46. Is it more engaging to keep it secret and do you like to hear the fans’ theories?
Ryan: I think the theories are better than the real reason!
Thomas: The theories are better! The actual reason is not that cool, it’s actually pretty dumb. So we decided to make it a mystery.
WRR: My theory is that it was your guys 46th project when you two came together!
Ryan: Nope, that’s a lot of projects! (Laughs) I think it was [Thomas’] second project and my first project when it came to music projects.
Thomas: That’s a lot of artists! (Laughs)
WRR: (Laughs) So the Monstercat label was instrumental in getting your work out there. How did you get onto the label?
Ryan: To be honest Mike Darlington, who owns the label, was a good friend of mine. I was producing and he was just starting the label. Me and Thomas had some progressive tunes and Monstercat was a dubstep label at the time and looking for progressive house music. Mike said “Dude, we need this music, it’s good” and I said “No it sucks, we can’t give it to you!” (Laughs) He kept convincing us to give him some progressive music and that’s how it started, as a friendship and it went from there.
Thomas: [Mike] was an early supporter and [Monstercat] were friends and they asked us to give them some music and they would release it.
Ryan: It was all about timing. [Mike and Monstercat] were just getting started.
Thomas: That was back when Monstercat had only 20,000 subscribers
WRR: Monstercat only started to get bigger recently.
Ryan: Right, we were just starting and Monstercat was just starting. I knew Mike and it went from there. It worked out well, now we’re both growing.
WRR: Do you ever check out rising artists to collaborate with?
Thomas: All the time! We really encourage people to send us music.
WRR: Do you ever look at rising producers on Monstercat or keep it more general?
Ryan: We look at blogs a lot. The guys on blogs, on Monstercat, on Beatport are usually bigger but there are some solid producers out there that are really small and they will send us ideas. They will be developing producers but they will have an amazing melody or amazing sound design but don’t have the whole package together yet. We will help those producers and get them to the next step.
WRR: It’s cool that you guys come from an unknown status and help rising producers along the way.
Thomas: Yeah, when you’re starting it can be hard because it’s such a vast world and you don’t know where to begin. It’s great to give the opportunity to people.
Ryan: People gave us the opportunity, like Paul Oakenfold, Kaskade, and Laidback Luke. We were working off tracks from two years ago and they helped us early on.
WRR: This is the first stop on the “Collide” Tour in honor of your new song with Laidback Luke and Collin McLoughlin. How did the collaboration come about?
Ryan: If you listen online there’s a bootleg called “Memories.” We were working on the instrumental of this song and Luke heard it and told us he had ideas for it and wanted to jump on board. We had a vocal we were working on and Luke had an idea for the arrangement so we went back and forth. We got Collin to sing a vocal and Luke made some changes to the vocal and the lyrics. It was a song we started at first and Luke hopped on and then we got Collin on board. It was a long process, that song was a year and a half old by the time it was released.
WRR: That’s awesome! I know usually the bigger producers will get smaller producers onto their tracks.
Ryan: In our experience it was us starting the music and then that music circulating to bigger producers. At the time when we were working with these guys Project 46 was nothing. Kaskade said “I want to work with these guys named Project 46” and we were like “What?!” We sent him stuff and asked “Do you like this?” and he said “That’s a sick idea, let’s run with it.” Kaskade [added] his magic to it.
WRR: This is a college party. You guys have played festivals like TomorrowWorld and Ultra. Do you approach the sets differently?
Thomas: Always. We always go with our opening track and finishing track, the finishing track will sometimes change. Usually we’ll talk and say “Ok, today we’re opening with this” and go from there. We’ve got seven and a half hours of music on our SD cards. You never know what people are going to like. At a festival you bang out some kick-drums and in a club you can play some more groovy shit, it always changes. We have a big arsenal of music and see where it goes.
WRR: I respect that! Some DJs stick to the same set and that’s it.
Thomas: Yeah, some cities you’ve been to before and you can plan a set for that. That’s cool too.
Ryan: Or if you’ve been there too soon and you can change your set. We play New York a lot and when we go back we’re sensible to what we’ve played before.
Thomas: We always change it up.
WRR: Speaking of traveling, what have been some of your favorite cities or venues to play?
Ryan: I really like playing in Vancouver, Toronto, one of our hometowns. There’s lots of sick venues, like LIV and Story in Miami and New City Gas in Montreal.
Thomas: Stereo Live in Houston! In Los Angeles we always get great crowds.
WRR: Always heard great things about L.A.!
Ryan: Yup, there’s places like Story where the venue is amazing or you’ll get places like Stereo [Live] where the crowd is amazing. It’s that student, young crowd.
Thomas: The rage crowd! Pure energy.
Ryan: Sometimes you get both. At Avalon you get both.
WRR: Speaking of night clubs, Ryan, what’s the significance of Beta night club? Even before producing you seemed to be no stranger to electronic music.
