The Southern California sun shines in through the bay windows of a large yellow house just off USC’s campus. Nestled between a fraternity and LADWP distribution station-turned-radio studio, the house is often abuzz with music from events, parties and small get-togethers, inside and out.
Jacob Amalraj, Luca Moretti and Jason Amalraj in Chicago (Photo: Jason Amalraj)
The odd mix of plants, microphones, propped-up skateboards and a digital keyboard cast shadows that dance across the old wooden floor. The front door opens with a creak as Jacob Amalraj walks in, drops his bag on the floor and throws his shoes in the corner.
His brother, Jason, is asleep on the couch, as if he owns the place. This might not be his house, he lives in an apartment with his girlfriend in Pomona, but he likes spending time here. It’s the musical home of their friend group – a group of academics, studying topics such as business and accounting by day, turned musicians by night.
Jacob has lived in this house for a year-and-a-half now while pursuing a degree in Business Administration at USC. His friends often joke that he was able to find a home, while they’re stuck with their college apartments. That is the vibe of this place.
Jason didn’t want to put a specific label on the music they create, opting instead to note that it references and intermingles with lots of genres.
“The weird thing is we all learned the fundamentals of music in a jazz space, and jazz is just kind of a fundamental building block of a lot of modern day music,” Jason said. “It's the building blocks for soul, R&B, hip hop, blues, you know? So I think, where that language has taken us in the way that we envision melody right now is it's like the best of mainstream music.”
Vintage record player (Photo: Michael Gribbon)
An old record player sits in the corner softly playing jazz. Jacob, Jason and their friends gather here often, spending late nights studying at the dining room table, chatting about their days, and sometimes just listening to music.
Around them, the room is lined with records, each carefully selected from thrift shops and flea markets, whatever they can get their hands on for cheap, and placed attentively along the fringes of the room's crown molding. Everything from vintage jazz recordings, classical symphonies, country music, and even some Taylor Swift can be found.
Jacob’s favorite is “New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh)” by Erykah Badu, which he got for only $2 somewhere back in New Jersey. He can’t remember where exactly.
Every Friday night, Jacob and his friends walk over to KXSC for his radio show, “pebblehead with djcobbsalad.” KXSC is USC’s student-run radio station which, since 1946, has aired radio shows with music curated by Trojans. While KXSC has transitioned mostly to playing music digitally, Jacob still likes to bring his own records occasionally to add some nostalgia to the music he plays.
Back at his house, equal time is given to listening to music as it is to creating it. Even while playing a game on Jacob’s Nintendo Switch or watching a football game on TV, something is always playing in the background.
Microphone on stand (Photo: Michael Gribbon)
Despite their true comfort here, the group does so much more than lounge around the house. They're often here with a purpose: creation.
In the modern music world, lots of production has turned digital, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic shut down studios and forced musicians to create from home. This has turned laptops and other at-home systems into creative hubs.
Remarkably, these devices have become powerful tools, equipped with software and recording devices that could simulate and synthesize the sounds of entire orchestras.
The group has recently begun learning Ableton, one of the most popular Digital Audio Workstations among at-home and professional music creators. According to Ableton, the DAW is “a favorite among producers of hip-hop and electronic music for its unique approach to loop-based composition.”
The group has experience with other software as well, including Logic, Melodyne and RX10, all of which they utilize in their creative process.
They also use tools such as virtual synthesizers, MIDI controllers, and pitch modulators to experiment and innovate in ways they never thought they would ever be able to outside of a full-blown recording studio. Their music resonates with a fusion of electronic pulses, intricate rhythms, and layered textures, creating a dynamic landscape of sound that encapsulates the DIY spirit of at-home creation. While it doesn’t shake the walls or blow out windows, you can feel the vibrations and through them, the passion that went into creating it.
Professor Rick Schmunk (Photo: USC Thornton)
“There were probably four- or five-hundred professional studios somewhere in Los Angeles in 1985,” said USC Thornton School of Music professor Rick Schmunk, reflecting on advancements in technology that have changed the music production industry. “Today you can almost count them on one hand.”
Schmunk, who is the creator of Thornton’s music production program and chair of the music technology program, said that independent music collaboration has really reached a new level since the pandemic, in turn with advances in music and audio technology.
