We had a recent chat with Kellen Champion, who won the Music Student Award for 2024 in Plymouth. We spoke to Kellen about his time on the course, his love for music and his plans for the future.
Tell us about yourself!
My name is Kellen and I am a Music Producer and DJ. I’m a pretty open-minded electronic music listener. My favourite genres/styles are; trance, hard-house, hardstyle, hardcore, hard techno but I do love other chilled styles of music. Growing up I was surrounded by dance music. My dad used to listen to 90s trance with me when I was really young and I went to many music festivals with my mum and saw many of my favourite artists. As a producer and DJ, I want to support the return of harder music genres being listened to more.
Congratulations on your ACC Award win. How do you feel?
Receiving the award means alot to me. It reflects my genuine enjoyment of the year at ACC and the sense of community that I’ve found here.
Tell us about your time at Access. What have you enjoyed about it? What have you learned?
This first year at ACC has been very fun! The sense of community here is amazing, everybody is very supportive of each other and it is great to see other people’s perspectives on music. The tutors here have years of experience in most (if not all) music industry fields so no matter what your interests are there is likely to be someone to help and inspire you.
Have you done anything in the industry outside of your studies? If so, tell us about it!
I have arranged 4 of my own DJ events at local venues which has been a great achievement for me considering at the start of the year I didn’t know how to DJ. Initially, I preferred producing music, but as I’ve grown more comfortable with DJing and performing to people, I’ve come to really enjoy it. I’m excited about possibly pursuing a career in both DJing and music production.
What’s your proudest achievement from your time studying with us?
To have a track that I am going to finish! I’ve been producing since 2020 and to this date, I still haven’t finished (produced, mixed and mastered) a single track. It has been a massive goal of mine to finish and officially release a track and I couldn’t have got to this stage without the help and skills learnt from everyone at ACC alongside the available equipment.
What advice would you give to someone considering studying at Access?
This is a course that will be helpful for people at most stages of their music production journey. Going into the course I was at a weird stage with my music and felt as if I knew I had a lot of areas to work on but didn’t know where to start. ACC helped me move on with a lot of guidance from the highly experienced and knowledgeable tutors here.
This course and the coursework have taken my musical understanding and overall connection with music to another level. As someone who hasn’t ever liked written work. I have to say all of the written work on this course helped me massively in understanding myself when it comes to music and I think I have come out of this year with a lot of knowledge from these written tasks.
What are your plans for the future?
I hope to be able to produce and DJ full-time. The main goal for me is to make a sustainable income doing what I love! To be a recognised music producer and DJ is a goal that I will strive to achieve. Being at college here for just one year has taken my music production to new levels and I can’t thank ACC enough. I am excited to continue the journey and start my second year here in September 2024.
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