Neo Classical Composer Juan Sánchez Explains How He Dealt With A Lack Of Confidence Not Believing In His Music

My name is Juan Sánchez, and I am a composer – but I was not always this way. This journey of mine began when I started taking piano lessons at the conservatoire at only 14 years old, which is when a deep passion for music and creation of art was born. During the end of the 80’s until the end of the 90’s, I was playing the keyboard with different bands, which helped me to feed this passion. In 1995, I travelled to London to study music and technology, and this is where I lived for five years. In 1999, I started to make instrumental ambient electronic music, and since then I have been creating music for multimedia and sound libraries for music producers.

I have always felt very grateful to have found my job as an ambient music composer and sound designer, but in my heart, I did not feel completely fulfilled with this role. I had always dreamed about becoming a professional pianist and composer, but I didn’t have the confidence to pursue this dream, as I felt that this was only for very talented musicians and I did not see myself in that way. I thought that, if I were to create music, nobody would want to listen to it – or worse, that they would listen to it and wonder why I had bothered to create music in the first place.

This negative trajectory that my life was on began to change when, one day, I discovered the music of ambient artists Max Richter and Ludovico Einaudi. I fell deeply in love with their compositions. I have always being a fan of ambient music – in fact, this is the music that I was creating at that time – but these artists were something special to me. They were different to the others. I loved the way they were mixing classical music with electronic sounds, using the piano as the main instrument. This started a fire of passion in me. Motivated by this discovery, I started searching for more similar music, and discovered other artists such as Nils Frahm and Olafur Arnalds, and other neo classical composers. I knew that this was the push that I needed to begin composing my own music.

The first piece I crafted entirely independently, inspired by the music I had been listening to, was a hybrid neo classical/ambient piano composition, which I christened as “Rebirth”. In March 2019, I took the plunge and released “Rebirth” as a single on Spotify and other music streaming platforms. To my surprise and delight, it was very well received on Spotify and quickly began to accumulate traction. People began adding it to their public and personal playlists, and I was receiving very good feedback and positive reviews from general listeners and music bloggers alike. They wanted me to make more music – and so did I.

This positive feedback and reassurance gave me the confidence I desperately needed to start creating more neo classical/ambient style, piano focused music. I released each perfected composition as a single on Spotify. This allowed my audience to grow, as news of my music spread throughout the music community and more and more people clicked the “play” and “add to playlist” buttons. People were even following me so that they would be notified if I released any new music. I was, of course, thrilled at the positive feedback that was flooding in, but I was also very surprised, as I never thought that my music could be so well received.

In this experience, I have also been incredibly lucky to have the unwavering support of the new age/neo classical music promoter BT Fasmer, the man behind the very popular New Age Music Guide blog. One of the pieces of immensely valuable advice BT Fasmer gave me was to release all of the singles again, but this time collected together as a complete album. I fortunately followed his advice, which lead me to September of 2019, when I released the album, also titled “Rebirth” after the first single I ever released. Thank you, BT, for your support and guidance!

The positive response that I am receiving for this album is just incredible. I don’t even have the words to describe how wonderful it is – it feels like a dream that I will wake up from at any minute. Every day, I wake up to a flurry of comments from a huge variety of people across all my social media platforms. They tell me how they feel about my album; how beautiful they think it is, and how much it has moved them and changed their perspectives on music or life. Some people have told me that “Rebirth” has impacted them in a way that no other album has done before, and others said that they cried the first time that they listened to it, as they felt that my music touched their souls. Consequently, I am extremely happy with how the response to the album is growing and developing over time – this, for a composer, is such a great achievement, especially for someone who almost did not follow their dreams due to self doubt.

A question that I receive often along with this feedback is “Why did you choose the name “Rebirth” for your first album?” or “What is the meaning behind the title of your album?” Here is my explanation. Over the course of the last two years, I have started to learn how to reprogram my brain by taking personal development courses. My goal is to completely overcome my self-limiting beliefs that were hindering my growth and personal development. Now that I am starting to see the fruits of my success and change the way I think, I feel that, in some way, I am becoming a new person – I have been reborn. I have no doubt that this is just the start of my career, and that great things are to come in the future. My music is available to be streamed on Spotify and other music platforms, under the name Juan Sánchez if you want to follow along with my journey.

Thank you so much for your support.