Oscar Zambrano is a mixing and mastering engineer originally from Mexico City. Since coming to the US when he was 18, he has worked with several multi-platinum artists as well as independent film-makers. Since 2002 he has been working in New York as a freelance engineer on a variety of genres, from hip hop to rock, jazz, pop, and classical music. In 2005 Oscar and his long-time friend Jorge Castellanos created Zampol Productions, a sound mixing and mastering company. Latin Times sat down with Oscar to find out how it all happened.
LT: Where are you from?
Mexico City.
LT: How long did you live there?
I lived there 18 years until I finished high school.
LT: And where are your parents from?
Mexico as well. My dad is originally from Monterrey and my mom was born in Mexico City. My grandparents on my mom’s side are European. They came to the US because of the war and then somehow they ended up in Mexico, so my mom was actually born in Mexico.
LT: What made you want to come to the US?
School, college. When I finished high school there were hardly any options as far as what I wanted to study, which was production engineering for music, so I came to the US for that. I wanted to study that because I knew I wanted to do something in music, and I really liked the whole technical aspect of engineering more than producing. I was in high school bands, so that’s how I got into it, and then I just really enjoyed being on the other side of the glass.
LT: Where did you go to school?
Berklee College of Music. It was great. A lot better than I ever thought it would be. I learned a lot, I made great friends – the way they set up the curriculum was great. I was dual major with film scoring, but I did that just for me – I just wanted to learn it because it was interesting.
LT: And then you moved to New York after school?
Yeah, I graduated and I applied to New York, L.A., Nashville and Miami because I think those were the places that my teachers and some friends I thought could help me find a job. And I found a job in New York, I came down for the interview and they said ‘you have the job.’ And a week later I grabbed a U-haul and drove my stuff down to the city.
LT: What did you think of the city?
It was great, it’s a really great city, but it was hard for me to adapt at first. I’m not sure why because I was living with my brother, I had a lot of friends, I had the job I wanted. But it was still so hard at first, I wasn’t really enjoying it to begin with. But I think after a year or two something clicked and I said ‘Alright, I’m in New York, I’m going to enjoy it.’ So I did.
LT: Did you find it culturally different? How did you find it coming to the U.S. as a Mexican?
I went to the American School in Mexico, and I came to the U.S. a couple of times before coming. Also, a lot of my friends in Berklee were from Mexico and actually one of my best friends was at Berklee, so that was really nice. I think culturally the craziness was going to the supermarket for the first time and seeing everything canned and packaged and precut. I think it took me two weeks to buy something because I didn’t know what to buy. I remember calling my parents and saying ‘The tomatoes are canned, I don’t know what to do with canned tomatoes.’ So I think that was more of the “culture shock.”
LT: What is Zampol productions? How did that start?
It came out of a bit of a necessity. My best friend in college, Jorge, he and I had always talked about one day setting up a studio. I came to New York and I found this job and I lost my visa, so I went back to Mexico. I wanted to come back to the U.S. because I thought I would have more experience here so I came back. Instead of just trying to make it happen, I thought, let’s make a company so it’s a little bit more real for me and I have to actually do something. So I called my friend and I said, ‘Let’s do it.’ And that’s how it started. He came down to Mexico and we officially opened the company in Mexico. We came to New York, we made the partnership here to make it official. We started offering everything, we did it all. With some contacts that I had here and there and with some freelance gigs that I had here and there it started to happen. I mean, it started out in my bedroom – I think for two years it was in my bedroom. And now we have a studio in SoHo and it’s doing really really well. Now we focus mostly on mastering and mixing.
LT: What kinds of music did you start off working with?
It was always different kinds of music. At first it was a little bit more hip hop. Because when I came to New York, hip-hop was really big and that’s what all the big studios were doing. So a lot of my contacts were in hip-hop and then a lot more jazz and now I’ve started going more into the indie stuff.
LT: Who are some of the biggest artists you’ve worked with?
Hip-hop wise, we did some stuff with 50 Cent, Dayton Family, Family Feud, Big Daddy Kane and Devon the Dude. Loudon Wainwright III, who is Rufus Wainwright’s father and a legend in the folk scene, we did one of his albums. We did Sufjan Stevens, one of his albums. A lot of Broadway guys. We’ve done Judy Koons, Sandra Joseph, Alice Ripley. As far as the jazz goes, David Berger Orchestra which is one of the biggest big bands in New York, very old school style. Also a lot of Indie stuff: Clare and the Reasons, Cassandra Jenkins, most recently Canon Logic, which is a new band that I think are going to do pretty well.
LT: Can you explain what mastering is?
Well it’s really the last artistic step because it’s the last time you can actually modify sonically what can happen with equalizers and compression. It’s also the spacing between tracks, which, depending on the artist, they do actually do spend a lot of time on that. Making sure the album is cohesive and that the volumes are as best as possible. And then there’s a technical aspect where you have to deliver a master where there’s no errors because you don’t want to deliver 100,000 copies with a glitch.
LT: How has the digital age and the internet changed your work?
It’s changed the industry quite a bit. For good and for bad. I think the biggest change with the internet and the digital age is that now music is free. I mean, the moment you could copy a CD at the same quality without losing quality, everything changes. The internet now is making it even more accessible. But it also gave us amazing tools, so we can do a lot of stuff that we couldn’t do before. So as far as my job goes, what changes is the deliveries: so instead of delivering for vinyl back then or for cassette, now you’re duplicating for CDs and iTunes. You also have different tools so you can deliver a different sound.
LT: What did you do with Marc Anthony?
That was one of my first big gigs. I was a general assistant (GA) at the studio, which basically is cleaning bathrooms and doing coffee runs. And after you’re a GA you move up to being an assistant. So I think it was 3 months in to being a GA and they got a call saying that Marc Anthony was coming in to record his salsa album and for some reason I got the call to see if I could assist it because it was a mixing session and they wanted someone who spoke Spanish because I think the engineer only spoke Spanish. So somehow I stressed out, and I started reading the manual back to front – it was my first big gig. And it turned out that, when I got there, they said ‘Oh we’re not mixing we’re recording.’ And to record a salsa band you need a couple of hours to set up and I had an hour. So I was stressing out and it was three days of salsa recording and we recorded all the basics for ‘Valio la Pena’ and it was great. I remember sitting there with Marc Anthony and watching the artist listen to the music for the first time was just great. So that was my first big awesome experience.
LT: Have you had any other big awesome experiences?
Another really cool experience I got call from my friend Daniel Belardinelli who is a film composer to record the music for a film that he had been hired for by John Wu, who directed Mission Impossible 2. And this was a Chinese film directed by Alexi Tan, so it was basically a full orchestra. And the budget was kind of low so we had decided to not make any money but do it right and have a full orchestra. So we went to Moscow. And we recorded the National Symphony Orchestra of Moscow. We were there for a week recording in a beautiful studio, with beautiful equipment, sixty musicians, it was great. I remember thinking ‘I don’t know if it’s going to get better than this.’ I was twenty-five, and I remember calling my parents and saying ‘I know what I want to do when I grow up.’ And I remember thinking, even if for some reason I can’t do this anymore, I’m happy with this because this is an incredible experience.
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