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Hi, my name is Oz Amaro. I'm the owner/engineer here at Soundhammer Studio.
Please Check out the links at the top menu and have a look around the studio.
Come see what we can do here.

Background

I've been a working and traveling musician myself (drums and percussions) for almost 30+ years. I have always wanted to open a commercial studio that would bring music, and the process by which it is recorded it back to its roots where it was all about people and interaction. I wanted my studio to be a collaborative place and the effort by all equally as collaborative. I wanted a more “open” environment where people could talk with no headphones, and could share ideas with no boundaries. That dream became Soundhammer Studio. Please stick with me here as I explain and share with you some of my beliefs on how music should be recorded. This belief is an important piece of information one should know when choosing a recording facility and especially your engineer. I believe music is more than cool gear plugged up to an artist and then throwing up some sliders in a way that could resemble a mix. I'm into capturing the magic of an artists, the mojo of a bands, the essence of the artist or performance that truly makes them unique, special and interesting...regardless of genre or style of music they play, there has to be something special going on. I strive to find, pull, extract and capture what that special really is. I believe I’m very good at finding it and even better at capturing it. Allow me to help you find and capture your magic too.

Making Mojo

Soundhammer Studios is an open floor environment. We purposely did not install permanently closed rooms and fixed walls between the artists, not even the engineer. The reason for this is pretty straight forward once you hear it. You see, music gets its life from not only the impact of the sounds that are around us, but also the visual and physical collaboration of that moment and that time. The impact of live sound bouncing off of us moves our emotions. The ability to openly communicate the feelings and display our visual appreciation with each other while we work, is an important key to the process. We ALL have to feel it, and we all have to believe it, especially the engineer. Hence, I've created a special environment that allows us all to enjoy what is happening with fewer walls and partitions and a more open floor. It's no secret that the best engineers know the goal of recording is to not just to capture what the client does, but to facilitate the creation of an emotional experience unique within space and time. Without that, we would never have had a lot of the recording masterpieces we have today. Unfortunately, the whole life of the “vibe” or “mojo” has been sucked out of many of today's recordings due to the belief in antiquated recording processes and philosophies, techno lust, and very low budgets. My goal here as the engineer of Soundhammer Studios and (more importantly) as a musician, is to get back to what music is really about. It has to be a group collaboration that has a life of its own within a small community if only for that moment. Now, I did not invent the process I use at Soundhammer Studios to record. In fact, it was the process used early on in the business of recording. It was somehow cast aside in favor of some audiophile’s lust of fidelity where only dogs could ever hear a difference. This came about mostly from marketing schemes created to get artists and engineers to believe that “magic” comes from external widgets and NOT from artists. It’s like artist nowadays are asked to believe that whatever comes out of their performances, is something outside of their efforts alone…like their performance is owed to some company’s gizmo or plugin. I’m here to instill onto the artist that it IS truly all them, when the approach is correct. To me, it is and always has been about being a listener first and working hard with the artist to not just get something up in the console with some hot gear, but more importantly to help artists get their vibe into the sound and produce a mix that sounds like a hot band. Many recordings I hear sound like a brute force effort to spray whatever an artist did into something of a mix. That process rarely sounds cohesive enough to convey to the listener a real hot performance just took place let alone have any life in it. If you learned anything from this page, know this…a quality track is not always a lively and “believable” track, and yes…there is a difference. At Soundhammer Studios, I will work to get you into that groove to where you will produce this difference. It’s not a tool, it’s not a plugin, it’s your talents, along with my approach and coaching that will achieve the sort of "difference" that glues your efforts in a very believable final mix.

About Soundhammer Studios