Zach, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. Let’s jump into it. Let’s do the state of the state. Who are you? Where are you? And what do you consider yourself? Yeah, I’m Zach Bloomstein. I am a producer, mixer, and engineer based here in Portland, Oregon. I do a number of things. Am the house engineer and the manager of Jackpot! Recording Studio.

And then I work with all kinds of different bands here in Portland and beyond. Let’s get into your. The early part of your life. Where did you grow up? So I grew up in a town called Framingham, Massachusetts, which is right outside of Boston. When I grew up, it was about 20 minutes outside of Boston. And now with the the traffic and so many people moving outside of Boston and commuting in, I think now it’s a little bit closer to 45 minutes.

Is there always seems to be traffic. But yeah, it was a great, great place to grow up. Easy to get into Boston. I would go there all the time with my friends to go to Newbury Comics shows. We were just we were there all the time. It was super fun. But I grew up in a restaurant in that my my family owns that my grandfather started in the 50s, and then my father and uncle took over.

And it was it was just the best way to grow up. I learned, I learned kind of about everything. I learned how to work hard. I learned how to work with people, sort of like the best education for then going to work in studios. Absolutely. Having a family, small business like that can be like just a great training ground for everything.

Yeah. Did you initially start out as as a musician and transition to a recording person, or was there a musical education in the beginning? Yes. So I wanted so badly as a little kid to play drums, and my father was just not having it. He did not want drums in the house, and at a certain point my aunt started dating a guitar player, which was very cool, and he gave me the guitar.

I’m actually looking at it right now. I still have it. It’s a really cool older Danelectro U3. I think I was 7 or 8 years old and it was just it was the coolest thing ever. My dad is a huge fan of music. We always had music, you know, in the house. A lot of I grew up on great stuff.

Both my parents had really good taste in music. It was a lot of Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Elton John, Billy Joel, tons of stuff. And I would I would go through my dad’s CD collection. I remember I would get in trouble because I would he would come home and I would have all his CDs out on the floor, and I would be in the living room listening to music on his speakers.

And he was like, don’t hurt the speakers. You’re going to blow the tweeters out. But yeah, it was it was really, really cool. So I was just obsessed with all this music. And my uncle started teaching me how to play guitar. I was not super into learning from him as a kid for some reason. Now when I hang out with him, that’s all I want to do.

It’s so he’s such a great guitar player, but my parents did get me a guitar lessons that I sort of was like on and off with. It was kind of strange. I didn’t start to become really obsessed with playing until I started playing with other people at school and started playing in bands when I was like 13 or 14.

That was when the obsession happened, because it was just so much fun. It was it was the best thing ever to leave school and go have band practice until 8:00 at night and then, you know, go home. And I was starting to get into newer, more modern music to at that point, and I just wanted to absorb everything I would I would take my tip money that I made from waiting tables at the restaurant, and I would I don’t remember what the percentage was, but I would set aside a percentage of it and I would go to the record store in Newbury Comics, which was in there were a number of locations, but there was

one in Natick, near my dad’s restaurant, and I would just buy CDs and I would buy them with no idea what they were. I would buy them because the covers were cool. I purposely didn’t do research on things. I would ask the people at the store what they were listening to, and I just discovered this whole new genre of music that I did not know existed, started listening to a lot of music.

Interestingly, interestingly enough, that that came out of the northwest and came out of Portland, but I kind of had no idea that there was this massive music scene. I was a kid from Boston, and I thought that I thought that the northwest was just like this grunge kind of thing. But this all this new, like, indie rock stuff was what I was super obsessed with as a teenager.

Was there any plans in your dad’s mind that you would take over the restaurant? Absolutely. And so was this was this a point of contention with you and the family? Like, Zach will take over the business one day, and. But I bet you had different plans. It went deeper than that. So yes, it was it was the the sort of family’s plan, but it was also the plan of the people that worked at the restaurant.

It was such a great place to grow up. I, you know, the folks that worked there had been there my entire life. So the guys in the kitchen, a lot of the the waiters and waitresses, the the busboys, everybody. I joked that I had 16 aunts because I, you know, I would walk in the restaurant and it was just like, oh my God, you know, the cheek kisses.

It would get out of control. Anytime I was dating somebody, I would warn them. I’d be like, we’re going to go in the restaurant. You’re going to get like assaulted a little bit by all these, all these women, but they’re really nice and they just want the best for everybody. And they’re and they’re really sweet. And you know, we’ll just get bombarded for a second.

