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Issue #135 – Mentor News
by L. Swift and Jeff McQ
Recording Connection mentor Doug Boulware has had a unique relationship with RRFC over the years, in that he actually started out working in our corporate offices in Los Angeles. From there, he eventually landed a position as an audio engineer with one of our mentors, Donny Baker at ES Audio, where he soon began taking on his own apprentices. These days, Doug is the VP of Operations at The Abstract Recording Studios, an up-and-coming L.A. recording studio with lots of opportunities for student growth.
Suffice it to say we’ve had a bird’s-eye view of Doug’s path toward a successful career—a career which Doug himself credits to the “hustle.”
“That’s literally what I’ve built my career on,” he says. “It is kind of a hustle mentality… I never had a staff position. It was never like, ‘Oh, I’m just kind of trying to get a job at a studio.’ I would go out to shows and I would hand out business cards that I made on my computer…I started doing stuff for free for people and hip-hop guys around my neighborhood and people I went to high school with… Very rarely did someone ever say to me, ‘How long have you been doing this?’ It wasn’t a question that came up a lot, once they saw how excited I was about their music and how energetic I was about doing it…”
Eventually, the stakes became higher for Doug, and once again, he hustled to meet the challenge. “I’d meet people who’d say, ‘I actually have a budget and I’m looking for a studio,’” he says. “There was a disconnect between the music I was making in my basement and the stuff I was hearing on the radio. So what I did was I went to bigger studios…and I said, ‘Okay, I get that you don’t have a job, but if I bring you a client, can I hang out in the session and just kind of soak everything up?’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, of course.’”
Doug’s “hustle approach” eventually found common ground when he went to work with the Recording Connection. “That’s what I was so attracted to about the Recording Connection,” he says. “It literally solves that problem that I kind of had to bump my head up against the wall several times to kind of figure out, like, ‘How do I get in the room with these guys?’”
Once Doug made the transition from the corporate office to the recording studio, his passion for student success found a whole new outlet. Instead of simply helping our students connect with mentors across the country, he had become a mentor himself! As such, Doug is able to recognize the hustle mentality when he sees it in his students, and reward it with opportunities.
“If I see a student,” he says, “and they’re like doing this kind of stuff, they’re watching videos on their own and they’re learning music theory on their own, to me, I am automatically drawn to that, and I will go and take an active role and say, “Okay, how is it going?” and ask questions and kind of see how they’re picking up on those type of things, because…I know that it’s something that I can use.”
A perfect case in point is Recording Connection graduate Andrew Flores, whom Doug first encountered at ES Audio, and whose dedication and hard work eventually landed him in a full-time position when Doug helped launch The Abstract Recording Studios. Doug recalls what first impressed him about Andrew:
“First of all, the guy was there constantly,” he says. “The thing that he had going for him was he would literally go home and he would spend four to six hours at home making music every day…He was constantly bringing these tracks in, and…I’d give him tips and pointers here and there.”
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