Recording Connection student Charles Huston
says
Recording Connection student
Charles Huston of Chicago, IL.
“I am just constantly enthralled with this equipment and everything.”
Indeed, from the beginning, it seemed like Charles Huston was meant for the recording studio.
“My dad actually comes from the old L.A. record industry,” he says.
“My Dad’s been having me in and out of a few studios my whole life.”
Even so, it wasn’t until his teen years that his love for music turned into a desire to be behind the board and to produce.
“I was big into shoegaze at the time,” he says,
“so I started getting into Radiohead. I was really big into Pink Floyd, My Bloody Valentine, just the craziest textures coming from keys, guitars, whatever. And I started getting really into the Beatles and everything. And then you get into the Beatles, you really like the song, and you find out the reason you really like it is because what it is doing sonically and the crazy arrangements. And then you figure out that there is Sir George Martin involved… You realize there’s like this whole process around things.”
After graduating high school, Charles tried going the college route to learn audio engineering, but was soon disillusioned.
“I actually dropped out of the Berklee School of Music out of Massachusetts as a production student,” he says.
“Took a couple years as a break because I didn’t really find their program worth it for me.”
It turned out that the time off wasn’t necessarily the best idea.
“I was getting into a good amount of trouble living in the burbs,” says Charles,
“and it kinda got to the point where it’s like, ‘Okay. How serious can I take this whole music thing?’…And I found the Recording Connection program, with basically the main allure to me being that you guys ran your curriculum through a mentorship at a professional-level studio.”
Fortunately, Charles says, his parents have always been supportive of his dream of producing, so his mother put up the money for him to attend the Recording Connection. He was placed in
Rax Trax Recording in Chicago, where he was mentored by studio manager Andy Shoemaker. That’s where things began turning around for him.
“Andy was amazing,” says Charles.
“He’d literally take any question I’d have, and we’d sit in that room if the time was available and just explore each topic until I understood it completely. It was great…I really can’t say enough about the wealth of things I took away from that studio, and I’m still not done yet.”
Given his personality and his background, Charles predictably proved himself to be a natural in the studio, which allowed him to advance quickly.
“Once I got in the Recording Connection, it wasn’t long before they go through the whole shadowing plan, and then they let you start assisting,” he says.
“I got into having my own sessions booked real quick.”
Control Room A in Rax Trax Recording
Once he had his foot in the door, Charles wasted no time in forming relationships and connections in the industry, and his entrepreneurial spirit really kicked in.
“You have to be clever about it,” he says.
“Some things that have really put me forward, I’d say, is finding relationships I want to create, figuring out a way to create them, and then not only getting that relationship initiated but then developing that relationship to the point where you can have a good working business relationship. But not only are you working on a friendly level, where you guys just work together personality-wise, but also business wise, you know. Creating a reputation for yourself, and having a body of work that also speaks for you as well. A lot of kids have the desire to be the next great producer or engineer but aren’t willing to put in the work on the things that happen outside the studio, which is sometimes more work than what actually happens in the studio.”
Between his on-the-job training at Rax Trax and his own initiative in making connections, Charles has turned his passion into an emerging career as a freelance producer/engineer working out of multiple studios in the Chicago area. The former shoegaze fan now focuses largely on the booming Chicago hip-hop community, working with up-and-comers like
Chisanity and
Lucki Eck$ (recently featured in Complex Magazine), and forming working relationships like producer
Tapez (who recently earned production credits on Kanye West’s “New God Flow” off the
Cruel Summer mixtape). What’s more, Charles says he’s in talks with investors to build a studio.
“They are gonna pay for the build-out and everything, basically giving me a platform to engineer and produce out of, so I can be generating more revenue for myself,” he says,
“so I can make myself more valuable to the whole team, which is just beautiful.”
So much of industry success is about being in the right place at the right time. Charles Huston, it would seem, was meant for the recording studio. After being disillusioned with classroom instruction and “getting into trouble” in his own words, it turned out that the opportunity to get into a real studio was the very thing he needed to find his place in the industry. It was the right place for him, at the right time. Today, he’s in the early stages of what he plans to be a long and productive career.
“I’m trying to be one of the producer/engineers [that is] really sought after in the industry,” he says,
“and it’s been kinda happening around me. I’m just trying to make sure my work is always on par, if not excelling past my peers.”