But it’s okay. But I my, my dad was really cool when he sort of figured out that I was not going to take that path. He was nervous also because he didn’t know how I was going to make money. And his I mean, he took over the restaurant when he was 22 or 3, something like that. And I started working there when I was 13, and that was kind of all I knew, I, I did to to make him angry.

I did take a job at Guitar Center in high school. This was sort of prove to him like, I can do other things just in case. But my dad was very cool. I did go to college for audio, and he did toward the end of college. I do remember him saying like, okay, cool, like, this place is ready for you whenever you want to get back here.

But I had already started working at a studio at that point. I just wasn’t making any money, and he knew that. And he tried to sit me down and see, like he was testing the waters a little bit. He was like, one more final attempt to see if you want to take this place over. And it was like a hard no.

I had started touring in bands at that point to and there was just, there was no world in which I could see that working out for me and and having the restaurant be my life was just not that was I knew it wasn’t for me. I’m sure that there’s a certain amount of exercising your personal freedom, leaving the nest.

And while that was family and and a foundation for you to stay there probably would have raised a lot of questions for yourself later on in life. I would assume, like woulda, coulda, shoulda kind of thing. Totally. I think for me, I mean, now I’m on the West Coast, so there’s no there’s no fallback plan.

And I’m okay now, but I think I needed to I needed to try and it was okay if I tried and failed. I knew that that place would be there if I needed it. I really didn’t want it to be, and I luckily I sort of never had to go back there, but I needed to know that I could do my own thing.

And it was difficult, though, because there was something really cool about the restaurant and growing up there. The land that the restaurant is on, it’s a little shopping plaza, and my great grandfather bought that land when he came to America from Poland. So and my grandfather started the restaurant when he got out of the army, and it was a small donut shop initially, and he he built it and expanded it over the years.

And there’s, there was just so much cool stuff in it. And it would have been a really interesting thing to to sort of, you know, be a part of that family lineage and to and to do that. But it just wasn’t something I wanted to do. And I also, I think, I don’t know if it was something that my father wanted to do either, but he did it.

My father is a very talented vintage arcade game restorer, so he has pinball machines and jukeboxes and shooter games, all this super cool stuff. That’s how I learned how to solder. Was helping him with this stuff. So that’s his. That’s his obsession. And he has now he has dueling careers now because he’s he’s built a business of restoring games for people.

I met someone at AES in Nashville. I was a judge for the student recording contest, and he saw my name there. He recognized my last name, and we actually he ended up sitting down and having lunch with us. But he was like, I talked to your father on the phone two days ago, asking him to help me sell my sister’s pinball machine.

And I was like, where are you from? And he was a northeast guy. And it was just like, it. It was crazy. It’s just like my father is well known in that world not to go, you know, too far out of of, you know, the core elements here of working class audio. But I’m just curious your your family history comes from Poland.

Is there any history of your family escaping Nazi rule? Not that I know. You know, it’s really it’s kind of difficult to track some of that back. I did interview my grandparents a couple of years ago, and I have hours of video that I haven’t edited yet, but I also have a video of my great grandparents. I do think they got out before all of that, but I would love to go back and try to try to do some more research on some of that.

As life gets busier, it’s harder, of course. And I ask because I wonder if there’s kind of a work ethic and a motivation kind of immigrant story of thriving in the US. And so for you to interrupt that and move into the recording world, I’m sure that that was there was many conversations that were had there all really, really happy with what I’m doing now.

I think it just took a second initially, to be honest. I don’t I don’t think it was until I moved out to Portland. We’ve been here for six years now. I don’t think it was until we moved out here. And like, I was sort of even though I had been on my own for a long time in living in Boston, I was still close to home.

But like, I was able to buy a house here and I have a I have I’m all set here. I’m really good. We’re doing really well here. But until I was able to do that all for myself, they were they were definitely. Everyone was nervous. My grandfather, my grandparents were both still around and they they’re doing great in South Florida and having a blast.

And they they definitely see now that that work, that work ethic did transfer to to studios. I just I took all the stuff I learned and I just moved it right over. So there yeah, there’s no one’s nervous anymore. So talk about your your journey on the east coast of, you know, working at the restaurant and then leaving the restaurant and getting into the world of recording.

How did that begin? So I started well, it actually begins in a funny way. So in high school, we had a TV program, and we put on a live television broadcast every single morning that broadcast to the whole school and the rest of the town. The high school I went to was fairly large. I think there were about between 4000 and 5000 people.

Framingham used to really be divided, and Framingham North and Framingham South, and it still largely is. But what they did is they took the Framingham North and South high schools and they combine them. So I went to this giant high school, and that was a good way to get the the news of the school out was to have a, you know, a morning show, essentially.

