So a little update... as all of you know, the economy has been very sour throughout the entire world the last two months and well, this has made it very difficult for many businesses. Tonight I went to my favorite sandwich shoppe in Santa Clarita, and had a long talk with the owner about all the other restaurants going out of business in the area. They said that for them Sundays used to be busy but today they hardly served anybody. The movie productions that used to call and order a limitless supply of food are calling with outrageously small budgets, or not calling at all and they don't know if they are going to make enough money to justify staying open once their lease comes due again - the landowner does not want to lower the rent, probably since many of his spaces have become vacant in the last year.

So as excited as I was in March about the prospect of running a full-time commercial studio it seems that our end of the recording business is really tough right now. Large established studios with huge credits are dropping rates low enough to lure our potential customers. And with 70% of the music made now being independent that means that when budgets tighten, already small budgets get smaller, so working with people funding their own projects is becoming more rare as well. We were so close to being up and running... right as the bottom fell out.

So for now I have shifted to doing work from my Santa Clarita studio as well as a little work out of North Hollywood when its called for. Some refurbishments to our Trident 70s Series console as well as the 2" tape machines are being made and then we should be working on some new projects if the other ends of the business can stabilize.

In the meantime I have really had to do some soul-searching as to why I want to do this crazy thing (make music for a living) in the first place. After all, most recording engineers I know find that there's really not all that much money in making records anymore and most of them now work primarily with post production for film and television.

Since I was born with a knack for hooking up electronics, a love for twisting nobs, an ear for melody and harmony and a naturally creative spirit I knew from a very early age that it seemed only natural to pursue a career in music.

What I realize about myself is that I am an avid visionary with sound. That is to say that to me, hearing music does more than just make sound. There are so many colors that dance between each note and every part resonate in just the right way to create a vivid visual landscape of emotion and movement in my mind. And what I like to do is bring that out of songs, artists, and their music. Sometimes it means just getting the right sound out of the guitar... sometimes evoking the right kind of performance from the singer. Most the time for me its in the arrangement. The harmonies that play off of each other for emotional color, creating space between the words, helping to supplement the limitations and enhance the power of the spoken word. After all words are only names we give to ideas but music speaks every language.

So for me music is the language of emotion. That's why feel compelled to create and to help people create. When I produce a song I feel like a director taking a great script and breathing visual life into the page, capturing, as it were, this vision that exists in the mind and putting it on a screen, helping the actor find that Oscar winning performance within himself and then editing it with care in the cutting room to ensure the most effectual timing and perspective is rendered.

What I'm realizing is that just because I can hold the camera, so to speak, doesn't mean I have to. Sometimes being the one who gets to step back from the lens every once in a while helps you keep the bigger perspective. There will always be plenty of technicians who are way more knowledgeable and experienced than I am. But that doesn't mean that my vision is not valuable. In fact sometimes that same technician is looking for someone with vision to direct him with what to do.

I guess all I am saying to myself is that its time for me to stop feeling like a square peg in a round hole and to just start looking for the right holes to fill while being 100% genuinely me.

Hopefully, I will keep you friends posted with what develops through this process :)

-Steve