We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Javier Piñón and Nathaniel Saavedra. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Javier Piñón and Nathaniel Saavedra below.

Javier Piñón and Nathaniel Saavedra, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

Back in 2021 we were jamming out with a few friends in SDSU’s parking garages when we had the bright idea of becoming an actual band and playing at the venues in the area. This immediately became very difficult to accomplish when several of the venues didn’t even want to hear from us because we were too small. The ones that did want us, however, were asking us to front several hundred dollars to be able to set foot on their stage. We soon realized that this was the unfortunate standard of the local music scene, and that we had a choice: we could either play the game just like every other band, or we could break away and make our own lane.
We decided to change the game for ourselves and make our own show instead! Calibrated Productions Presents…Delivery was hosted at La Mesa First United Methodist Church in 2021. Our friend Chef Willie made kebabs, we sold t-shirts with a tie dye station, and our band, Delivery, played the stage we built. We were very proud to successfully turn a profit on our first company event!
We both had prior experience in event organization, so the success from our first event inspired us to see how far things could go. We both had unique backgrounds in music and esports, and we realized the potential that we had by combining our skillsets. We believed that we would be able to succeed because of the wide variety of skills we’d picked up as we built our careers. But…succeed at what?
We knew our skills would let us break through the music scene and lift ourselves, but we knew that wasn’t what our goal sould be. We believed we had to focus on supporting other minority artists around us who have likely experienced the same difficulties that we did, but that may not have had the ability to overcome them yet. Our belief is that the best way to truly succeed is to remember your roots and uplift your community; otherwise, what’s the point?

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?

Trying to release a new song? Let’s make it happen! We can work with you to write it from scratch, gather musicians to perform in the studio, set up microphones to capture the magic, and mix and master the tracks. Our all-in-one approach goes one step further by offering video recording and livestreaming services as well, meaning we can make just about any content in our studio. We’re even offering a special deal where we can record an album in a day for $300! We record the whole thing live off the floor, capturing audio and video of each track to edit together into a music video.
We believe that the best way to support our artists is to be able to provide for everything they need to succeed. We’ve been fortunate to have the opportunities to broaden our skillset over the years, and we recognize that not every artist can write music AND produce the song AND promote it afterwards. And if they can, we believe most artists prefer to focus on creating the art than producing and promoting it. Most artists we’ve met would love to focus on their music; they have only figured out how to handle the rest of the work that comes with it. Our artists trust us to handle the rest so they can focus on being their best artistic selves.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

Our goal is to support our community, and the only way to do that is to go out and be a part of that community! Hitting up local shows at bars and skate shops is a great way to find bands and solo artists who are trying to push their careers forward, but showing up is only half the battle. The key is to actually be willing to step out of your comfort zone and talk to the artists. We genuinely love to connect with other hardworking creatives who are trying to reach their dreams, and we want to do what we can to help them get there. We don’t just try to sell a product to everyone we meet; we want to partner with them to put in the work together to succeed. We believe in the potential of everyone we work with, and we will go the extra mile because we want to see them succeed.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

A couple years ago we used to run a weekly Smash Bros tournament in La Mesa called The Pit. We hosted 32 sessions before circumstances with the venue forced us to sunset the series and move on to new projects. We were definitely sad about the ending, and somewhat disappointed that we couldn’t push it further, but overall we were proud of what we had accomplished and valued what we had learned. At that last Pit, however, one of our attendees said that they were sorry that we failed, and sorry that The Pit didn’t pan out to anything.
That was a curious perspective that we hadn’t considered before. Yes, we could very easily just take the L and never look back. Maybe even call it quits altogether and admit that it’s too hard to host local events at all. But that just wasn’t how we view the world.
We wanted to look to the future instead, and chose to search for new opportunities coming up on the horizon. Around that same time, we were fortunate enough to connect with the studio that would become Long Beach Sounds in north Long Beach. The door of The Pit was closing, but Long Beach Sounds was opening, and we walked through it with anticipation of seizing the new opportunities that came with that. Our partnership with Long Beach Sounds would end up yielding many successes as well, such as our Concerts at Clancy’s and Long Beach Live series.
It’s very easy to get discouraged in this line of work, but life always keeps moving forward and so should we. You can’t control what obstacles come up in life, but you can control how you react to them and how you work to overcome them.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://calibratedproductions.org
• Instagram: calibratedproductions
• Youtube: @calibratedproductions