So I was a part of these TV classes throughout high school. I was kind of a weird outcast kid. I was like, in between all these different kind of groups, like, I tried playing sports. So not for me. I was like trying to play lacrosse was a horrible at it. I skateboard, which was really fun, and how I learned about a lot of music, but I was not really a part of that group.

But and then like band at school, like I wasn’t, I don’t know, it didn’t, I was, I was between all these things. But when I started doing the, the TV stuff is really where I found a home and where I made some of my lifelong friends. So my junior year, I started, I was doing sound for the show for, for a couple of years, which was really cool and really, really difficult.

You have all these mics and there’s video packages that are rolling, and it was really fast paced and it was crazy. We would do sports broadcasts, you know, film them, edit them and then air them that night. It was it was kind of crazy. But there was there was a producer of the of the TV show and it was a student in my junior year, it was sort of decided that, that I was in the running to be the producer of the TV show for what would be my senior year.

And I ended up I did end up becoming the producer of the TV show. So it was it was really cool. So I was producing this TV show every single morning, directing all these sports broadcasts and all this stuff. And it was it was a great sort of pathway to me discovering that you could go to college for recording, because a lot of the same colleges that had communications programs had recording arts programs.

Yeah, I discovered that that could be a career. And my all this music I was so obsessed with. And then this, the sort of behind the glass kind of person could, could be combined into one thing. Even though that video and broadcast was not the thing that I wanted to do. Yeah, that’s that’s kind of how it started.

And my grades in high school were not great, but because I was taking these AP TV classes, shot my GPA up, which was super helpful. So I was able to get into a handful of colleges, a couple music schools, and then just some like sort of more purely recording arts programs. And one of those schools was the New England Institute of Art in Boston, which unfortunately has now closed.

But that’s where I ended up going to school. It was it was fantastic. Talk to me about adventures after school. Like, where did that take you? How did you get in to where you wound up? You didn’t immediately come out to Portland. I know that it was all super connected to school. So in college at the New England Institute of Art, we had a record label at the school, and I discovered that if you were a part of the record label, you got like double the amount of studio time that you would get because you were allotted a certain amount of hours of studio time for per year classes you were taking.

And I would run out of that studio time super fast because I had my own bands. I was bringing them in and recording and learning a lot, but I could not get enough of it, and I knew that I needed to do it to to learn how to do it. There’s there’s just no way around it. In recording.

You have to be bad at something for a while to get good at it. And I knew that college was the perfect place to be bad at stuff. So I joined up with the record label at school. I brought a band in to to make a record, and it was it was just it was amazing. And sort of through all of that, I met Sean McLaughlin, who I, I was with for a long time during and after school, but he was actually never a teacher of mine.

But I was an aide for him and we, you know, we became good friends. I started interning at his studio. I was young, I was I was 18 or 19. I remember like going to shows after sessions or going to see clients, two people and nobody knowing that I was underage. And they would try to buy me drinks and I would get carded and I’d be like, no thanks.

And it was, I was I was trying to sort of hang with everybody, and I didn’t want them to know how young I was. But yeah, that was that was my pathway. So through as soon as I met Sean, through the rest of college, I was at his studio, 37ft every single day that I wasn’t at school. Anytime he would let me be there.

So at a certain point I ended up working it out. So I only had classes 1 or 2 days a week, and then the rest of the time I was, I was there with him assisting, running Pro Tools, doing anything I could. And for the first year that I was there, that really was was kind of what it was like.

And then and then I became his assistant. And then we started doing a lot more together. But it was just the best. Sean was the best teacher because he was one of the few people there that was actually doing it and teaching, and that’s what makes him such a great teacher. And he’s he’s a fantastic teacher and a fantastic producer engineer.

And a lot of my other teachers were great teachers, but they were not out there in the world. And Sean, he he always knew the new plugins. He was listening to new music. He was out seeing bands all the time. And I was like, this is the guy that I need to be around. It set him apart so much from all the other teachers.

And I was like, this is, this is the one that is going to teach me how to do this stuff. Sean also has an infectious enthusiasm, you know, even if you’re just talking to him on the phone, you feel like he’s smiling and happy the whole time. Just how he comes across and not burnt out at all. You know, he’s been doing this for a while, but I saw so many of these other teachers and sort of peers and I was like, this is the coolest thing in the world.

