Zachary McCaw gets 25,000 hits on SoundCloud and Airplay in France!

Already a lifelong musician, Zachary McCaw (Philadelphia, PA) unearthed a love for audio while working in the audio department for his church:

When I was 15, I went to a church in Columbus that had a need for somebody to be in the audio, part of the audio visual part…And so I was like, ‘Hey, I want to try this out.’ I was doing audio with them on pretty big setups out there till last year. When I started with them, I realized how much I loved it, and they were gracious enough to give me actual hands-on live experience. I was working on 32-channel boards, setting up microphones, amps, all that stuff, and also on the recording side, Sunday features and things like that, doing that recording live.”

After moving to Philadelphia, Zachary decided to look back into recording:

“I hadn’t had any formal schooling and stuff. So when I saw that the way you guys set it up with Recording Connection was that you mentor with somebody who’s already in the industry…that’s when I signed up.”

Interviewing with mentor, Joey Heier aka “Uncle Joe” at Crystal Clear Studio proved to be more than he’d been anticipating:

My jaw was on the floor seeing the equipment that he had…It was like love at first sight…I was just totally nerding out…I played a lot of jazz music in the jazz orchestra and band. He’s a horn player, he plays trumpet. And we’re both talking about playing jazz music and just playing horn instruments. So we’re talking about that. We’re talking about kind of what inspires us and why we want to do audio and things like that. So I knew right off the bat he was going to be a great inspiration.”

Flashforward just a matter of months, and things are looking great for Zachary and his band-The Lunar Year. The group now boasts more than 25,000 hits and recently even got airplay in France. The sound quality for one of the band’s most-played, beloved songs isn’t great. Zachary says he recorded it during his second week in the program. Since then, he and the group’s lead singer, Katie Burke, have recorded at least 11 songs.

Now, rather than simply being dumbstruck by the gear, Zachary is finding he’s geeking out on something more specific, namely, Katie’s voice:

Katie’s got a lot of smokiness in her voice…Any good band, in my opinion, has a very signature recording style on their voice. And I didn’t realize that until I started recording Katie. So we’ve been kind of developing that, whatever it is going to be her signature sound of her voice for this band…It’s pretty fulfilling to be able to hear the quality I’m able to do now as opposed to with that first song.”

We’ll keep our ears peeled.

https://soundcloud.com/thelunaryear/