Kind of a cool story how we found The Blasting Room. I was watching a YouTube video about sound production and the speaker said "at some point in your life you should work with a professional producer". That got me thinking. I was listening to a lot of Rise Against the time, so I looked into where they had recorded all of their records. That quickly lead to The Blasting Room, in Fort Collins, CO. Ben was living in the Bay Area at the time, but this was too intriguing to ignore. So I went to the Contact Us page on their website, got everyone's email address who worked there and wrote an email that I then sent to everyone from the intern to the owner, Bill Stevenson. It said something like: "Hey - we're a punk-pop band who's all self-produced up until this point and we'd love to come in and record a few new songs with you." I think I sent demos for Misdirected and The Edge, and also sent a link to our existing material on Spotify. A few weeks went by before we got our first response from the intern saying that he'd love to work with us. We held off on replying, and about a week later the guy above him responded that he'd love to work with us as well. We were considering his offer when about 2 weeks later we got an email from Grammy nominated Andrew Berlin, who's their top (non-owner) producer. We said yes immediately. About 5 months later (because that's how far out Andrew was booked), we got on a plane, flew to Denver and rented a car to drive about an hour north to Fort Collins. When we got there late that night we were blown away by the place (which has 2 bedrooms and a large living room where we stayed from Sunday through Thursday). It was HUGE and had gold/platinum records lining the very long entry hallway, along with hand-written notes (which were framed) to the owners and Andrew thanking them for helping them out. Many said something snarky, like "sorry Tom took a shit in your side-yard"! Lol! And that was it. We were hooked. Working with Andrew is like being in a dream. We go in with great songs, but he has ideas to tweak the arrangement, add new musical hooks and just gets the songs sounding next to perfect. The Gammy winner Jason Livermore takes what Andrew records and mixes/masters the songs into the finely polished diamonds they've become. We've been there two other times since then (three times total) and recorded everything we've released since late 2022 there. Our last visit was late October/early November 2024 where we spent 6 days recording and mixing our EP Stopping Time.

My advice to any aspiring musicians is to "at some point in your musical life you shouls work with a professional producer". You may not get someone on the level of Andrew/Jason, but they will likely still add a lot of value to your recordings.

Go for it!

m