“I think that we're paralyzed by decisions and everything right now. And in the music world, I can have any sounding kick drum in the world I want on any track, which means I can spend all day, and any producer out there knows this. You'll listen to 80 different kick drums to find the one instead of writing the song.”
GeekWire · October 2026
The startup founder, who co-owns a Seattle recording studio built around a vintage 1980s console from Detroit, was explaining why he likes old gear with hard limits. He says he deliberately restricts his own options to stay in a creative frame of mind rather than an analytical one.
Transcript
…his name is Jason Matthews. And I was like, hey, do you want to do a road trip with me from Detroit to Seattle? And he said, sure. And so I flew into Detroit. I rented a minivan. We threw this thing in a minivan and we started driving 30-some hours across the top of the country in January. Well,
…stories of what was going on in Detroit when what type of music was flowing through that board. But talk a little bit more about like this idea that the sound you get from this authentic kind of vintage equipment is different than a very technology produced sound. Why is that? Why does that matter?
I think about this a lot. Like to me, it's about the imperfections. It's about these, all these, this recording gear from whenever they had the limits that they had of what they could handle signal-wise or anything like that. And so it forced people to adapt to it. And that meant that maybe as you pushed it, you know, like gave it a lot of signal, yelled or played guitar really loud or something, it started to distort a little bit and start to push back and limit how much signal comes through. And so really smart engineers back in the day figured out, I can use this as an instrument. I can start to control it and manage the sound. And so at the end of the day, you get this mix out of this that you can never reproduce because it was all those elements at that point in time that created this thing. And that I just love that idea. I think that we're paralyzed by decisions and everything right now. And in the music world, I can have any sounding kick drum in the world I want on any track, which means I can spend all day and any producer out there knows this. You'll listen like 80 different kick drums to…
So you're you mostly up until this point, music gets recorded here, but are you trying, it sounds like you're trying to get into podcasting as well, which was part of the reason we'll last the
tap after this failure.
So it's funny. I should mention there's actually a Geekwire podcast story behind why we're here. I don't know if you remember, but at our Geekwire deck party, I pulled different founders aside this summer and had conversations that led to a whole podcast episode. And one of those founders was Jana…
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