about BZ

For the last 22 years, I’ve been a partner along with Monica Pasqual at popTuna, a company that creates music for visual media. PopTuna is still going strong, but this website is focused more or less on the music I’ve made apart from popTuna. Monica and I are and I believe always will be musically joined at the hip (or maybe the ear), but sometimes we both do other things.

In addition to being a partner at popTuna, I also own and operate a small but mighty recording studio in Oakland, CA called Studio 132 as well as it’s online persona, The MixPack. I’m also an independent artist under the name of BZ. But overriding all this is my life as a husband and parent of two high school age kids. Oh- there’s also a small dog thrown into the mix.

Over my multi decade long career I’ve been fortunate enough to work with all the major television networks, scores of theatrical and cable movies, video games, commercials for many Fortune 500 corporate entities, and uncountable documentary pieces, most of this through my work with popTuna and Monica Pasqual.

For a bit more background, her are some excerpts from an interview:





What is your musical background? How did you first get involved with music?

I grew up in my father's home studio in a small town in west Texas. I remember being 7 years old and duplicating tapes for my father's daily radio program 'The Sound of Texas', spooling 1/4 inch tapes on an Ampex reel to reel machine. It wasn't long before the studio/music bug crept into my life. About the same time, I started playing piano and at age 14 developed a love for guitar. I attended an audio engineering school in Texas and later received my B.A. in music with an emphasis on classical guitar from the University of Texas at Austin where I was honored as one of the best guitarists in the state of Texas by "Texas Beat Magazine" in 1992 while playing with my metal band "Culture Shock."

My father played a little trumpet, and my mom played Piano. My father had an ARP 2600 synthesizer to make sounds for his radio show. It was just incredible, and I still think about that synth's architecture when I think about signal flow and sound creation. When I was 14, my brother, who played guitar, showed me a chord or two on the guitar. I think within that day I was playing along with Van Halen albums, and then soon I could play along with the all the early Rush albums. I think the piano background helped me tremendously in my guitar playing. Playing guitar kinda became an obsession, and that's all I wanted to do, which sustained me through college graduation.

What are some of your accomplishments?

I've played hundreds of shows, I've won an award for being one of the top ten best guitar players in Texas, I graduated with a B.A. in Music, my day job is composing music for film and TV and being a producer for artists and bands, I've won 6 Emmy's for some of the TV work I've done, I won 2 Telly Awards for music for, I've released 5 albums, my work has been on Platinum selling video games, national ad campaigns, and scores of independent films. A big chunk of my income is from royalty payments from TV shows and films that are using my music. And I'm a husband who somehow manages to spend quality time with my kids.