We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Andrew McKee. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Andrew below.
Andrew, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear your thoughts about making remote work effective.
As music is a team sport, it’s ideally played & worked on together in the same room! However, the pandemic forced a lot of industries to go remote, and the music industry was no exception.
I was lucky enough to be able to continue producing and engineering music for remote clientele on through the pandemic and beyond, and at this point it makes up for the large majority of my workload.
I made a couple of key gear purchases in 2020 that have allowed me to accomplish more work remotely while away from my main recording studio space in Imperial Beach. Also, in 2021 a partnership with the audio software company Waves elevated my presence on social media as an audio professional, and I started seeing much more remote mixing work come in.
I’m sure the pros & cons vary situationally but in my experience, the only pitfalls I’ve come across every now and then are that maybe something gets lost in translation, or that something might have been caught in person more immediately.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I’ve been a student of music from an early age, participating in everything from marching band to orchestra – and although the learning hasn’t stopped I’ve been lucky enough to carve out a professional career over the last 10 years.
This has consisted of live sound engineering for weddings & corporate events, producing & playing different instruments on my clients’ records, recording horns and editing work for bands like Tribal Seeds, Stick Figure, & Michael Franti, and a LOT of touring across the country with my band Hirie! (And a little of everything in between).
I provide my clients with every service involved in crafting songs from start to finish: songwriting, production, studio recording, editing, mix engineering, and mastering. While these are my main offerings, I also occasionally take on live sound engineering gigs and provide 1 on 1 production & mixing lessons.
I suppose the thing I’m both most proud of and love about my job(s) the most is how many people I get to positively influence through doing work I love!
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
I was able to use my involvement in touring & recording with Hirie as a way to kickstart my social media following. Building my audience has been a slow-going organic process, and I’ve really started to dive into video production & editing in order to more easily create content.
The way I see it, the more I can capitalize on what I’m already doing by creating content around it and getting it in front of people’s eyes, the more I can grow my audience & clientele.
If you’re just getting started with building an online social media presence, I would suggest starting to get comfortable with recording & editing video so you can be in control of the narrative of your content and branding!
Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?
I’ve only recently started getting into YouTube as a learning resource, and I TOTALLY wish I would’ve dove in waaaay earlier in life!
I now follow a bunch of channels dedicated to music business topics, release strategies, studio gear & techniques, and music theory (and the *all too occasional* guilty pleasure channels discussing Marvel & other science fiction franchises haha). But I can only imagine where I’d be in my career if I had discovered how invaluable a resource YouTube can be!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.mckeezyproductions.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andrewmckeezymusic/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/andrew.mckee.58
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-mckee-45835334/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCPwpbvQUHH4paRtr0O2uow
Image Credits
Jose Cavada Elizabeth Villagomez