A Sound Guy Was Born

08/07/2024

This issue was indeed written the date specified, but as life would have it something came up and I had to wait a while to get to it. Boo, I know. Things have been insane, not just for me personally, but all over the place. This will be a special Double (or maybe triple now that it’s been a few more days since I wrote this intro…smh GET IT TOGETHER ALREADY!!) Edition of the blog. A second one will release tomorrow and will feature an evening I spent with Humble Crumb.

Well hello there friends and welcome back to another week at blackhat studios. We didn’t have any shows or recording sessions last week, so I have nothing musical to report this time. What I can tell you is that I have spent the last four or five days working on a gift for the one and only Matt the Sound Guy. Why have I been working on this gift you ask? Well today, yes, today August 7th is Matt’s birthday. 

This will mark his 34th revolution around the sun, and another year doing whatever it is he does every day. I thought I would take a sec to throw out a few highlights from the 12 of those years he has spent as my friend, partner, spouse, baby daddy, partner in crime, and pain in my ass. Enjoy…

12 years ago around springish my roommate came home from her classes at vvc and excitedly told me that while she was in piano class this cute guy came in and told the class his band was auditioning for a singer and a bass player. He said that anyone who wanted to try out could get in touch with him. I’m paraphrasing mind you, this was a decade ago. Being the aspiring diva that she was, she decided to go for it. As fate would have it, she got selected and the Mighty Strange burst into our lives, forever altering the course of mine. This band was a blip on the radar of life mind you, it didn’t stick around more than a few years and they didn’t really play a ton of gigs in this form. You see, that guy that came into the piano class, that was Doug Strange. A strapping lad, with a Devon Sawa haircut us 90’s girls all loved. He had also recently found a bass player he met through craigslist at a Del Taco. (You guys still go there way too much btw) That kid, that was Matt. Freshly graduated from the Musicians Institute with a degree in bass performance… you know that part. 

Fast forward two years and Matt and I are very much together, having a family and getting more associates degrees from VVC. We eventually moved to Big Bear and he started thinking about doing something different with music. Playing in bands wasn’t really doing it for him, he wanted something else. Sometime around 2016 Matt decides to go to the recording program at Citrus College. By 2018 this guy had graduated and come up with the idea to establish blackhat Studios. By 2019 we released debut EPs for Doug Strange and MaDu. It was around this time that we started showing up to Frogee’s old open mic nights. 

I won’t go too deep into those days, but that is where we really started to take off. This is where we started meeting people in the actual local scene. People we could actually maybe work with. There were some really talented people coming through there and at the time we knew none of them. Frogee’s was/is the home of a local powerhouse reggae group called Twenty Dollar Prophets. We met Andrew, Chris, Johnny Savage, and a ton more people going to these open mics.  I’m not really sure how it happened entirely, but somehow Matt ended up doing a few live sound gigs, and that is what really became the bread and butter of blackhat. That wasn’t the intention of course, because at the same time Matt was working with Scoby Bear setting up his (Scott’s) personal studio, “Da Barn” which is where we eventually recorded a BUNCH more stuff. Wiring that medusan monster was a helluva job, but he got it done. The real goal is to make music with talented folk in our local community and elsewhere. 

By 2022 the live sound gigs were overtaking everything else and Matt decided an apprentice or second engineer would be a solid move. Enter Rhey, and then me taking on more and merging my art hustle with blackhat in an effort to offer a bunch more services we were being asked to provide. Photography, flyers, logos, album art, custom merch lines and so much more. 

So basically, this kid from Crestline met a dude and some chick and eventually started a record label and art studio. We released some cool shit, and we plan to keep doing it until we just can’t anymore. Here’s to 34 years of Matt, 12 of team Vaughan, and 6 of the blackhat collective. We thrive together, we make music together…Here’s to all of us, and here’s to Matt for being who he is. Love to all.