We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jesse Grisham. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jesse below.

Jesse, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear your thoughts about making remote work effective.

This could fall under covid-related, innovation, or changing business model. It may seem obvious to say, but the typical model for making music is, primarily, getting people in the room with you and recording them. When Covid decimated all that, we were forced to adapt. People still wanted to make music, so we had to figure out a way to do it without compromising on quality. I was able to figure out a way to record artists remotely and continue making records even though we couldn’t be in the same room.
I used a relatively new tech from Audiomovers to record artists in real-time from anywhere in the world. There was some set-up that had to be done, and a few hiccups along the way, but once I got things figured out, the experience wasn’t too terribly different that the way we had been doing it.
I started by having the artist actually set up a recording space at their location. In some cases, they would already have a decent home studio setup, and we could just use that, but in others, they had nothing. I would send them all the gear they needed, help set up their room for the best sound quality we could get, and set up their computer so that I could remotely control it from my computer. Then we would do a video meeting via Zoom or Google so we could communicate visually. This way, it was almost the same as the regular experience being in the control room while the vocalist is in the vocal booth.
Now that things have settled down, we’ve gone back to in-person tracking for 95% of projects, however, I still do remote tracking to keep travel costs down for my clients who are farther away or the ones who simply prefer that method.

Jesse, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m Jesse, a songwriter and producer/mixer based in Nashville, TN. I’m originally from a small town in Western KY called Paducah. I grew up surrounded by music – both of my parents played in the local symphony, my mom was a teacher and taught private lessons out of our trailer, and my dad was a music teacher and band director. Both of them were great singers, players, and my dad a songwriter– so the language of music was spoken regularly in my house. I was instilled with a deep love and appreciation for music that carries on to this day.

I first came into the recording and production world in what is probably a very typical way. I was in and out of bands during my teenage and college years, and in my early 20s, my band scrounged up some money and went to Nashville to record an EP with a producer friend of ours named Jon King, who had a home studio at the time. Immediately, I was hooked. I knew nothing about recording or production, but I absorbed everything I could in every moment. I still remember the first time hearing the mix pulled up on the monitors in his small control room – and I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.

When the time came for my band to record again, I decided to attempt to produce the record myself. I knew almost nothing about it, but I was too stubborn to not try and too ignorant to know how much I didn’t know. I begged and borrowed all the gear, set up at a buddy’s church nearby, and for 6 months, there I sat with the Pro Tools user manual on a laptop, an article on “how to record vocals” from Recording Magazine open on my left, and an article on how to use an equalizer on my right. And I made that record. My efforts were admittedly primitive, but at the time, it was the greatest thing I’d ever done.

I moved to Nashville in 2011. I toured as a guitarist and bassist for several years (and still do from time to time), did the artist thing, had a publishing deal as a writer here in town, and all the while I honed my craft and made records here and there as I could find the opportunity. In April of 2021, after a time of planning, my wife and I made the decision that I would go full time in production, so I started Arcsea Studio as my private production studio.

I offer full production and mixing services, songwriting, and, though not a part of my “official” services, I do lots of artist development type things for my independent clients. I want to be the biggest advocate and cheerleader for my artists, because I want them to feel like someone is in their corner, fighting for them. My work is primarily in Contemporary Christian, Country and Rock.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

One of the core reasons for why I do what I do is because of something that happened when I was 16. My band at the time had just played a demoralizing string of shows where basically nobody turned out. We were feeling dejected, directionless, and like no one cared what we were doing. While sitting at the lunch table one day, I turned to my bandmates and said, “When I get older and ‘make it’, I am going to do everything I can to make sure other young bands don’t feel like we do right now.” Fast forward to today, and I’ve kept my promise.

Where I’m from there was no such thing as a “professional musician.” I had never once heard that you could go to school for “music business” until I was already a junior in college. The music industry is a difficult place, and navigating that was one of the most significant challenges of my life– and I’m still learning every day. That experience has really driven me to help the artists I work with as much as I can. My whole philosophy is to add way more value than I take, and I want that to come across in my business.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

Well I mentioned earlier in my story how I came into music production, but I actually went to school for Graphic Design. After I got my degree, I got a job at a screen printing company because “that’s what you do” when you graduate, but all through college and the years afterward, I dabbled in different DAW programs and made my own little productions for myself. I worked there for 2 years before I quit and did the freelance thing – thats what gave me the time to work on recording. It was entirely a hobby at that point.

After I moved to Nashville, I was jobless and broke, like most musicians. I didn’t know anyone or anything other than music was here. I still had a few freelance design clients, but not many. My then roommate wanted to put out a hip-hop record, and that was my first paid music project. From there, I produced a few more records as people came to me, each time getting better and better.

After I got married, things basically continued that way for me, so I took a part-time courier job to supplement my income. When I found out my wife was pregnant, I went into panic mode as I think all expectant parents do. I pulled back from touring and design, and ended up going full-time at that same company in order to have that steady income. It was during this time that I began to pick up more production clients and built out our garage into a studio. I started listening to the Six Figure Home Studio podcast and ultimately enrolled in the Profitable Producer Course, and that catapulted me into the business side of things. Eventually, in April 2021, I quit the courier job and dove in to the production business full-time.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.arcseastudio.com
• Instagram: @jessegrisham
• Facebook: @jessegrisham, @arcseastudio, @jessegrishammusic
• Twitter: @jessegrisham

Image Credits
Lauren Athalia, Miranda Jensen