Sound Media Productions is home to Seattle-based producer, mixer & mastering engineer Brandon Busch. (That’s me.) Other engineers as well as self-produced bands hire me to mix and/or master their projects. While I still do album production and tracking for the right project, I spend much of my time taking other peoples’ tracks or mixes and essentially making them sound better. Here’s how that happened…
First, like most of us, I began as a musician, playing bass in bands since Jr high school. That continued through college and beyond. Near the end of the college days, I got one of those fantastic Tascam 4-track decks to have a way to make decent recordings of my band’s songs. I learned quickly that there was WAY more to this recording thing than just plugging in some mics and hitting the record button! I wanted to know how on earth the bands I loved got the sounds they got on their records!!! After quickly maximizing every in and out and knob & button the 4-track had to offer, I got more stuff and moved on to the ubiquitous ADAT & Mackie 1604 combo. After quickly maximizing… well you see where this is going. Long story short, one day I started getting calls from friends who asked me to make “demos” for their bands. Great! I needed the practice. Then I started getting calls from the friends of those friends asking how much I charge to make demos, because the one they heard sounded great. Wait. What? How much I charge?? Oh, I guess I do this as a little side business now! Sweet. It’s fun, and I’m getting pretty good at it, so that’s cool.
Now the 2nd development is that I got hired to produce some commercials and broadcast segments for a couple local companies. This situation forced me to get a business license and name (hence the generic, business-y nature of the name, which just kinda stuck) so I could be legit while dealing with some local companies & radio stations. We’re in the late 90’s now. A couple years after that, it was pretty much back to doing mostly music projects. I had just enough going on that I was able to quit the day-job and literally tell my boss to “figure it out!” when he asked how he was going to run his company without my help. (that’s another story!) This is the day in 2002 I became a full time recording guy. I put some work work into the detached mother-in-law on our property, and turned it into a cozy little studio with some decent gear and separate tracking & control rooms. After countless weekend demo sessions, 3am guitar solos, and better and better bands, over 10 years later I have settled into kind of a niche around here as a mixer and am now earning a name as a capable and attentive mastering guy.
I still do a fair amount of tracking and producing when it’s the right project, but I spend much of my time these days crafting nice mixes and mastering other people’s projects. Home recordists like to send me their tracks to mix because I can offer such a dramatic improvement to their sound. Other engineers are finding out that my mastering skills often rival the usual choices, and so does my service and respect for their sound. My personal interest in mastering grew out of a frustration with what happened when I sent my mixes to other guys and got it back sounding less musical rather than more. Sometimes the frustration wasn’t with the sounds, but with the bed-side manner and attitude of some of these guys. There are certainly people I trust to send my mixes too, but for the most part, I started doing it myself, and then mastering more and more outside projects. I’m sorry, but even if you’re good, people don’t like being talked down to or treated like you’re doing them the favor by getting over charged for adjusting a couple track spaces on a CD.
Today, I’m in business almost entirely by word-of-mouth because I offer a solid service, and help my clients realize their artistic vision. I do it with a clean slate for every project, respect for the artist, and an attitude of creative partnership.