About Me
Jax Productions is the Music Division of Cool Oz Productions, a Brooklyn base film production company.
I’m Matthew Jackson, CEO of Jax Productions. Although I’m a producer and composer, I’m a musician at heart. My primary instruments are piano and bass clarinet. I’ve been studying piano since I was 5 years and bass clarinet since middle school. It took a moment for me to get into the bass clarinet, but after hearing Eric Dolphy play Gold Bess the Child, I was hooked.
My love for music and technology led to study Music Production and Engineering and Film Scoring at Berklee College of Music. My love for film scores grew out of a ritual of going to the movies at the Regal Battery Park Stadium 11 theater on Saturday nights with my dad. The Marvel movies were my favorites. It was particularly during these movies that I began to make the connection of how a section of a score can influence the mood of a scene. We would stay until the credits were done to watch the post scene that would give hints to the next Marvel movie. While watching the credits roll, I would listen to the score and the movie’s soundtrack. I realized how music can impact other industries, and this led me to want to study music production and film scoring.
My First venture into Producing and Recording
My first venture into producing and recording was creating three tracks for a high school friend. The genre was hip hop. We recorded the tracks in my home studio that consisted of an iMac, Logic Pro, Focusrite Scarlett USB Audio Interface, Yamaha Arius digital piano, Shure SM57-LC Cardioid Dynamic Microphone and a Rode Procaster Broadcast Quality Dynamic Microphone. Once the tracks were completed, we uploaded the songs onto SoundCloud. Since we had no budget, we used social media platforms to implement a small marketing plan. Our target audience were our friends in high school and on social media. The marketing plan was to share the link to the tracks to our target audience with the hope that our target audience would share the link with people outside our sphere of influence. Although we received good feedback from our friends, we didn’t get many hits outside our target audience, but my first venture in producing was exciting. There were bumps in the road. We disagreed in which direction to take some of the tracks, but we were able to resolve our differences, compromise and complete the tracks. I learned a lot, and also quickly realized there’s a lot I still needed to learn. I pursued a degree in both music production and engineering and film scoring simultaneously at Berklee College of Music. There I received hands on training in studio production, composing and a comprehensive understanding of the music industry that I now implement in my business.
