Xander Icaza: Better than Master of One
- Avant Media Institute mgmt
- Apr 23
- 6 min read
Slow-Burn Love Affair with Sound
For Xander, choosing to go to Avant Media Institute was a no brainer, but the journey to get here was more complicated. Alexander Icaza, better known as Xander, started playing guitar at nine years old, but it wasn’t love at first sight. He hated learning guitar at first, practicing and doing recitals, but because he loved music, kept up with it. Things really started moving along when he was a teen and started learning songs he liked from his favorite bands with styles he actually enjoyed playing, saying that “Shred guitar was just the coolest thing in the world to like a 14 year old Xander.” He kept refining his skills in guitar, falling deeper in love with music, and his ambitious attitude had him wanting more.
Ultimately, this led him to joining a band himself. After creating songs with his band mates, like many aspiring musicians, Xander’s band wanted to record their music. This was the thing that led him to discovering audio engineering at last. With barebones gear and a lot of determination, they got started.
“we… threw together what we could. And it was terrible.
But, you know, that was, that was the start, and that was the start of going ‘I want to get better
at this. Yeah, this is where I want to focus.’”
Xander’s first DAW was Garage Band, and with that, he and his band began to learn about music production and audio engineering by trial and error. They would collaborate and experiment and get better each time, all of them driven by passion for creating music and began to see some growth as artists. To Xander, the most important thing was jumping straight into the creative process, but he still needed some guidance as a beginner to reach his full potential. The research phase then began, and he looked into and studied the engineers and producers that made his favorite works come to life. He began to invest most of his paychecks into audio equipment, saying “everything that I did at the time went back into engineering, back into more equipment for my studio.” Despite this, seeing what his close friends and fellow engineers/musicians were able to accomplish based on their skills and not relying on gear gave him the final push to learning about sound by the book.
Finding the right school for him took some time. Xander started by taking a semester of guitar performance at Berklee in Boston and when that didn’t feel right, some time at UT Austin to study film. Ultimately, he decided that diving straight into audio engineering was a better fit for him, and kept searching. Xander kept pushing, hoping to find the program that worked best for him until he found it here at Avant Media Institute.
The Right Fit
Xander’s tour here at AMI got him hooked as soon as he saw how hands-on our program was, the fact that it was all audio based right off the bat, and he liked what he heard of some examples of the work our students created. Xander recounted his time here and discussed that while he came from a rock background, he liked the diversity of the class he was in and also liked getting to meet people who worked with different genres like trap, hip hop, EDM and more. His classmates and their different backgrounds in music helped him expand his horizons and develop a love for the different genres they worked with. Beyond his classmates, his instructors also left a lasting impact on Xander. He was impressed by them and felt that he got a lot out of every class he took here. Whether he had no experience in the topics covered or he was well versed, he still had plenty to learn.
“Every class goes to studios at some point during the the tenure of the class, and it was going to studios and actually having hands on experience, and going and producing a session, or, you know, making a song on the spot, and just seeing the process –and seeing how, you know, we can do it as a class–made me feel a lot better about doing it…a lot of it was stuff I was familiar with, but it was revisiting studios and revisiting production that made me go, ‘I'm a lot better at this now than I was when I first started.’”
Working with audio professionals at AMI and in other studios helped to build his confidence, and with this new confidence, he began venturing into working with other people outside the scope of his band. Xander graduated from Avant Media Institute in 2022, finally had the skills to match his passion, and got to work straight away.
Post-grad Life
Xander hit the ground running after graduating. His first major project post-grad was working on a full length album with Houston based indie/alt rock artist Max Diaz for his second album Metanoia. To Xander, this opportunity stemmed from proximity and passion. Max asked if Xander knew how to record live drums, which turned into a session, working on a song, and that eventually turned into working on the entire album.
“not just engineering it or just
recording it. But, I mean, I produced it. We designed sounds from scratch. I performed on it. I
played bass on some tracks, guitar on some tracks.
We did everything together. It was a super, super collaborative process.”
Because Xander was interested in and so proficient in more than just audio engineering, he was able to be a better collaborative partner, something he takes a lot of pride in. Having versatility in audio engineering, and becoming proficient in producing, playing, mixing, recording and generally always learning and growing one’s skills as an audio engineer is Xander’s way.
Click below to hear some of Xander’s work on this project:
Jack of all Trades
“Jack of all trades, master of none, though oftentimes better than master of one”
has been the credo that Xander has applied to his career in audio. He has worked in live sound, broadcasting and sound for a Baptist church which only kept leading him to only have more opportunities, and more connections in audio and audio related industries. To Xander, the diversity in his skills and not being afraid to work other jobs in audio that were not his favorite opened more avenues for his career. Other successful audio engineers, like our last WOF inductee Angeline Johnson, can agree that to succeed in this industry, two things are true: you have to play many parts as an audio engineer and you have to continue learning. For Xander, that meant extending his love of music from playing an instrument to taking care and maintenancing instruments to learning about how to record it to recording it himself. It meant working on an album as an instrumentalist/producer/songwriter/recording engineer but also learning how to be a broadcast engineer for a church.
Advice for Future Audio Engineers
To put it simply: You can’t do it alone! Xander learned lots from his many instructors at his previous educational institutions as well as his AMI instructors, but he put a clear emphasis on saying he learned plenty from his collaborators, friends and contemporaries. Art in all of its many mediums thrives on community, and to build a career in audio engineering, you need to allow yourself to rely on others, learn from them and be a decently social person. He networked anywhere he could, from his job, school, and being involved in his local music scene. The Houston local music scene helped Xander land his first major project, and he encourages others “go find your local music scene and go take mental notes. What bands are good, what bands have promise or have potential, or you know, what sounds can you push to the next level?”
Xander is a man of action with a “just do it” attitude, and his advice for others wanting to succeed in the same industry is to do the same. He urges others to get their foot in the door, use the connections they make at AMI, and try accepting all of the opportunities they can find in live sound, broadcast,as they come. Xander believes success in this industry is not all luck, some of it is, but not all of it.
“if you're a skilled engineer, you have background, you have a portfolio, they're going to be stoked that you want to work with them”
Closing Thoughts
Throughout his work and career so far, Xander has shown that if you have a strong desire to create, you will persist, exhaust all venues, and use the resources you have to create. We are incredibly proud of Xander and cannot wait to see what else his future has in store.
Written by: Lucia Sanchez Solis
For the full podcast episode with Xander Icaza and our 301 Instructor Mark Drew full of more great advice and gear talk, visit our youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/@avantmediainstitute
Comments