The Story Behind 3BD
Bassist · Producer · Songwriter · Marketer
Butch Dillon is an American music producer, bassist, songwriter, and marketer. He is the founder of 3BD Productions Inc, a production company, and 3BD Enterprise LLC, a marketing agency built to help independent artists and brands reach real audiences. His path started long before any of that, on a street in Chicago where music was simply part of growing up.
Chicago
Butch was born and raised in the inner city of Chicago. According to his mother, he was whistling melodies before he could walk, before he was even out of his stroller. Music found him early, and it never let go.
At age 10, his older sister Diane, six years his senior, told him he ought to think about playing an instrument. She suggested the conga, like the guys played in the park around the neighborhood. Diane had a deep love for music. She was a vinyl collector and a true appreciator of sound, and she kept instruments around the house, pianos and guitars among them. Young Butch grabbed a guitar and started teaching himself how to play.
The kids on his block all played something. At one point there were four or five bands forming on a single street. Butch and his friends started their own, but everyone wanted to play guitar. He asked his parents for one, and they got him a guitar. He started playing in the band, making up music and learning the Top 40 list of the day. But he noticed something. Nobody wanted to play bass. So he started tuning his guitar down and mimicking bass lines on it, playing those lines for the band instead. He eventually convinced his parents that he should switch to bass since there were not many bass players around. They got him a bass guitar, and with it came music lessons. By age 11 or 12, he was studying bass and music theory seriously.
By the time he reached high school, Butch was already a strong reader of music with a real grasp of theory. His band teacher noticed how quickly he was excelling. It was not that he was so much more talented than the other students. He had simply gotten the education first. That teacher enrolled him in the American Conservatory of Music, a prestigious music college with a program that let high school students start taking college level classes before they even graduated.
Memphis
After graduating high school, Butch packed up and moved to Memphis with his band friends, determined to keep the group together. He gave it everything for a full year. When it ran its course, he packed up again and returned home to Chicago.
While he was still in high school, Butch had worked at the University of Chicago as a security receptionist. When he came back from Memphis, he picked that job right back up and resumed his education at the American Conservatory of Music. This time he pushed further, studying sound engineering, arrangements, music production, and songwriting.
Nashville
Touring eventually carried Butch to Nashville, where he sharpened his songwriting and production skills even further. There he partnered with Jonnie Barnett, who showed him the business side of the music industry. With that knowledge, Butch started his own music publishing company and began handling publishing administration.
Working alongside Jonnie as a writing team, Butch landed his first published song with a local Nashville artist. Many more followed. As a musician during this stretch, he played a great deal of Christian music and also toured with country artists as a bassist and musical director.
New York
Wanting to push into more genres, Butch packed up once again and moved to New York. There he worked as a bassist, songwriter, and producer, building records across a wider range of styles than he had touched before. He lived and worked in New York for seven years.
Los Angeles
A job offer brought Butch to Los Angeles, where he continued writing music. It was there that he noticed a major shift taking place across the industry, driven by the digital world everyone was now living in. Rather than resist it, he leaned in. He began studying marketing and earned his marketing certification, then launched his own marketing agency, 3BD Enterprise LLC, in California.
Today, Butch combines marketing with music creation and direct to consumer sales, running 3BD Enterprise LLC alongside his production company, 3BD Productions Inc. He has carried the same instinct that got his first song published in Nashville, that of building real relationships and doing the work, into a business that now helps other artists and brands get their own work in front of real audiences.
From marketing insights to trusted product recommendations, the blog covers the lessons learned across three decades in music and business.