The Music Man

For the past seven months, Fabian Cruz has worked for Memorial Primary Care as a Patient Financial Representative, making sure patients’ experience with the healthcare system is up to par.

To make sure things run smoothly for them, he coordinates patients’ referrals and ensures their insurance claims are processed promptly.

While Fabian enjoys his career at Memorial, he says his real passion is for music.

He balances his day job at Memorial with his work as a musician, composer and music producer, something he's been doing for almost ten years. The multi-talented Fabian plays both piano and guitar and composes electronic music as well.

Fabian's musical influences vary. These days, he creates mostly electronic and hip-hop music. He also dabbles in such musical genres as reggaeton, electronic music and jazz, "a little bit of everything," he jokes. His wide-ranging tastes inspire his musical creations.

"What I strive for is to make something that’s fresh and new, so I try to combine all of my influences into something I haven't heard before," he explains.

He creates electronic music by starting with mostly instrumental sounds, using either computerized or synthesizer-based tracks. Fabian enjoys working with electronic music because there is no need to arrange music for other instrumentalists.

He can work on a track by himself until he is satisfied with the way it turns out. That could take some time, though, since Fabian is a self-proclaimed perfectionist who works tirelessly on a song until he’s completely satisfied with the outcome. Then, and only then, will he release it.

While Fabian has been around music his entire life, he took up the guitar at age 7 and piano at age 15. It was during these teenage years that he decided to become more serious about music. The late start makes his success that much more noteworthy.

Today, Fabian focuses most of his efforts in the area of music production, which involves a different set of skills.

"My job is to make sure the song gets completed and represents the artist's vision," he says. “This means composing music, coming up with ideas, looking for vocalists and instrumentals and completing the recording sessions for each artist.”

Fabian will go into the creation process with a few ideas, then keeps building and layering the various sounds until a song is ready. “For a music producer, it’s more of a building process, where everything is combined until a song is created while also trying to stay faithful to the vision of what the music could be,” he says.

Once he's satisfied with all the elements of the song and the way it sounds, Fabian will release it, using social media channels to market the music.

"From there, things happen pretty organically," he explains, although he takes steps to influence the success of a song through using online analytics and targeting a specific audience with each social media post.

While Fabian is a perfectionist and truly dedicated about his work, he describes music as coming from the heart. "It's something I have always been very passionate about,” he admits.

His latest project, which is a collaboration with friends, is still in the creation phase. And although the group is not thinking about marketing just yet, Fabian says he has contacts at some music labels where they plan to pitch the music once the tracks are released.

"We'll see where it goes from there,” he adds.