Ryan: Yeah, I was involved with a club called Tabu and Beta and was involved with the promotions and the talent buying as well. So I have a unique perspective on the scene. Project 46 started during the time Beta was starting. Beta was trying to get its liquor license for two years and that was during the time we started Project 46. Since then I haven’t been as involved with it but I tried to bring it up as much as possible. They have a big team over there now and they’re doing their own thing.
WRR: Awesome! Most producers work from their bedroom and work from there but the fact that you were apart of a club and you booked big producers like deadmau5 is amazing.
Ryan: I actually didn’t book deadmau5! (Laughs) He was one of the only producers I didn’t book. Me and Joel don’t get along actually. (Laughs) I don’t think Joel will ever play for me but I’ve booked guys like Tiesto. To give you an idea of how long I’ve been involved in the scene, I booked Avicii for 500 bucks and a Hawaiian pizza. (Laughs) I’ve known Tim [Bergling] for a long time, I knew a lot of the bigger guys when they were really small.
WRR: Do you ever apply the business skills you learned through that to the business of Project 46?
Ryan: Of course.
Thomas: Why do you think we are where we are today? (Laughs)
Ryan: There’s more than just the music, right? I mean, you can look at guys like Martin Garrix who is an amazing producer but who is built off the song “Animals” and it’s the business behind the song. There’s a lot of business involved.
Thomas: A great song is useless if it’s not heard. That’s where the marketing and the business come into play.
Ryan: Right, the business is very important. But now it’s above me, we have PR teams and others to help. But it helped get us going for sure.
WRR: Thomas, you’ve grown up playing instruments and such. Did you ever hope to become a famous musician one day?
Thomas: No! (Laughs) I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. Music has always been apart of my life so for me I don’t feel like I’m doing anything different except now I’m getting paid to do it, which is obviously better and beats pushing buggies at Costco. (Laughs) But yeah, I never planned for it and always did it as a passion.
WRR: That’s interesting! You’re classically trained, how do you incorporate that into your laptop producing?
Thomas: When you hear the album you’ll hear! (Laughs) Some songs I’ll screw around with on my guitar and write the riff and transpose it in. The cool thing about when I started producing was that I was producing Pro Tools and it was all audio based and then a friend of mine showed me FL Studio which is a lot more MIDI based so that’s when I transposed everything into MIDI’s, I thought “Cool, I can write this riff on my guitar and then make it on a MIDI. I mean, making sounds on a computer is like playing an instrument, it’s just instead of having to do all in real-time you can plan it out. I mean, I’m not a great piano player but I can have an idea in my head and then do it as though I was Beethoven, you know what I mean? (Laughs) So for me that’s why I jumped onto electronic music.
WRR: Awesome! So who are your favorite rising producers?
Thomas: One of my favorites is Kryder, I love Kryder. He’s getting pretty big now.
Ryan: Thomas has a soft spot for all the groovy stuff (Laughs)
Thomas: Yeah I love Kryder! (laughs) Walden is also awesome, John is sick.
Ryan: I like Paris Blohm. I’ve listen to [his] stuff for a long time cause he’d send me stuff before he had that big song “Colors.” There’s a lot of really small guys, I mean like Soundwell for example. He’s sick. We did a song with him on…what was it called again? (Laughs)
Thomas: “Waiting!” (Laughs) We make a lot of songs (Laughs) We’ve probably made 30 songs in the last four months, it’s retarded man (Laughs). Our album is, um, what is it, 14 tracks? We had to cut like 20 songs.
Ryan: The plan is 13 new songs and “Last Chance” on the album and we were way over so we had to cut songs we actually really like. When we send our album into the label they will probably want to cut a couple more songs and will want us to work with certain people to make more music. So we’ll see what happens.
WRR: Alright, last question. How excited are you guys for the new season of Game of Thrones? I know Thomas is a big fan (Laughs)
Thomas: I’m already on book 5 so I already know what’s going to happen (Laughs)
WRR: (Laughs) Me too, I’ve read all the books!
Ryan: I’ve never read the books (Laughs)
WRR: Has [Thomas] spoiled [Ryan]? (Laughs)
Thomas: No haven’t spoiled him (Laughs)
Ryan: I feel like by the time the new season comes out I’ll have to catch up on the previous seasons.
Thomas: You know what sucks though? The 6th book doesn’t come out until 2016.
WRR: Yeah it sucks. Then we’ll have to wait for the 7th book.
Thomas: Write George, write!!! (Laughs)
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Connect with Project 46 on Social Media: Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, and Instagram.
White Raver Rafting would like to thank Phi Kappa Tau at the University of Florida, Christian Kline, and Lauren Worthington.
Photo Credits: Stian Armstrong, Michael Vensamoye, and Aka Rambo Productions.
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