Evan Kepler, a singer, pianist and music YouTuber has released four albums on iTunes, has over 10,000 views on YouTube, and has an immense passion for music. Along with these accolades, he is also a student at MHS, where he is more widely known as Evan Imata. His talent began to grow from a young age, which would soon turn into the career of his dreams.

“As he was growing up, I sensed that he had a very discerning ear and a great sense of rhythm. I continued to see his musicality develop and widen when he wrote his first composition on piano, when he starred in his first musical, when he released his first album, and when he danced on stage for the first time. Through these things, I’ve seen his passion for music and the arts grow and develop,” said his father Ryan Imata.

He goes by the stage name Evan Kepler, which has many meanings relating to his interests and role models. “Kepler (a renowned astronomer) is a stage name that reflects Evan’s love of astronomy and one of his biggest musical influences, Bruno Mars,” said Ryan Imata. The stage name was also put in place to conceal his identity for privacy reasons. “So when I first started out, I wasn’t planning on making a YouTube channel and I wasn’t really planning on people knowing that the music was coming from me specifically, I was just doing it to put it on iTunes and stuff. So, I guess my mom was going for privacy so my parents just wanted me to put it under a different name,” said Evan Imata.

His music career started with his love for the piano which soon expanded into music production. “I started out as a pianist. I took piano lessons for a couple years, and then after that my parents gave me my first iPad and it had Garageband and when I first started off on Garageband, I thought it was like the coolest thing in the world. I would sit in my room all day using Garageband and learning how to use it,” said Evan Imata.

His father also played a major role in his passion for music production. “My dad is super into music production too, so he has this program called Pro Tools 11, and it’s one of the best music recording softwares, he also has a lot of other music technology to go with it. So, I asked him to teach me and then he taught me how to use that and then so over the past three years, I’ve been learning more and more about it, and I’ve been getting better at the music production process,” said Evan Imata.

 He began to produce original songs and started posting them on YouTube, and soon expanded his channel to include covers of songs too. “I guess when I first started making original songs, I didn’t know where to put them, so I just decided to put my original songs on YouTube, so I did that. Then, I don’t know, after awhile I looked at my YouTube channel and it was just all original music so I was like, maybe I should do covers too,” said Evan Imata.

 Some of his more popular videos, not only on YouTube but on Instagram, consist of him making music with ordinary objects. “I mean, you know there’s a lot of YouTube videos, there’s YouTubers like Andrew Huang and Kurt Hugo Schneider, they like to make covers out of objects that aren’t instruments—objects you wouldn’t usually think that make music. So I’ve always just kind of wanted to make some kind of music that didn’t require actual instruments too,” said Evan Imata.

Some of his videos feature McDonald’s products, a car, and even something as simple as glasses of water. However, the process to film and edit these videos can be time consuming. “The recording part, just the recording, usually takes one to three days; but that’s not the entire day, maybe three hours one day and then three hours the next day, like that. I like to do it when I’m just alone, so no one sees me doing it. It takes longer than I thought it would. The editing part, that probably takes the longest—but I don’t think that takes too long either—I’d say that takes maybe like four to five hours,” said Evan Imata.

Besides making YouTube videos, he also writes and performs his original music; his most recent album “Semnpronex” differs from his previous albums. “Well, I mean each song has a very different message and I try to make it that way. I mean for my past albums I had some kind of dark songs—sometimes I feel that everyone around me is sad—I just wanted to make this album happier,” said Evan Imata.

He faced some challenges when it came to writing his latest album. “I had a writer’s block on my last album. I started it, last year in March and from then it was going really fast, but then in between 2016 and 2017, like when it became 2017, I think I started having a harder time writing. I guess it’s because I’ve kind of written a lot of music so far, so I’m trying really hard to not reuse ideas that I’ve already used, but it’s kind of difficult,” said Evan Imata.