Today we’d like to introduce you to Alex Green and Alexander Koutzoukis.
Alex and Alexander, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
Plaid Productions got its start in, of all places, the Chipotle in Davis Square. Both of us were recently out of college, and were both working in jobs where we weren’t using our creative faculties to the fullest of our abilities. Fast forward to a few months later, when we were living in the same apartment just outside of Davis Square (and perilously close to Redbones BBQ), working on albums for my former collegiate a cappella group, The Amalgamates, and for Berklee College of Music’s perennially excellent Pitch Slapped. Fast forwarding further to our last two years, we’ve worked with groups from across the world, including Grammy-winning and multi-Platinum recording group Pentatonix, MICappella from Singapore, Six13 and the Maccabeats in New York City, and countless others from the professional and scholastic realm.
As with most other creative businesses, a lot of our success can be attributed to knowing the right people and getting the right advice. From the start, Tufts University alumni (and current and former Boston residents) like Deke Sharon, John Clark, and Ed Boyer all helped us along our path to becoming self-sufficient music professionals with both musical and business advice. Peers and mentors have been invaluable resources in helping to form and sustain a viable business, since individual musical talent and knowledge can only get one so far without knowing how, where, and when to apply it.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Because our business has grown organically from the start, we’ve had a surprisingly smooth journey from two guys in our early 20s messing around with audio production to doing this as a full-time job. Knowing the right people and having existing relationships within the audio production community really helped us from the start, making it significantly easier to hit the ground running. And in addition to our connections and past experiences, we each also received an initial “investment” of sorts from our parents, loaning us the money we used to upgrade equipment and software at the outset.
Our biggest struggle came about a year ago, when we passed our official five year mark. At that point, we had to rethink our approach and our general outlook: instead of being a scrappy startup, we were a fully-fledged business by which we supported ourselves. Small businesses, especially in the arts, always have a certain “flying by the seat of our pants” feeling just because of the nature of the field, but we did try to codify and standardize some parts of our work, including how and when we email current and past clients, how we deal with task tracking, etc. We’ve got a much better handle on our busy and slow[er] seasons now and internal expectations, meaning our clients get their music back more quickly, and as better-executed versions of their vision.
Please tell us about Plaid Productions.
Plaid Productions is a full-service music production company, specializing in contemporary a cappella and vocal music.
Full-service a cappella recording and production: Arranging, recording, editing, mixing, and anything in between, all done in-house. CARA award-winning, BOCA, BOHSA, SING, and Voices Only placed tracks, RIAA-certified Multi-Platinum albums, and multiple Billboard top-charting albums and songs all produced here.
In my view, the thing that sets us apart is how much we care about the music and the process; we don’t outsource things or cut corners. It’s nice to have awards and accolades to show, and clearly we have to support ourselves financially, but we wouldn’t have made this into a living if we didn’t feel passionately about the art itself.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
We don’t really have many regrets, which I suppose is a good sign. If there’s anything we could have done differently, it might’ve been committing more fully to this being a full-time job, though I can’t think of how precisely we could have been more direct about it at the time. We spent a good deal of our first couple of years making do with what we’d had equipment- and space-wise, rather than immediately making an investment in studio space, recording equipment, etc.
Pricing:
- $75 / hr for all individual services
- $750 / song for editing and mixing
- $900 / song for recording and editing
- $1200 / song for recording, editing, and mixing.
Contact Info:
- Address: 28 Francesca Ave
Floor 3
Somerville, MA 02144 - Website: www.plaidacappella.com
- Phone: (978) 973-3390
- Email: info@plaidacappella.com
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/plaidacappella
- Twitter: www.twitter.com/plaidacappella
- Other: www.plaid.pro
Image Credit:
All photos by Amie Rosenblum (http://rlphotography.weebly.com/)
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