Steve McDonald

Steve McDonald started and built a recording studio with two of his friends from high school and started making records and film soundtracks right away. From the late seventies into the early eighties he worked on some of the seminal punk era recordings including “Saturday Night Pogo”, Needles & Pins “I Wanna Play With Guns”, Lydia Lunch’s “1313” and the Soundtrack of “The Decline Of Western Civilization”.

With the advent of the CD he went to work for Dunhill Compact Classics (DCC) doing licensing, compilations and mastering.

He was offered a position as the staff engineer for a record company in the late eighties and started recording and producing Smooth Jazz for Sedona Records, JCI Records and Artful Balance. In 1989 JCI moved to Arizona and Steve stayed in L.A. joining up with SRC/Zoo but legal problems within the label held up most releases. In 1989 an old friend asked if he could help, and the result was The Dream Syndicate’s “Live At Raji's” recorded and mixed live to two track.

In 1994 a producer he had worked with started a company called Blitzz. The first release was from a group that Steve and a writer friend Gary St. Clair had found named All-4-One. The first release sold 27 million copies worldwide. Steve continued with Blitzz for 4 more releases then left to start working with Gary in a production company with releases for Nu Flavor, Mana and Santana among others.

In 2002 he met with Bob DeMarco and was asked to help with putting together a patchbay and figure out a way to isolate his guitar amp for recording. This started a friendship and working relationship that continued for 20 years, with Steve handling engineering and design duties for Bob’s studios. Bob and his business partner Michael Egizi were responsible for the bulk of music for Paramount Domestic Television, which included music for Entertainment Tonight, Extra, The Dr. Phil Show, Ellen, Hard Copy, and many others. Also, during that time, they produced and recorded records for independent artists like Bob Malone, Trysette, Amy Engelhardt, Wally Minko, and more. In 2018 Bob and Steve started to do music video production, and a documentary.

During the pandemic years, Steve started working for a not for profit and was responsible for creating the live streaming content, a library of educational videos, as well as helping on large scale Zoom fundraising video productions.