Alumni Success Stories

Alumni Information
School: LaSalle College Vancouver
Grad Year: 2012
Program of Study: Professional Recording Arts
Degree: Diploma

Employment/Professional Information
Company Name: Mitchie Rikzu/Social Scam
Location: Vancouver
Job Title: DJ/producer/remixer/engineer

Describe a Typical Work Day:

Wake up, make some coffee while I wait for my home studio to get turned on and load, watch family fued or highlights, then it goes it bursts of how long my computer wants to stay open for (haha). I’ll work for 2 hours then it’ll freeze, re-load, 4 hours of work, freeze, re-load, and repeat until bedtime and or noise complaint (haha). Oh and I eat somewhere along the way too.

What accomplishment(s) are you most proud of?

My accomplishments I am most proud of I would have to say was going from living in a town with a 100 person population as a bedroom producer/DJ, to moving to Vancouver and getting signed to Mental Madness Records. Then having my first EP release do very well in 2 different charts and being featured on 6 huge compilation albums, all in less then 6 months! And getting asked to sign to another label I am very excited about, but will leave nameless until the releases/remixes are done! I am also working on a huge project under the alias Social Scam, but watch for the pages marked “Official” Social Scam!

What are your creative inspirations or influences? Who are your heroes?

Inspirations and influences come from every angle. For me it is not about how far/high up a person makes it in their field of work, but what they had to over come to get to that level of success. My moms a huge inspiration for everything she’s battled and over came. As for music inspirations people like Benny Benassi and MSTR KRFT, who are leaders in the electronic world, but don’t sound like anyone else, they have so much of their own flavor.

What do you enjoy the most about your career?

When it comes to what I love most about my career, it’s for sure the amount of creative room you have as a dj/producer. You can play with and incorporate any other genre into your house or dub track and make it sound like it Should be there. It is amazing getting to work with so many different sounds and so many different people. Getting to work with a folk artist, rapper, and dj all on one track is unreal. And the fact I am never asleep before 3am, makes this paticular career feel all the easier/funner, who goes to clubs and works in the studio at lunch time?

How did your education at LaSalle College Vancouver help prepare you for your career?

I thought I knew a lot before I came to school, but LaSalle College Vancouver definitely taught me the ins and outs of the industry. I was fortunate to have professionals critizing my work every day and having them guide me thru things like good and bad mixes, contracts, song structures etc. I could only handle the trial and error approach I had taken before for so long, I needed to know I was making the right mixing techniques and not asuming. And learning the mixing techniques, then learning all the levels of professionalism I was fortunate to learn, helped vastly in approaching big name artists like Electrovamp and Brooklyn Bounce, that I’ve had the privilege in remxing and producing for now.

What advice do you have for people beginning their careers in your profession?

For people getting into djing and producing, You never know when your time is going to come, so don’t change your style to fit another crowd, find the crowd that fits your style. Work on and perfect tracks and your sounds every single day, but at the same time, you can’t force anything or people will hear it. Oh, and, bus everything to a distortion unit. Haha

Your profession is constantly evolving, from the technology you use to new career opportunities that didn’t exist five years ago. What trends do you see on the horizon that will affect how you do your job or your profession at-large?

This is a big one, because the music industry doesn’t evolve over night, unlike technology has seemed to do. IMO the way things look is, at one point there was no such thing as “working out of the box” (crazy I know), it was all analog gear. Then DAW systems evolved massively and there is nothing we can’t do in them now. Now we have dj/producers that are running their mixes thru tape machines, and getting those grungy nasty synth lines from going out of say Pro Tools or Logic, into a full rack of distortion units, back into the DAW to give tracks and mixes more flavors then an ice cream truck. I am on both sides of it, I love using both plug ins and rack gear and think with people using both, it is only making the future of electronic music brighter and more original, because the more your are using, the harder your sounds will be to duplicate.