UBC Music Initiative (UMI) president Misheel Enkhbayar comes from a family of singers.
“I was in choir for two years in high school. And I think when I came to university I kind of lost touch with the musical side,” she said.
So Enkhbayar sought out to make the UMI a post for people of all musical expertise and experience to mesh.
“[We want] to create an outlet for people who want to perform and don't know how to start. I think that's one of our biggest values as a club,” Enkhbayar said.
“We really focus on letting people know that you don't have to be of any particular skill level,” said VP Marketing Fabia Masud. “I think it's really important to us as a whole to make a space that is inclusive to not just people who are already properly comfortable artists, but also people who just want to try it out or who just want to enjoy some good music and make some friends.”
Masud recalled how a couple of people sang for the first time at a UMI event, and left having strengthened their artistic network — “because they met at the event and they enjoyed each other's performances so much, they met up and they got together and they came back to our next event doing two duets.”
“It really just shows how much people are invested in this part of their life,” said Enkhbayar.
“I think that was the moment that made me really proud, and it made our team really proud too,” Masud added.
UMI hosts themed events at least once a month where members can showcase their musical talent and the public can listen in on some homegrown acts, but the newest addition to the club’s outreach is their cornerstone rentals program.
“We offer probably the cheapest rates in Vancouver for equipment and other musical instruments like our speakers and microphones and wires,” said Enkhbayar.
In a city where instruments and sound equipment can easily rent for hundreds of dollars at annual rates, UMI’s program offers a flexible budget-conscious alternative made by students, for students.
“We also do a lot of educational workshops,” said Masud. “We do music production, we do lyric writing. We also have alumni nights, where we just explore one specific topic that people are curious about.”
The club has seen its community move in an instrumental and vocal direction in the past few years, but its outreach has a reputation for genre diversity, from beatboxers to bands.
New this term is their lessons program, geared towards forming bonds between volunteers hoping to gain valuable teaching experiences and eager aspiring musicians looking to pick up an instrument.
“A lot of people are looking to join a club to either meet people or put it on their resume, and then they actually end up performing and bringing out their musical side a lot more than they thought they would have the opportunity to,” said Enkhbayar.
“It doesn't matter if you're in a band … or if you know how to do a very specific thing. Anybody can be [in] UMI,” said Masud. “[It] doesn't have a lot of boundaries.”