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Issue #180 – Student Successes
by L. Swift and Jeff McQ
Over the past few months, Recording Connection grad Devin Zorn (Dallas, TX) has seen his career as an engineer take some remarkable turns for the better. He’s traded his job at Guitar Center for a gig with far fewer hours and much higher pay, freeing up his time to work on other music projects. He’s recorded and mixed records for known and up-and-coming acts like Tom Devil and the Wizard. He plays guitar in bands Kenny Hada and The Others and Pampa Gray, with whom he played the Dallas International Guitar Festival this past year. Devin also freelances as an engineer at Fort Worth Sound Studio, and recently he even joined IATSE local 127 which has opened doors for him to work in some amazing live venues. Devin’s life is now full of the things he loves to do, with more still to come.
It didn’t happen automatically. In fact, to hear Devin tell it, a lot of his recent victories came from a decision to pull himself out of a slump.
Since going through the Recording Connection, Devin had landed a decent job at Guitar Center in Dallas and worked on a project with Tommy Katona and Texas Flood, a high-profile Stevie Ray Vaughan tribute band, doors which opened to him, in part, because of his connection with his well-known mentor, Dallas engineer Rick Rooney. But after a while, Devin found himself struggling with his audio engineering career, and even started getting rusty as a guitar player. That’s when he says decided to help out an up-and-coming band—Tom Devil and the Wizard.
“The owner of the band had done EP’s and used to spend $3,000 a song to get the recording mixed, mastered, and produced and everything,” says Devin. “After an EP and about three singles, he was never happy with any of his recordings or mixes.”
At first, the band rejected Devin’s quote for how much it would cost to record, but after trying unsuccessfully to record on their own, the band approached him again.
“At the time, I hadn’t done anything since Tommy Katona and the Texas Flood,” Devin says. “It had been like 10 months. I was overweight and my guitar chops had been going down. I was just like, damn it, this sucks.”
Devin recalls the moment he decided to take the plunge and offer to help out the band, even if they didn’t have much of a budget. He went up to the band’s bass player, Joe Pirro, who’s also a friend and said, ‘Hey, are you still trying to record that thing?’ He was like, ‘Yeah, we’re having a lot of trouble with it.’ ‘I’ll f**king do it. Let’s just make it happen. You don’t have to worry about paying me, even.’…So we did it with no budget.”
Devin says it took about a year to record and mix the whole project from start to finish, but it revived his own passion for engineering and making music.
“I wasn’t expecting how good of a band they were going to be,” Devin admits. “From their musicianship down to their writing…It was really substantial music all the way through. So it was definitely a treat to get to work with them being the truly amazing artists that they are and the work I put in there vastly improved my recording and especially my mixing techniques…After the band’s bad experiences with other studios, it was quite a compliment when they told me that I’d made their recordings sound exactly like what they’d had in their heads. We have an amazing amount of mutual respect and plan to do many more projects together.”
Through the experience Devin pulled himself out of his slump and renewed confidence in his own abilities. Not long after, he says he was able to land a gig doing live sound at a large church, a move which enabled him to quit his job at Guitar Center and move onto another phase in his career.
“Working and doing audio for a church every week, the consistent pay…I make more doing that six hours a week than I did 40 hours a week at Guitar Center,” he says. “So it was one of those things where now I work two days a week and the rest of the time I can fill up with music and whatever else I want.”
Devin has definitely made the most of the extra time, taking gigs and working at live events whenever the opportunity presents itself, including plans to record Tom Devil’s next project. Now out of his slump, Devin says his experience with his mentor Rick Rooney continues to inspire him as well as open doors for his career—even at the church where he now works.
“Rick was like an oracle, you know?” says Devin. “He believed in me…Recently at [the church] we had one of Rick’s colleagues, Keith Harrelson, came in… when I told him Rick was my mentor, he looked immediately at all my bosses at the church and was like, ‘You need to keep this guy.’”
As for recovering from his slump? Devin rightfully gets to take all the credit for that one.
“Literally the only reason why I’m successful right now is because I didn’t quit,” he says. “It was one of those things where I had to just put my foot down, like, ‘I’m making something happen.’ That’s been the most important lesson in life that I always followed but never thought about till now – don’t quit! Just keep walking until you find your way out.”
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