Why aren’t they acting like it is? And Sean always was and it was like this. It was just so exciting. It was so exciting to be in his world and to be in his orbit. And for listeners and watchers, I’ll include a link in the show notes to past interviews I’ve done with Sean, because he is a former guest and and good friend and supporter of the show, so you should check that out to get, you know, his his perspective and where he comes from.

Talk to me about the the things that the key elements that you learn from Sean, not just from a technical perspective, because I think that’s inevitable. I think that there’s deeper things, some things that probably are similar in nature to what you learned at the restaurant. You may have learned from Sean. Can you name some of those things?

Definitely. There are much deeper things than how to mic a drum set and stuff like that. You know, I always tell everybody like, you will learn that stuff. It will come. You’ll pick up techniques, you’ll listen to music, the things that you cannot learn on mix with the masters and you cannot learn on YouTube is how somebody presents in a room and how it makes people feel.

And that is the most important thing about shadowing somebody or interning at a studio is is sitting in the very back of the room and and just absorbing, absorbing how they present themselves. And then the, the result of that, because that that was one of the biggest things I picked up from Sean was his ability to make people feel comfortable, performed their best and have a great time doing it, one that we had in the studio.

All his sessions were super fun. It didn’t really matter if even if the music was sad or heavy or something like that, like people were having a great time and recording is still it’s very much a service industry, you know, it’s just like the restaurant. So the way that he was always able to make people feel in the room super duper important.

And then, you know what he’s able to bring to songs and his productions and everything. Of course, that was all really great too, but I learned how to work a room from Sean and it was. That’s super duper important. Once again, that infectious enthusiasm that Sean has, I can easily see that happening. Yep. It’s a deeply psychological elements to a recording session and some of this mature in the technical, you know, rather quickly but may slow down a little bit.

And it may take a while to really kind of get that that psychology down in the studio. What do you try to do when you’re working with people like, do you think you could put your finger on it or identify it? I do everything I can to make people feel their best and to be able to give me their, you know, the best that they can do.

And sometimes there’s a limit to what they can do in a, in a day and what they can emotionally handle in a day. But just being able to to read the room as much as possible and figure out where our problems are going to come up. And, you know, oftentimes I’ll know which songs and art and artists is struggling with.

And I always like to tell people like, let’s okay, that’s going to be a tricky one. Let’s not do that right away. Let’s have a couple wins first and then let’s attack that that one. That’s going to be a little bit more difficult. I think just making people feel really good and making people feel like they are good because they are like, if you’re in a studio and you’ve, you know, devoted your life to making music or making records, you’re talented in some way, you know?

So I think that giving people these small wins just makes them feel good. And then and then let’s do the one that we know is going to be a little bit harder, that where the key, you know, it’s really just a little bit too high. But we can get there. And we’ve already tried changing the key like we, we got it.

We can do it. We just have to have small wins. It really helps artists. And obviously there’s a different approach for when you know, when when you’re working with a band and you’re kind of either the engineer with opinions or the co-producer or you’re the producer versus you being the engineer supporting a producer, totally. Do you see that as a different way of handling yourself with the producer?

It’s super different. Another another person that I sort of I left out of this, this whole trajectory is a guy named Barry Marshall, who is another teacher of mine at school, and Barry is a producer. Barry does not touch gear. Barry doesn’t know about gear. He’s a musician and he’s a producer. So I spent years just engineering for Barry and making all these different records.

And and that was where I learned that side of things, like he is the one in charge and I am just getting the sounds. And it’s really interesting because I still work with him. And now as the years have sort of shifted and we’ve got ten plus records, you know, we’ve done together now that’s where there’s a little bit more of like a co-producer thing.

But yeah, those lines are a little bit those lines can also be a little bit confusing sometimes. This is actually something more recently that I have, like, I guess a part of my career that I’m sort of changing. I have been recording and doing all this stuff for a bit now. I think within these past three years, I now finally feel comfortable calling myself a producer, and that’s after producing quite a lot of stuff, and I now finally understand what it is.

And I feel very confident in saying, I’m a producer, I produce that. But it took a it took a long time to figure out because those lines were a little funny, and I was in the room and I kind of didn’t. Sometimes I didn’t really know what was going on. I didn’t know if I was producing, if there wasn’t a producer there.

I didn’t know if the band was producing, if we were doing it together. It was kind of confusing. And now now I’ve I’ve figured it out. I’ve played quote unquote producer on some records that I kind of wish I wasn’t credited as producer. Sure. Just because I don’t feel like I really got to fully exercise production decisions. And there some things on some of those records and I’m like, not thrilled about, but sure.

