CZHED (pronounced “SHED”) MEDIA STUDIOS SOUND ADVICE

The Czhed (Shed) Media studios have been around in concept since the start of 2002. The studio was finished being built in 2004.

We do acoustic trouble shooting for all sorts of facilities including: recording studios, bars, theaters, sound production facilities, DJ booths, Listening room, and Home theaters rooms for gamers.

We also do online mastering/re-mastering and digital editing and post productions for film, video and slide shows through FTP uploads/downloads. In studio, We offer on-site digital recording in an ultra quiet live room, mixing, mastering, music/beat composition and beat making. We also offer mobile digital live recording as a service.

A little about my background.

I was born the oldest son of an Air Force Non-Commissioned officer. Through out my life I have live all over the US and in Asia and Europe. My dad is a real Jazz junkie; he turned me on to his love of jazz music at the early age of 3. Now even though I love all types of music my very favorite music form is jazz.

It was my mother who turned me on to Pop, Soul and Gospel. Whether she knew it or not, by taking me to my first music concert at the age of 7, she set me on a life course.

Who was the artist featured at this music concert? Where was it held?
Where else, but the famous Apollo theater and James Brown and his “Soul Review” were the Headliners. After the concert, through her network of friends my mother was able to take me back stage. Where I was able meet James Brown and get his autograph. I was hooked from that point on; music became a driving force in my life.

Before I was 12 years old we were stationed at the very northern tip of Japan’s Hokkaido Island. The Air Force base was so small, that the children of people stationed there, that were in the 8-12 grades were shipped of to another Air force base in the southern part of Hokkaido to go to school. They only came back home over major holidays and during summer. So the highest grade where we lived was the 7th.

Always an audio-visual freak since I can remember, I was the kids who ran the 16-35 mm projectors at school and did all the splicing of broken film stock. There was less than 4,000 people at this base (including military members and their families). The only reminders of home were the movie theater (where we normally got movies from 6 months to a year later), the military run American TV station which broad casted from 5:30pm-12:30 am (most of the TV shows were at least three years or older) and my godsend, the military ran American AM radio station.

Again thanks to my mother’s connections, I was able to get an intern slot helping out the morning request show DJ from 4:30-8:00 am Monday-Friday, before I headed of to school. My job was to located records for the DJ, to field off-air requests from the listeners and to be his sometime on-air sidekick. The radio station had a huge record library that went back over 30 years, which were roughly 20,000 records in size.

I loved that job and held it for over a year and a half. Until we left that Air Force base and came back to the US. While in Japan I made some of my first recordings with and open face reel to reel 4 tracks, using both microphones and direct input from a 6 channel analog mixing board.

We came back to the US in the summer of 1971. They didn’t have a school radio station at the Junior High I attended in Kansas City, and no commercial radio station was looking for any 13 year old interns, so I said goodbye to radio and headed back to playing and recording garage bands. Kansas City is where I got heavily in to hard rock and funk and moved up to learning about and doing 8 track analog recordings. Again, thanks to those garage bands and the loudness factor of hard rock, I fell into the world of acoustic room design.

The first material I used was the good old egg cartons (yes, Virginia they really do work!) I was working on weekends as a bagger at the base commissary (for you non-military types, a courtesy clerk at the supermarket) where I made it a point to meet the egg purveyor and was able to get the empties egg cartons he wanted to get rid of at the price of 1cent a piece.

Soon I was hooking up basements and garages with egg cartons on the walls and ceilings so bands could practice and parents and neighbors could have piece of mind.

By 1974, my dad had gotten re-assigned to an Air base in West Texas. I was introduced to Country Western and Texas Swing. Now in High school, I took a course in “film”, which introduced to the worlds of 8mm film, animation, story book design, directing and early video tape & film editing to me.

In 1976, I graduated from High school. And in that Fall I started college. As always, when I had free time I was deep in to music from performance to production. On the visual side, I finally had access to 16mm cameras. While of course still doing the egg crate and rock wool thing, in my own little effort to help musician’s parents and their neighbors keep their sanity and hearing, by fixing up the acoustics on practices rooms, basement and the good old garages.

I left Texas in the fall of 1980, in the next 4 years I moved from Washington to Oregon to Colorado and my life followed the same pattern. By day, a management job, by night music and music productions in both 8 & 16 track analog and helping friends “sound modify” their practice spaces and recording studios.

In 1984 I moved to Europe where I lived, until my return to the US in 1997. In that period of time, as it relates to the worlds of music and sound acoustics, I performed on stage, managed a record label, taught voice, ran my own production company, I helped built some recording studios and fortified practice rooms. I also worked European music trade shows. Including the biggest of them all, the annual “Musik Meese” in Frankfurt, worked in MIDI, did beta testing for digital audio software and software text translations from German to English.
Upon my return to the US in 1997, I moved back to Seattle, I worked for a non-profit doing event planning/PR. Then I worked for a small Bio-tech start-up doing PR/Global sales. When possible, doing digital music productions and acoustic work, I also work part time at a local Community College instructing a course in international macro/micro business.

When the bottom fell out of the dot.com boom around the end of 2001, I decided then, it was a good time to go back to my first callings of music, film and acoustic design. So I bit the bullet, starting taking part-time and temp work. All my extra money and time went in to building my own business platform to offer my services from. The Czhed Media Studios was born in 2002 and the studio was up and fully running by 2004. and in the mean while I was recruited to teach Digital Audio at a local Technical College.

After much prodding from those around me, I have taken the next step and started this blog to share what I know about acoustic room design. Frankly, I believe I will get just as much out of this blog, as I will give. I look forward to further growth of my knowledge base and that of those who take the time to read this blog.