Thomas Lujan — Portland Recording Connection

Hello!

I'm Thomas.  I'm a 19 year old who recently uprooted my life, moved half way across the country and found my self in the beautiful city of Portland, Oregon.  Coming from the small town of Los Alamos, New Mexico, it goes without saying that this is quite the change.  My motivation: my whole life, all I could picture myself doing is making music, and over the years, my interests have moved closer and closer to the production aspect. One day, I decided that this is what I wanted to do with my life.  So I moved across the country applied my way through Recording Connections, slowly worked my way through phone calls and interviews, and here I am now, apprenticing with Steve Sundholm at Kung Fu Bakery.  Education is the first step to success and I'm finally on my way!

I play guitar and piano and I can sing (to a degree).  I've been playing guitar for about six years.  My parents bought me a guitar for Christmas in 2007, and I've been locked in my room strumming away ever since.  I've used my skills to play with several small town bands, one of which played a local benefit show.  I also joined a couple school bands playing for orchestra and jazz concerts.  I got the opportunity to travel around with the school show choir and play instrumental parts for them.  As far as singing goes, I'm far less accomplished but I do have some credibilty.  I sang in the high school choir for a year, took a couple voice lessons, and got myself a lead role in Los Alamos High School's musical production of "Rags".  I went on to sing in the University of New Mexico's choir: Dolce Suano, as one of their barritones.  I play piano too.  Kind of.  I can play all the major scales, I can manage arpeggios, and such, but my knowledge is limited.  I've only been playing for about 6 months, so I can carry on basic melodies and that's about it.  It is good to know multiple instruments because you can transpose musical ideas onto different instruments and get new opinions. I feel it is important to have insights on songs you're writing and it can completely change your take on a song you're writing.

I studied at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico for one semester as a music performance major.  I worked my butt of while taking 18 credit hours and worked to achieve all I could and beyond in my classes to take away all I could from the course's curriculum.  I made it all the way through and then asked myself, "what am I going to do with this?"  As far as performance goes, it is damn near impossible to make a living for yourself that way, so what kind of job does that give you?  On the side, I had been experimenting with a fruity loops program I had downloaded a while back and made some simple techno arrangements.  I loved it, and it got me more and more into mixing, mastering, recording, ect.  and I decided that this is what I want to do.  I learned all I could about EQ, compression, sound synthesis, tracking, gates, everything I possibly could to make the songs I'd dreamed of come to life.  Now I'm anything but a professional at this point, but everyone must start somewhere.  I produced some music under the alias of "Apollo Voluum" and did my thing with that for a while, and then stumbled upon the Recording Connections education program.  I slowly got enrolled, and here I am now, eager to learn all I can to be the best producer I can be.