And I think some of that comes with obviously conversations before you get in the studio of of saying like, I’m producing this and obviously we’re a team and it’s your record, your name’s on it. But like, let me flex, you know, let me spread my wings a little bit and let’s do some experimenting. Let’s see what’s going on here.

And I think when the lines are not sort of clearly defined, going into it is when things can get really confusing and, and that we don’t necessarily feel confident in, in sort of putting our foot down sometimes, I guess. Yeah. Talk to me about the decision to move to Portland. Yes. It was a very difficult decision. I did it at a very strange time.

So I, you know, I had been at in Boston with Sean at 37ft for a long time. At this point, I now had a room at the studio. So there’s an A room and a B room and then a large shared live room. So I had had that B room for 5 or 6 years, maybe, maybe seven years.

Kind of hard to remember. And it was awesome. Like, I, you know, I had a room, my rent there was, was pretty affordable. I was able to bring clients in and work. Sean and I were really good at splitting the calendar I could record while he was mixing because his his room had a separate entrance, so it worked out really, really well.

I never wanted to stay in Boston as long as I did my whole life. I always thought I was going to move somewhere else, but everything was just really good there. I had such a great thing at at 37ft with Sean and I had clients. I had been playing in a band for a really long time that was based out of the the northeast between Boston and Western Mass.

So I had a lot of clients that I had met through playing in that band and being on the road and sort of doing that whole thing. So I sort of never thought that I could leave that area. I thought I was always going to be tied there. And then when the pandemic started, I began mixing almost exclusively, and I had all this mixed work that I was I was doing remotely, and I was just like, now is the time if if I’m going to move, I think I have to do it right now, because at some point this pandemic will end and people will start to reemerge, music will start, live, music will start

up again, community will start up again. And I think it might be a good time to get out of here and then start over, just as the rest of the world is starting over. So we I sat down with my partner and I was like, we, do you want to move? She wanted to move to. And it was she.

She grew up in Connecticut, so we both had wanted to get out of the northeast for a while, but it was always kind of me that was that was holding us back. So I had the studio and it was going to be too hard to do this anywhere else. But yeah, if it wasn’t for COVID, I would still be in Boston, and Portland was a place that we had a couple friends I didn’t want to go to LA, didn’t want to go to New York.

Austin was maybe on the table. Seattle was maybe on the table. But we came out to Portland in the summer of 2020 to visit some of our friends had such a great time, and we decided like, okay, that’s going to be it, we’re going to move to Portland. But we didn’t actually move here until February of 2021. It took a while to sort of button everything up and to tell Sean and tell our families, and to make it so we could actually do it.

It was a very, very hard thing to do. I moved all my gear out here, I moved, we just moved everything. It was, it was it was kind of crazy. But did your connection to Larry Crane and Jackpot occur before the move was? No. Okay, so that came after. There’s another another piece here the whole time almost, that I was working at 37ft.

I was also working at Peerless Mastering. So I was an assistant engineer there and QC engineer Jeff had been trying to make me a mastering engineer. Jeff Lipton yeah. And it just like was not for me. But I love Jeff and I think Jeff just like having me around there I was it was really fun. It’s such a great studio.

I learned so much. Yeah. It was it was like a similar thing. Like, didn’t really want to leave Jeff. I was only working there one day a week. But it was it was awesome. But yeah, my connection to Portland came from Peerless, and it actually wasn’t with Larry. It was with a guy named Chris Funk, who is the guitar player of The Decemberists.

And we had done some records where he was producing, and we were working on at Peerless. So I that was my that was that was a Portland connection. But I didn’t know how big a Portland connection was going to be until I got here. What was your experience in the transition from Massachusetts to Oregon? I mean, East coast, West coast, you know, culture, weather, lifestyle.

Yeah. Anything come to mind? It’s so different here. It’s different in a lot of good ways. I think now that I’ve been here for a little bit, I have finally, like slowed down into the pace of life of living on the West Coast. I did not know that it was going to be as difficult. I think that my East Coast work ethic was super helpful for me transitioning here.

It really set me apart from the other engineers that were working in Portland, simply because I would answer my phone, answer emails, respond to people like I don’t know it. That kind of was not as much of a thing here.

Which you know, is just stunning to me. You know, it was it was a crazy transition, but I think I’m definitely a West Coaster that was stuck on the East Coast. Now you’re just a West coaster who answers their phone and texts and emails. Yeah, I so yeah, I have slowed down with some of that just because I’ve gotten really busy.

