ABOUT

New Blue Entertainment, LLC (NBE) was founded by 12x GRAMMY® Considered, 2x Carolina Music Award/2x Peak City International Film Festival Award winning artist, actor and producer Jason Damico.

Aside from starting piano at the age of three, drums at four, and singing and playing fretboard instruments at ten, Damico was always fascinated with the sound and sonic landscape of music. After acquiring a simple 4-track recorder at around the age of eleven, Damico was hooked onto production--trying to emulate the drum sounds of some his rhythmic heroes such as Stewart Copeland (The Police), Alex Van Halen (Van Halen), Steve Smith (Journey), Ian Pace (Deep Purple), Lars, Ulrich (Metallica), etc. His parents soon began to see his natural proclivity and fascination towards songwriting and sound creation. They decided to upgrade him a step-above his humble and limited 4-track recording setup--gifting him with, at the time in 2008, the latest version of ProTools to date (ProTools 8).

A seminal turning point in Damico's life happened, however, this same year--where he experienced an unfortunate and traumatic eye injury at the age of fourteen due to a fishing accident. For six months, he would find himself nearly blinded in his right eye and unable to lift more than 5 lbs conditioned by doctor's orders for recovery purposes. He was also unable to read and had to sleep upright throughout this recovery period; left to only listen to music on his iPod. It was during this period of convalescing that Damico began to experience a supernatural, sonic-sense "awakening" internally where he was able to hear everything "all at once" and somehow intuitively understand it.

"The best way I could define it is like it was as if there was a dark drape that had been unveiled from my visual sense of sound. I was able to see relationships between instruments, frequencies, emotional reasonings, nuances, etc. in music that before were simply non-existent to me. But most of all, I was able to decipher and understand melody and harmonic relationships within about ten seconds--it was as if I learned years of college level music theory all in a moment. It's still baffling to me to this day because I was always a drummer first and was always listening to just drums on recordings. But after this happened everything changed dramatically--I was able to see the entire picture."

After a required cataract surgery in the Summer of 2008 with another 6 weeks of recoup time, Damico began his first year of high school, where he was able to invite friends over to his then "unfinished basement" studio and write and record after school. He would in his freshman year develop a project with three senior classmates that would go on to win 2nd place at a battle of the bands in Raleigh, NC's prestigious Lincoln Theatre. This event would also prove another seminal and defining moment in Damico's life story and career--where the band had won 10 free hours of recording time at a high end studio in town. However, Damico was the only one to show up to the session.

"In all honesty, I was thrown into a whirlwind of self-producing and multi-tracking back when I was fifteen. A band I was in back in high school had won 2nd place at a regional battle of the bands. The winnings were $500 cash and 10 hours of studio time paid by the BOTB organization. On the days scheduled to go in and track, none of my band mates showed up. So I ended up playing and singing all the parts on the song we had planned to record. This was a turning point for me and I realized two things: I was addicted/fascinated/in love with the recording process and at the end of the day, in the grand scheme things, I couldn't rely on anyone else but myself to get the job done. Don't get me wrong, I love working with other people and do it quite often. But when it comes to the creative download within my head space, if I can play it, I will. And if I can't, I'll figure out how."

Damico would continue this unapologetic passion for his art throughout the rest of his high school years and into his time attending online business school with William Peace University's School of Professional Studies Program. It would soon win him 2011's Carolina Youth Artist of the Year, 2015's Carolina Rock Male Artist of the Year--both for his original music releases and performances. During this time, he would also begin working as an intern at one of the world's most prestigious studios located right in Pittsboro, NC--Manifold Recording. He would soon develop a sense of world class engineering and producing practices while under the tutelage of world renowned engineer and producer, Ian Schreier.

"Over the years, I've had the incredible opportunity to record/engineer/mix/produce/perform on various projects in an amalgam of diverse genres. Working at Manifold Recording as an intern from 2015-2016 for a little over a year was an absolutely life changing experience for me. Up until that point, my education was mostly self-propelled and by the means of online mediums such as YouTube, Forums, etc. as well as being a practitioner of the art of recording. Studying, working and shadowing under chief engineer Ian Schreier (Slash, Velvet Revolver, Clay Aiken, COC, John Custer, Kenny Chesney) in an over $10 Million facility entirely changed the game of engineering and production as I knew it. I finally was able to spectate and participate in how to make a real record. Subsequently, I was able to transfer that knowledge back to NBE and into my own work."

To current day, Damico obtained his Bachelor's of Science in Business and now is a proud member of WPU's 2019 alumni--graduating Summa Cum Laude and earning the WPU SPS' Outstanding Graduate Award. He is also an active member of both the Alpha Chi and Sigma Beta Delta National Honor's Societies.

For more information regarding Jason Damico and his career, please visit www.jasondamico.com.