How Social Skills Helped Billy Decker Dominate The Nashville Mixing Scene

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the Six Figure Home Studio Podcast, episode 13

SPEAKER_2 (0:03)

You're listening to the Six Figure Home Studio Podcast. The number one resource for running a profitable home recording studio.

Now your hosts, Ryan Hood and Chris Graham.

Brian Hood (0:19)

Welcome back to another episode of the 6 Figure Home Studio Podcast. Today's episode is a treat, in my opinion, it's a treat because we got country music mixing engineer Billy Decker, who is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, country music mixing engineer in Nashville.

He has mixed records for people like Billy Ray Cyrus, Kenny Chesney, Darius Rucker, Jason Aldean, Sam Hunt, Dustin Lynch, Chris Young. He's Cassidy Pope, tons and tons and tons and tons of people. That's all you need to know. I think to his name at this point, over 25 million records sold with his mixing credit on it.

And I was just looking around at some of the music videos he has on his site, and just looking at seven or eight music videos, they have a total view count of over 250, 260 million people have watched the music videos, just from seven or eight videos. This guy has made it. If you could ever say that anyone has made it in country music, this guy has made it in the mixing world for country music. This is an extraordinarily competitive market. The country music world has so much competition, and Billy Decker has somehow found a way to not only break into this industry, but to absolutely dominate it. And it's not going to take you very long once you start listening to this interview to understand why he has had such a long and successful career. And just a quick disclaimer, there are some audio issues in this episode that you will have to deal with because it is what it is. It was our first guest on here, and we're still figuring out our systems on how to get the best audio from all of our guests with the least amount of feedback and weird little glitches. And unfortunately, it's not perfect audio. So you'll just have to look past that fact. You were about to get a behind the scenes listen to how this man has entrenched himself in one of the most difficult genres to break into and sustain a very long and very lucrative career in this world. So without further delay, here is our interview with Billy Decker.

So Billy Decker, we are so stoked to have you here. Welcome to the 6 Figure Home Studio Podcast.

Billy Decker (2:19)

Thank you for having me. Greetings from Nashville, Tennessee.

Brian Hood (2:22)

Tell me about your first paid project. This is a huge moment in a lot of home studio owners or even commercial studio owners in your case. This is a huge deal in a lot of our lives. And I'd love to kind of hear back the story around your first paid project.

Billy Decker (2:35)

My first paid project here in Nashville probably would have been my first paid job.

I could not. I moved from via Nebraska to Virginia Beach as a staff engineer out in Virginia Beach doing R&B and hip hop all the way down to Nashville in probably 94, and nobody would hire me. So I've got a criminal justice degree from the University of Nebraska. Then I went to full sale and came to Nashville, and I found myself washing dishes at Longhorn Steakhouse because nobody would hire me.

And then I moved over to Applebee's, gave myself a raise and started waiting tables at Applebee's instead of washing dishes.

And in the meantime, I snuck into Belmont University, believe it or not. Here I am like a 26-year-old, 27-year-old, and I snuck in late at night and took all their internships off their internship board, and started cold calling people all over Nashville the next day.

And I had a music publisher actually call me back and say, yeah, I could use some help. It's unpaid. And what you'll be is a song plugger. So that was back when we had cassettes.

And so my job was to make the cassettes and then to deliver them to the music publishers, the artists, the record companies, whoever he had meetings lined up with to pitch these writers songs.

So I was a song plugger was the title. Well, after a while, I was like, why in the world am I pitching their songs? I used to be a artist. You know, every, what do they say? Every failed engineer or every good engineer is a failed musician. So I'm like, I can write songs. I'm going to do this. So I went out and wrote like 12 songs, mixed them myself, engineered them, recorded them, paid for everything. And when I was out supposed to be having meetings and pitching other people's songs, I would slip some of mine in as well. Well, this gal over at Curb Records was like, hey, these are pretty good. Who is this? And I'm like, well, it's me.