“You know, just being a musician is not enough, you're going to have to be able to mock stuff up at home,” Schmunk said. “It's a given that that's a skill that a modern musician needs. You can't just be a good player or a good singer, or a good songwriter. Everybody's got to be a bit of a producer. And you've got to learn how to mix, because any time you're showing your music to anybody, they're going to expect it to sound like a professional mix.”
Schmunk also noted the prevalence of free training and tutorials on online platforms such as YouTube and LinkedIn Learning, giving up-and-coming music creators and producers better-than-ever access to equipment and software.
Jacob, Jason and their friends have discovered a newfound independence through such software, crafting their compositions from the comfort of their homes during the pandemic, and now from their apartments across the country while at school.
The brothers’ musical journey began long before they even thought about Southern California.
Jacob and Jason grew up more than 2,500 miles away from USC, in Newark, New Jersey. At the urging of their father, a big “music head” according to Jacob, they played in their schools’ bands and orchestras, never really diving deep into music outside of the classroom.
Jason got started with piano and strings, learning violin and viola before moving to band to learn trumpet and trombone.
“At a certain point, I was playing about five real instruments,” Jason noted. “I hated it. I didn't like playing real instruments. There was an appeal to me behind it originally that kind of got taken out by the aspect of having a designated practice time.”
Jason and Jacob played at Carnegie Hall growing up, “but it just sucked the fun out of music,” Jason continued. “So I kind of dismissed it as a career path until I went to school and life and started, like, waking up.”
Jacob, a year younger than Jason, went straight to his middle school band, picking up clarinet first then saxophone. Listening to jazz growing up, the rhythmic melodies with improvised style drew Jacob to the genre.
Although it may seem their lives focus around music, these young men are all still students and professionals. Jason is working on his professional accounting certification at Lehigh University. Their friends’ majors span topics such as computer science and data analysis.
Luca Moretti, Jacob and Jason’s friend from high school, who now lives in Chicago, frequently Zooms into the creative sessions the group has here at Jacob’s home in L.A.
Moretti, whose walls are lined with acoustic dampening boards, considers himself a musician first, even though he just graduated on Dec. 5 from NYU with a degree in statistics and works as a data analyst for Cook County in Illinois.
“I learned jazz the way that you're supposed to kinda study that music, because no academia adequately teaches any of this shit,” Moretti said. “At the end of the day, it takes a personal drive and a personal curiosity to really sit down and listen to the music and study what are the elements that make it like that.”
In today's challenging economic landscape, many musicians like them are navigating a demanding balancing act, juggling their passion for music with the necessity of pursuing alternate majors and careers to make ends meet.
“My only desire to get a business degree was to be taken seriously.”
— Jason Amalraj
With the traditional pathways of the music industry often proving financially precarious, artists are increasingly pursuing degrees and professions that offer more stable financial prospects. This dual pursuit reflects the reality that, for most, music alone rarely generates enough income to cover the bills.
According to ZipRecruiter, the average salary across the music industry in Los Angeles is just over $56 thousand. By comparison, the average salary of an entry-level person graduating from business school in California is more than $80 thousand.
“My only desire to get a business degree was to be taken seriously,” Jason said. “I wanted to get a financial and accounting degree so that I could have a degree of literacy. You know, in the music industry, money slips through the cracks, like constantly. Being financially literate and knowledgeable of what was going on in the books was a really big thing.”
Yet the resilience of musicians shines through as they find ways to harmonize their creative aspirations with the practical demands of the modern world. Helped by the “at home” movement of digital music creation, with the world at their fingertips, musicians can record, produce, and share their work from just their laptops.
This newfound independence has not only streamlined the music-making process, but also has allowed artists to explore uncharted territories in sound, blending genres and experimenting without the constraints of costly studio time.
While financial pressures persist, the digital revolution has given musicians the tools to thrive creatively in their own space, physically and virtually.
Music, it seems, transcends physical boundaries, with digital tools fostering a creative renaissance in an age of isolation.
“It's like all the kids that we work with now have become our closest friends,” Jason said. “It's just been a conduit to keep this group of people together. Music is a people game. You are really going to work with who you really like, you know, for no cost and for no reason.”
