BY CLIFF SMELLEY
Pablo Picasso is credited with saying, “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”
Brighton Gibbs’ art helps people dance away the dust of everyday life.
Gibbs, a 2015 Keystone Heights High School graduate who lives in Orlando, has found a passion in electronic dance music, which has led to him creating his own music and working as a DJ. He recently released an EP — “Brighton’s House” — and has several singles to his credit. His music is available on Spotify as well as Apple Music and SoundCloud.
He has his dreams, of course, of improving as a producer, growing his fanbase and performing as a DJ on larger stages at larger venues. The main thing, though, is that he’s doing something that gives him joy.
“All it is is art,” Gibbs said, adding, “It’d be nice to get recognition for it, but at the end of the day, I’m expressing myself and putting something out into the world. Hopefully, people enjoy it. If they don’t, at least I contributed something.”
Gibbs, the son of Kenny and Tonya Gibbs, has been making music for a few years now and has been a DJ for about a year and a half at events in Orlando as well as throughout the state.
“It’s just slowly growing,” he said.
Gibbs considers himself a full-time producer/DJ, but added he can’t pay all of his bills through just music at his point. To help him with that is the business he and his father have — Floor Busters, which provides interior demolition for houses, condos and businesses.
His family is “extremely supportive” of his career, Gibbs said, adding, “They give me all the time I need. If I need to go to a gig that somewhere far away, or I need a day off to do a show or do something, there are no questions asked. It’s just constant support.”
Becoming a music producer and DJ wasn’t a lifelong dream, but Gibbs couldn’t help but go down that path after attending the Electric Daisy Carnival Orlando.
A really good vibe
EDC Orlando is a three-day music festival that Gibbs said attracts approximately 250,000 people annually. It consists of multiple stages, rides and artwork.
“I fell in love with the community and the people who were there,” he said. “It’s kind of like the peace-and-love movement of the ‘70s, where everybody’s just really kind and loving.”
Gibbs said he wasn’t even aware of electronic dance music — also known as EDM — growing up in Keystone, but he said the crowd he was a part of at EDC Orlando “sucked me in” and created an interest in producing EDM himself.
“All you need, really, to make the music is a laptop,” Gibbs said. “It’s all electronic. It’s all off synthesizers and stuff you can get off the internet. Getting into it isn’t really that hard. It’s not super expensive.”
Today’s world makes it easy for people to learn how to do new things. Gibbs said YouTube was a valuable resource.
“There are so many people on there to teach you how to go about making music and designing drums and doing things with the synthesizers — to get them to work the way you want them to.
“The learning curve has just been brought down so much over the last few years with all the things you have at your fingertips to help you learn. I just went all in on it and learned as much as I could, and I continue to learn every day.”
An art — not just pressing a button
While getting into it is easy, EDM producing/DJing is anything but. Gibbs said many people think DJing, for example, is just pressing a button and playing music.
“There’s a whole art, especially with what we do with electronic music,” Gibbs said. “DJing isn’t just like playing a song necessarily, but the ability to shift from one song to another flawlessly without anybody noticing and keeping the whole crowd with you the whole time.”
Gibbs said he can play two songs at once, but because of how he mixes them, they sound like one song.
“It creates a whole new sound and a whole new song that no one’s ever heard before,” Gibbs said, “but it has vocals from a track that everybody knows. You put them over a new set of drums or a new beat, and you create a whole new thing that’s your own in that moment.”
Gibbs said it can take years for someone to learn how to seamlessly mix different pieces of music together.
“Music comes in different beats per minute and different keys,” Gibbs said. “If you just press play on two tracks at the same time, it could clash really bad and sound horrible. You have to learn to get that to blend and sound like one good, cohesive song.”
A DJ also has to be able to read the room. That’s something Gibbs learned during his first-ever gig, which took place in a wine bar in Orlando.
“It was just trying to keep a nice, cool vibe for everybody while they were relaxing,” Gibbs said, adding, “You didn’t want things that were really fast and heavy.”
Gibbs said a music producer is the person “who makes the beat behind the vocals.” When it comes to EDM, the producer is making a track on a computer that would be impossible for a conventional band to perform in a live setting because of how many instruments go into creating it.
A producer such as Gibbs, though, does perform his creation in a live setting as a DJ.
“That’s our way of putting on a show,” Gibbs said.
Scratching an itch
Gibbs played football at KHHS and received a scholarship to play at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. Once his playing days were over, he admitted “there was just a big hole in my life.” He no longer experienced the thrill (as well as the anxiety) that comes from performing in front of others.
That changed with his foray into EDM.
“This is definitely something that brings that back into my life and gives me something to be excited about,” Gibbs said. “It gives me something to be competitive about as well.”
As in football (and other sports), not everything goes the way you want it to.
“There are nightmare stories,” Gibbs said.
One such story involved him being hired by a venue to close the night out following the performance of a Frank Sinatra cover band.
“I come in and play like disco music for everybody — to move the room,” Gibbs said. “They wanted me to move the room into more of a nightclub feeling. It was just a horrible situation for me as a DJ. I had an elderly man come up to me and tell me my music taste was absolutely horrible and that I should never do whatever it is I’m doing anymore.”
Gibbs laughed as he recounted the incident and went on to say that DJs are going to have nights that are “miserable” and interactions with people who aren’t kind.
“You have to deal with partiers and the more-crazy side of people sometimes,” he said.
Mostly, though, Gibbs is surrounded by people who are dancing and enjoying themselves. He said that’s typically all he needs to see to know he’s doing a good job.
That, in turn, leads to him enjoying himself as well.
“The whole job of a DJ is to create an environment of fun,” Gibbs said. “You have so much fun doing that. At least I do.”
Moving forward
Gibbs has worked venues such as Elixir, Fixtion, McQueens and Pretty Please — all in Orlando — and will be in the lineup for “It Just Doesn’t Stop” Season 4, an EDM festival that will take place in Venice July 31-Aug. 3.
Getting gigs, though, is the hardest part of what he does.
“Once you get a little bit of notoriety, it’s still a dog-eat-dog world,” he said. “There are always people at the same level as you, and you’re all going out for the same job. Everybody’s trying to get the same gig.
“Until you get to that level where you have a hit track, and you’re selling based off of your name alone, it’s tough.”
Gibbs, though, said he’s been “enjoying the ride” as he hopes to accomplish several goals, the biggest of which is to play the main stage at EDC Orlando.
“Hopefully, I’ll hit that goal, but there are a lot of small goals along the way,” Gibbs said.
He’d like to DJ at a big venue in Orlando called The Vanguard and has been in talks with the owners about possibly doing that. Gibbs is also looking forward to breaking the 100,000-stream mark on Spotify.
“We’re at 80,000,” he said. “We’re almost there.”
Besides the music, Gibbs and his wife, Torri, have a clothing brand called “Dogs and House Music.”
“It’s really been an adventure,” Gibbs said.
An adventure that wasn’t even on his radar as he was growing up in Keystone.
“I think he would’ve doubted it very much,” Gibbs said if the younger version of himself had been told what he’d be doing in his future, “but I was pretty open-minded back then. I might have just been down for it.”
The current version of Gibbs is definitely down for it. He wishes he would’ve gotten into EDM sooner, but also said, “I’m happy it happened the way that it did.”
If you’d like to know more about Gibbs, visit www.brightonofficial.com. The website includes links to his music on Apple Music, SoundCloud and Spotify as well as to his YouTube channel and Facebook, Instagram and TikTok accounts. You can also access Dogs and House Music merchandise via the website.