I now have help. I so I recently signed on with Linear Management. I don’t know if you’re familiar with them. They’re based in Nashville. There’s it’s a great roster. But Kelly and Chris from Linear are managing me now, which is like incredibly helpful. They deal with everything that’s coming in and it just it gives me so much more bandwidth to do this while still being ready for new work.

You know, do they filter projects for you? Yes. Okay. Yeah. And they help manage everything I have going on to they do all the billing client communication. It’s fantastic. I love working with them. Do you all have a system of communicating like, oh, hey, I did a day with these guys over here. Totally. Yeah. I just tell them I’m like, oh.

And you know, they we share a calendar too, so they know what’s going on. But I can just be like, hey, can you bill them for this? I just finished this. This is delivered. They get deposits for me to, which is super nice. And I’ve never had that before. So yeah, invoices are going to get a lot faster.

How did that relationship come about? About two years ago, I started working with a band called Portugal. The Man. I got thrown into this. This world that was bigger than anything I had sort of ever done before. I realized, like, oh, wow. Like I’m, I’m going to. And I ended up making a record with them. And it was it was amazing.

And I realized I was like, okay, now I’m playing with this sort of like big, big league people, I guess, you know, whatever that means. And I realized that I really didn’t know about the music business, and I didn’t know about what a the career of a producer meant from a business and financial perspective. I think I also realized, like at a certain point, like I was I wasn’t just happy to be in the room anymore, like I was.

I was in there and I was doing stuff, and I was I was a piece of the puzzle that was important, and I needed to learn how to advocate for myself and to represent myself. And at a certain point, I realized that that was not something that I could do for myself. And as soon as other artists started reaching out to me via their managers.

I was like, I can’t be the I don’t want to talk to managers, I want to talk to the band, and I always want to talk to the band. I really don’t want to talk to managers. So my my friend Chris Funk introduced me to some people that managed him in the past. So I started taking lots of meetings and exploring, maybe having a new relationship with management.

Kelly is one of the people that I, I met with, and her and and Chris from Linear are just awesome. And they were the ones that I met with and I was talking to and I was like, oh, I feel like I’m just talking to people, not managers. And these are people that I want to talk to and want to want to work with, and that I feel comfortable talking about money with and all this stuff, and I feel comfortable having them advocate for me.

So yeah, it’s been it has been just so amazing. And, and they just I think they’re, they’re helping me make this, career viable for a long period of time. Whereas before I was kind of just like, yeah, sure, I’ll do that. I’ll do that. Yeah, whatever. Like take kind of take whatever. And now it’s like, okay, cool.

We can we can do that and we’ll work with you. But we need this and this. And it’s just it feels a lot better. It feels like it’s a level up and it feels like things are more serious, even though it’s largely a lot of the same stuff I was already doing. But just having someone to advocate for you is just amazing.

So helpful. Yeah, it sounds so cliche and so corporate, but having a team of people, yeah, you know, like I’m not alone anymore, you know? You’re not alone, right? Yeah. Okay. Were there questions that you were like, okay, so if you’re going to manage me, what does this mean? You know. Did you hard hard press that so you could figure out like is this something worth doing?

Yeah, totally. And like, we’re still sort of new at this. I’ve only been working with them for four months. Yeah, we’re still we’re still exploring this. But I mean, so far it’s been really great, even just bringing them into my world, into some of the, the artists and, you know, into some of these relationships I’ve built over the years.

A lot of things have improved with that, too, like bringing them into the Portugal. The Man world. And now all of a sudden, when I do stuff with them, there’s, there’s agreements and there’s things that have been kind of worked out. And any of the larger artists I work with that have labels or management, it’s just a whole level up.

Now when it comes to working with the indie artists, that’s where it gets like it’s still a little bit more difficult, but I just I tell these indie artists, I’m like, I work with everybody. It’s the, the, the client base that I have is broad and there are people that are self-funded and there are people that are funded by smaller labels and larger labels and stuff like that.

These this is Kelly and Chris are just helping me with everything. And you fall under that umbrella. They’re fantastic. And and yeah, they have to be involved in everything. It’s not just like I can’t just bring them into the bigger things. Yeah. So this is where I would question, does it get awkward because it’s like, okay, it’s fine for the for the bigger projects because managers are talking to managers.

But the minute you get into the indie world, then you have artists talking to manager, and that doesn’t make them comfortable, I’m sure. So there’s a lot of, you know, kind of handholding that you might have to do with the artist to say, no, no, no, no, it’s cool. These people are cool. They represent me in a quality way.

