Today we’d like to introduce you to Gavin McMahan.
Gavin, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I come from a very musical family in San Diego, California—my mom is musical theater royalty down there and my dad plays viola in a symphony and bass in a rock band. Every person on my mom’s side of the family majored in music in college except for two—they only minored in music, haha.
My earliest memories are of being in my car seat as a toddler as my mom would drive us around, listening to whatever music she was about to musically direct. I remember attending countless rehearsals and performances, being tossed around by the musicians and actors as the token toddler.
I fell asleep to the sound of my mom playing Rachmaninov and spent Sunday afternoons at Spanish missions watching my dad’s symphony. I remember my mom yelling from the kitchen as I practiced piano, “G flat in the left hand!” “Gavin! Slow down!”
All this to say, my upbringing was unusual. I started formal training when I was 7 with classical piano because it was the well-trodden path in my family. But all the classical music and musical theater in my family made me want to claim my own musical space.
When I was 9 or 10, I found a ukulele in a dresser and started playing. At the time, I was listening to a bunch of indie rock and punk bands (Pavement, The Strokes, Weezer, Rufio, etc.). These were MY bands. Nobody in my family listened to them except for me on my Walkman. I started playing a lot of those songs by ear on the ukulele, elated that I had found my own space—a way to celebrate my musicality on my own terms with no familial framework.
I immediately begged for a guitar. And I got one. It was a match made in heaven. For the next 4 years, I would play guitar for 3+ hours a day with guitar tabs printed out all over my room. I began seeing how arrangements worked thanks to an old software called Guitar Pro. I was obsessed.
But the piano lessons didn’t stop; my classical theory and understanding grew in tandem with my guitar fixation.
In middle school, I started playing in bands. I remember looping a couple of chords in the exact same pattern with a drummer for hours on end. I couldn’t get enough.
In high school, I joined drumline, not to drum, but hopeful that there’d be a spinoff jazz band where I could play guitar.
That never happened, but I fell in love with drums, too. As anyone will tell you, drumline is crazy. It was intense. We even went to world championships my junior year and placed third in the world.
When I was sixteen, I got to the point where I was playing both drums and guitar professionally for studio sessions, musical theater, and in live bands around town.
Meanwhile, I started a band, Paint the Woods—a name I wouldn’t get rid of for over a decade. We were good for our age. We won all the battles of the bands around town and gigged around San Diego and LA but the band sadly fizzled out due to college and LDS missions.
Long story short, I ended up at BYU from 2011-2019 studying Commercial Music. I was there for a long time.
At BYU, my instrument was a voice. I never sang in a choir but got all my ensemble credits by playing bass in jazz bands and percussion in symphony orchestras. I planned to focus on production and songwriting but found myself in all the orchestration, film scoring, and jazz classes. This is why it took me 8 years to graduate, haha. I wanted to specialize in everything.
Outside of school, I still had my band, Paint the Woods which played regularly at Velour and other venues and festivals. I also worked as a live sound engineer all over town, played various instruments in several bands, played in wedding bands, started scoring, and started opening up studios.
At first, I had a modest home studio setup for my own projects and homework, but then artists at the venues I was doing live sound for would ask if I could record them. This snowballed into a full-time job.
Of course, the biggest thing that happened to me in college was meeting my wife, Nicole! Nicole was also studying Commercial Music at BYU on a similar path to mine. She has evolved into a powerhouse RnB/Pop artist and it’s the joy of my life to produce all her music and MD her band.
After a few years of producing local artists full-time, Nicole and I bought a house in 2019 with an unfinished basement that we designed and built from the ground up as a studio. For the past three years, I’ve been working out of this studio, recording, producing, mixing, and scoring.
Here I’ve scored a couple of documentaries, written lots of library music, recorded/produced dozens lot of local artists, rehearsed and musically directed countless bands, and arranged and recorded a whole lot of strings… you name it.
These days, I’m really focused on producing my wife’s music and MD’ing her band. But outside of that, I’m still wearing many hats. I just made several orchestral arrangements for the Utah Valley Symphony playing with Jon Schmidt of The Piano Guys, arranging strings for several clients, and producing songs for various artists local and afar.
I’m tremendously grateful for my parents, numerous mentors, and all the training that has brought me to where I am today. I’m still that little kid in San Diego trying to do my own thing my own way and am thrilled that I did end up carving out my own musical space to thrive in.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
The hardest part of all of this is just being an entrepreneur. All the financial stuff has taken me a long time to figure out. I’ve been burned a lot. So I try to be better about contracts now.
I constantly find myself in situations where I’m making 10% of what I thought I’d be making because I didn’t account for how long something would take or how much gear I’d have to buy in order to pull it off.
Financially, it’s been rough. I probably haven’t played my cards very well because I get so caught up in the rhetoric of, “This is music. It has to be good no matter what!” that I end up unintentionally sacrificing the business aspect of my work to maintain relationships and make projects the best they can be.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I produce bands and artists, record anything and everything, mix music, arrange for strings, full orchestra, and pop ensembles, play piano, guitar, drums, and sing, and do live sound, and music direct!
It’s a lot. That in and of itself is probably what sets me apart. For example, I play piano and have a strong jazz/RnB/gospel vocabulary which is helpful, but I also play from the perspective of a producer, engineer, arranger, singer, etc.
These days I think most people in the music scene think of me as a string arranger, RnB/Pop producer and keys player, and someone who tries to make every project as professional as possible.
I’m the kind of guy that will volunteer to do live sound for a DIY backyard concert but come in hours early to calibrate speakers, tape down cables, provide in-ears for the band, etc. haha. Everything has to be Mary Poppins perfect with me. Thanks, mom haha.
So, before we go, how can our readers or others connect or collaborate with you? How can they support you?
Message me on Instagram or reach out through my website! gavinmcmahanmusic.com
Pricing:
- $50/hr
Contact Info:
- Website: gavinmcmahanmusic.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gavinmcmahan/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLEjTdOx_ztvXqEkvoX3uPQ
