It’s not easy to make a living in the South African music industry actually making music. There are not that many full time positions for musicians, producers and sound-engineers and if you want to make money as a person who makes music you need to be your own boss or own a company. You also need to do as much as possible so that the work is steady and pulls in a sizeable income. Johan Rautenbach is an example of this kind of music industry player. He is a hard-working session musician and owns his own studio called Farmhouse records where he records and produces some of South Africa’s top Afrikaans contemporary musicians.
Johan started to make music in a small analogue based home-studio with his brother back in 1994. It was here that he began to teach himself the skills he would need as a producer and sound engineer although he wasn’t doing any serious work quite yet. At that time he also began working as a musician playing guitar on a few albums. His session work got him some well deserved attention and it wasn’t long before he was playing guitar with some of South Africa’s top Afrikaans contemporary musicians. Because he was receiving so much live session work he decided to sell his analogue recording gear to focus on being a performer and musician.
Ironically it was at this time that musicians started to call Johan and ask him if he wanted to produce their albums. Of course he agreed, but since he had no more equipment he had to hire out other studios to work in. But this wasn’t the reason he set up Farmhouse studios. It was more to do with the fact that he felt he needed a small recording and production studio for his own work as a musician that he put together the space in which he now works. When the production work began flowing in, it seemed only logical to use his own studio rather than hiring out and expensive space in which to make music. Currently his studio centers around an analogue 24-in Behringer mixing desk, Nuendo running on a PC and a great room to record in. He says that his recording room is particularly great for recording drums in, and although he doesn’t have a lot of gear and space he knows how to get the best out of his equipment which is all his clients really ask from him.
Over time Johan has recorded, produced and played with many of the big shots of the Afrikaans contemporary music scene such as Steve Hofmeyer, Coleske and Theuns Jordaan. An example of his high-production output would be Coenie De Villier’s SAMA award winning ‘Hand Gemaak’ album which Johan co-produced with Coenie. Many readers would be forgiven for not knowing who many of the top Afrikaans contemporary musicians are, because they don’t get a lot of radio play or exposure aside from TV marketing. But don’t think that it’s a small piece of the local music industry pie. Afrikaans music is phenomenally well supported. Johan gave the example of Juanita Du Plessis’s album ‘Skarumba’ which sold roughly 105 000 copies but said that he never heard the title track on any major radio station. Johan reckons that many people in the Afrikaans community feel the need to preserve Afrikaans as a language and for this reason support Afrikaans music and literature because it captures the music in a physical format. Therefore the more Afrikaans music and literature there is, the more the language is documented, recorded and therefore preserved. Its for this reason that Johan is in the right place by being a well established Afrikaans contemporary producer and musician even if his interests extend to many different types of music.
The South African music industry is a difficult place to make a name for oneself and find regular work. Even if you’ve got the skills to make music, you need to find your place, stake your claim and show that you know what you’re doing. Johan doesn’t have a gigantic, overly-equipped music studio but he knows how to record and produce Afrikaans contemporary music as well as play guitar proficiently enough to be one of a few regularly employed session musicians. He is rooted in a well supported sector of the local music scene and for this reason he will probably not find it difficult to keep the work coming in.
| Facility: | Farmhouse |
| Person: | Johan Doesnâ, Johan Rautenbach, Steve Hofmeyer, Theuns Jordaan |
