Today I have Jeff Lucero. He’s a Senior Audio Engineer at The Saltmine Studio in Mesa, Arizona. He’s done work on a certified gold record and on a Grammy nominated album. I Interview him to get some insight on what he thinks about the landscape of the music recording industry.
Dylan: Thanks Jeff for being able to have a quick interview with me.
Jeff: Absolutely
Dylan: Can you describe what you do as a senior audio engineer?
Jeff: Basically I’m a engineer at a recording studio in Arizona. The Southwest, we kind of have our region, the largest studio in the region. We are featured on the cover of Mix Magazine of last year 2016 February.
What I do is I record and produce people and kind of manage the place. You know, you just have to run the day to day processes of a recording studio. We deal with high profile clients, make sure their needs are met; just general recording studio stuff.
Dylan: What’s the most famous person you have worked with?
Jeff: The most recognizable project was a song on DJ Khaled’s album. But, you know, we’ve worked with Riff Raff, Waka Flocka, you know, a lot of hip hop people.
Dylan: Yeah that sounds really cool. Working at a studio, how has the digital age or the use of social media and digital, like computers, and other stuff like that has changed the way the studio operates or does things?
Jeff: Yeah. So Generally, I will put that into two points. One with the digital age, we get kind of the best of both worlds really these day because we get the fancy computers and we get to interface them with the vintage gear of the last 5 decades basically and that type of thing. However that has also changed our business model because our main competition is the average person that has the same computers that we have and they have a lot of software that will mimic the actual pieces of equipment we have.
Dylan: Would you say that people that are self producing, and like YouTube doing YouTube videos and producing themselves
Jeff: That is another thing that happens but we do also provide a service for them too. We worked with BigDaws, he has his big social media thing going but when he does need professional recording or expensive microphones, we can you know, hook him up. We have video team now and now more than ever we have people that will pay us $150 bucks or something just to make a 60 second promo video for their social media essentially and I think the visuals are becoming more relevant because YouTube exists, and Instagram exists, and Snapchat exists. It’s all kind of like we are way more visual now then we ever have been basically.
Dylan: Yeah I agree. It’s interesting to see from just my own personal experience how social media has changed the way artists interact with audience or potentially trying to get an audience trying to get famous.
Jeff: Word of mouth is kind of becoming…well I guess internet marketing is now our word of mouth but you know the actual face to face contact and the face to face promotion is going away. Maybe not going away but just changing to the point where it’s all just supported by your social media imprint or your imprint on the internet with your website or whatever.
Dylan: Well thank you Jeff for your time. Do you have anything you would like to plug or say at all?
Jeff: Oh man. You can find me on Instagram @JeffLucero2 (spells it out)
Picture at top. Solid State Logic SL9064J module. wikimedia commons by: JacoTen
The Lucid Rabbit 
Leave a comment