Definitely. And, so far everyone’s been really, really cool about it. But I think that has a lot to do with the way that that Kelly presents herself to these indie artists. She’s very easy to talk to, and these artists understand that and they all really like her. So that’s very important to me. Your involvement with Portugal. The Man, was that on a production basis or engineering basis?

It was an engineering basis, and it was one of those things that sort of made me realize, like, so if I’m engineering and there’s no producer in the room. Am I engineering? What is what is going on? So it was yeah, it was kind of this, this interesting, learning experience for me. But yeah, we made a record together called Shish, and there were a lot of amazing people involved in that record.

And yeah, that was a jumping off point for my relationship with them, and now I now I do a lot with them. I do a lot of mixing for them at the moment, which has been really, really fun. Talk to me about a relationship with Larry Crane and getting involved in Jackpot! And how does that fit into all of this?

Yes. So when I moved to Portland, I had convinced a couple bands I was working with on the East Coast to. I had already had some records lined up for, you know, dates. After I was, I was planning on moving here, so I asked them, I was like, would you guys be okay with flying out to Portland and doing these records here?

And I think all of them but one were down for it. So I was like, okay, cool. Like you guys come out and then I’ll find studios for us to work at. And Jackpot! was was just a place I was freelancing out of, and it was just the best place to freelance out of, like in Portland by far.

It is the the the best, most freelance friendly studio ever. So I just started doing that, started bringing work in there at a time when no one was booking the studio because it was still kind of in COVID times and we were being safe. We were testing, we were masking, we were Lysol crazy disinfecting all the time. It was wild.

But, yeah, it was really it was really, really fun. So I just started freelancing there. And then at a certain point there, old studio manager Kendra Lynn, who’s awesome, asked me if I wanted to be on staff, but I still hadn’t met Larry throughout all of this. It was wild. I was just freelancing. And there was there came a point where they had these Burl converters, and they were something was messed up with them and they needed to be fixed.

And Kendra mentioned it to me and I was like, oh, Sean had some of those. I actually know how to do that because I helped Sean with it. But she was like, come in, meet Larry and help him with it. So I went in there and just like did some tech work and it was awesome. And that was the day I met him.

How to becoming a manager take place with me managing Jackpot! That that came in a in a really interesting and very organic way. I had been on staff at Jackpot!, but I think a common misconception for being on staff at a recording studio means that there’s just going to be a shovel shoveling work into your, your inbox or your, you know, your empty work bucket or something like on a daily basis.

That is not the case. Being on staff at a studio means that, yes, occasionally things will come in the door and the staff engineers get to get their first pick at them. But what it really means is that you’re you’re just a part of a great community of other engineers, and you get to put your name on the website and you get to in my opinion, the most valuable thing is you can then use that to help build the client base.

So that’s what I was doing. I became a staff engineer at Jackpot! I was going around town, I was meeting bands. I was going to shows. I was leveraging other work that I had done. I was going to record release shows for bands whose records I had done, met the opening bands, met everybody, and I was just bringing tons of work into Jackpot! all the time.

So I think just because I was there all the time and knew the studio really well there. There came a time when Kendra, who had been managing Jackpot! on and off for close to 20 years, she didn’t want to do it anymore. And her and Larry sat me down and they’re like, do you want to do it? You know the place super well.

You know how to fix the stuff. You’ve already run your own studio. And yeah, it was kind of a no brainer because I was I was there all the time and I was already like so deep in the trenches of that studio. It was it was amazing. And it’s it has continued to be super great. I love running that place.

I’ve made a record there. I made a record with the band Tiger Touch there, and as Larry had explained it to me, you know, he tried to make the studio as dummy proof as possible. It’s like as long as, you know, signal flow, like you could figure it out. No problem. Yeah, totally. And it’s like we had a freelancer in over the weekend, and I don’t mind getting a text message of being like, hey, like where I know you guys have one of these.

Where is it? I’m like, oh yeah, we got that. I know exactly where everything is because everything gets put back in the same place. So it takes me two seconds to tell a freelancer, oh yeah, that Little Labs thing is just right underneath, you know, it’s in the. The guitar box bin that’s labeled, you know, right next to the mic locker.

And he’s like, oh found it. Great. Thanks. Those are the messages you want to get. You don’t want to get messages of like, hey, there’s this weird, crazy thing. Why isn’t this piece of gear work like, we don’t we don’t operate like that. As soon as something is broken, it gets pulled and fixed or shipped out some manufacturer immediately.

And we don’t we don’t leave stuff around. That doesn’t work. That place is is very foolproof. It’s amazing. I’ve known Larry for I think I’ve known Larry for 26, 27 years. I will put a link in the show notes to to that interview that took place quite some time ago. He’s the best being being a part of the the Jackpot! family.

