Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Matthew Shaffer. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Matthew , appreciate you joining us today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard.

Many recording studios give you exactly what you pay for. You give them X amount of dollars and they give you basically a demo. The only way to get a better sound is to pay way more than you can afford or hope for a record deal to pay for the studio time. It is highly unlikely to get a deal now that won’t hurt the artist financially.

We offer hours for a rate also but we also provide the level of involvement and interested treatment of your songs that you might not even get from a label. Basically, we won’t produce your song and call it finished unless it’s on par or better than a song we would release ourselves.

In today’s market you need a polished professional sound. There are a lot of AI tools that claim you can achieve this with song home recording and algorithms. To some extent that’s true but all the songs usually end up sounding roughly the same. You also need to stand out and have a unique sound. That requires human experience. AI can only take you so far.

We aren’t anti AI though. As a tool it is helpful in speeding up the production process. Coupled with our combined 30+ years of experience we can offer a lot more for less time and money.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I taught myself to play guitar when I was 15. I immediately got involved in starting bands. My second band toured the States for ten years. We provided our own sound and sometimes even provided the sound for festivals we played at. We were eventually signed to a small label that took us internationally before it got bought out by a major label and everyone on our label including us got dropped. The band didn’t survive after that. I went solo and taught myself music production releasing more than 500 songs before meeting Jon (Sulzbach) who had a masters in production. We realized that we had all this experience and equipment available to help other artists out. We decided we would give them the dedication and help that labels and the industry at large never gave us.

We started in Jon’s basement, then moved to a garage that I converted into a three room studio. The week we officially opened our doors we were met with a major label artist who is making a comeback. He saw our passion for other artists and our love for music which in his words he hadn’t seen in decades in New York or LA. He has recently become our silent partner and we are drawing up plans to build a large recording studio in the next year or so! This will enable to us to help artists even more with even better equipment and facilities. But before then we are able to provide sound that rivals major studios already. It is only going to get better from here!

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

Don’t become complacent. There is always room to grow and many opportunities you can miss if you aren’t looking. After getting dropped by my label I got stuck on the idea that I needed to be signed again to succeed. I hate to say that I spent close to a decade standing in front of major label execs and getting nowhere. I forget the exact moment but it was after Island records gave me a personal number that just went to a full mailbox that I told Jon that we should be helping artists get the treatment that we never got and help them achieve the sound quality they needed to ba able to get signed. At the time I was thinking maybe helping others will help us get signed again. Little did I know that my drive would become more about the artists than my own music. I also have little interest in getting signed now. Labels are dieing and we are helping artists not need a label.

Have you ever had to pivot?

This was sort of answered already but to reiterate, my career was being a songwriter and musician. But now my career is producing other artists. I used to have no interest in producing music but now I would rather be producing others and helping them than making my own music. We still make our own music but it is now a secondary focus to our career as producers.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://Bombgifted.com
• Instagram: @bomb_gifted_studios
• Other: [email protected]

Image Credits

Tay Banks, Chris Malick