And then, you know, by way of the Jackpot! family. Like the Tape Op family. It’s so, so cool. Larry’s the the absolute best. I think there are a lot of people in this industry that are just like the total gem, sweetest people ever. And he is he is okay. Yeah. Larry. Definitely. He’s the best. We’re about out of time.

I want to ask you. There’s two questions. First off. How do you approach your finances from being an audio professional? Is there an approach that you take to survive? Yes. My biggest thing is to not overextend myself. I live sort of modestly, but also, I think confidently, like I own a house. I but it’s it’s not. The mortgage payment that I have is significantly less than what my rent was, especially in Boston, and even was when we moved here.

I know that I can I can pay this mortgage really easily and pay my bills. But then also like, honestly, it’s it’s just saving anytime I any there’s any extra money. It just it goes into a rainy day fund. I know what my bills are roughly going to be every month. I say roughly because like flat tires happen and gear needs to be fixed.

And there’s, you know, insurance needs to get paid and all that stuff. One of the things that does happen is sometimes, especially with these larger projects, is it can take even with, you know, having this great management, it can take a little bit to get paid for certain things because maybe the band hasn’t gotten paid or you’re doing something for a movie or TV show and that hasn’t, band hasn’t gotten paid for that yet, so you don’t get paid yet.

So even if you’re working for a week, you might not get paid for that week for a couple of months. It’s really important to have to know that you have enough money in the bank to live off of. I always like to have about six months of living expenses just in liquid savings. Just just in case. Because you never know.

Even though I’m I’ve been very lucky to be busy, you really don’t know what’s going to happen. And then the other part of the question too is, is when you get up in the morning and I know every, every day is different for all of us. But in general, when you get up in the morning, is there a routine for the day?

Is there a mindset, an approach that you take to your day just once again for survival and not just to survive, but to thrive? Like what? Definitely. What’s going on in that brain, Zach? The biggest thing, especially now that I’m in my into my 30s, has been exercising every day and that is that is how I like to start my days.

It is the weirdest little world that I’m in, but I have a Peloton bike that I love. So it’s Monday, Wednesday, Friday I ride the Peloton Bike Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays I lift weights and that is the best thing. So that’s right in the morning. And then, like, my workday starts, but my workday starts after I’ve had an hour to myself, my phone still on Do Not Disturb when I’m working out.

And it’s it’s just super nice because if you like, wake up and get out of bed and just, oh my God, they need this, they need this. It’s just it sets you up for a really chaotic day. But if you wake up and take time for yourself, it’s super helpful and you can have a crazy chaotic day, but it won’t feel that way.

Yeah. And then it’s after, you know exercise is done and I’ve showered and sat down either here at Jackpot! or wherever I am that day. Then it’s just I’m going to take 20 minutes and deal with these emails and these text messages. And I talked to Kelly and Chris from Linear Management most mornings. And they’ll they’ll just sort of update me on things.

I’ll check in with Jackpot! and make sure that all of our invoices have gone out. They need to go out that were paid up, that any incoming bookings we’re dealing with. But yeah, it’s just I just kind of bounced around all the various email addresses and message threads that are going on, and then it’s whatever I’m doing, whether I’m producing a record with a band or mixing or fixing gear or whatever it is then, and I do that.

I do not work super late at night anymore. I’m generally done by seven, eight, nine, usually at the latest. Occasionally I’ll have late nights, but I like to sort of be done at a reasonable hour and I most of the time don’t work weekends anymore, which is really nice, and I’m happy to do it when it’s a great record and it calls for it.

But I don’t want to be a weekend warrior. I love having time to myself. Is do you try to get up at the crack of dawn? I wish I could. I go through phases and it and it definitely is related to the weather, but I usually get up at seven 730. So not not super late. Not super early.

Yeah, I was scheduled stuff in the in the morning time like our interview today. So sometimes I and if I stay up late whether I’m working or not, that’s always a challenge for me too. But it’s nice to have at least a framework from which to operate, which you can improvise on as usual audience in the show notes links will appear, which you can visit.

And Zach, you’ll send me some links, I assume. Yes, I got some stuff. We got to have a reason for them to look at those show notes. Absolutely. Oh man. Well, great to chat with you and great to have you on the show. You know, I tend to bring people back after, you know, a few years. So let’s check back in a few years and see where things are at.

But until then, maybe I’ll run into you in Portland. If I’m back up there making a racket. Please do. All right, man, you take care. Thanks so much. Thank you.