College and the Birth of AnSounds
Ahh post-high school. After DJing my own graduation party, along with a few of my friends’ it was time for me to be a big bad college kid at Westfield state. I remember moving in the first day with my 12’ Kicker speakers. One at my feet under my desk and the other wired around to the other side of my bed. Sean Heran, my roommate. We played football together growing up and I was fortunate enough to have him as a roommate throughout my freshman and sophomore year. Come junior year we lived a house away from each other on the same street. Sean and his parents walked into a great sight of me blaring what was probably Mac Miller or G-Eazy at the time.
Being able to play club lacrosse at Westfield also helped me tremendously. It is where I would make my first connections to “get paid” to DJ. It was a tough sell sometimes walking up to some of the seniors and saying, “ I’ll DJ your party if I can drink for free”. Well, it worked. At the same time I had some friends at UMass, 40 mins down the road, plugging me in at parties there.
It seemed like each month I found myself DJing more parties than I was attending.. if that makes sense? By the end of Freshman year I knew my weekend warrior status was going to fade. I knew I wanted to do more, and I knew I had connections to start doing more events (grad parties, functions, etc., but trying to brand myself under DJ NuNu was just not going to fly.
One night after a some discussions with the boys reflecting on the year, I told them my idea to turn my DJing into a brand. While brainstorming names and logos, Kraig Sweezy said it once and I immediately locked it in.
Now this isn’t word for word, but I can assure you this is as close to it as you will get, “ Bro, what if you took Anson and mixed it with Sounds, like music, so its AnSoUnDs… An…Sounds.. An…Son.”
From there AnSounds was built.
A quick logo design, a phone # and 15 business days later I was back in Braintree dropping my business cards wherever someone could see it. Soon I was getting calls and texts, booking graduation parties, sweet sixteens, family reunions, you name it. This spilled into my sophomore year of college where I was coming home on some weekends to DJ and got a few vacation Christmas parties.
It was a great feeling and conversation with people started to change. I would bump into people I hadn’t talked to in a while and they would ask me how DJing is going. Some people were actually interested, but even those who were just asking to make conversation were acknowledging the fact that this was a part of me and that felt good. The checks weren’t too bad either…
Junior year rolls around and I just spent the summer working my ass off. I needed to make as much money as possible as I was studying abroad in Italy. No, this was not some fake DJ story so I could talk about my time abroad. I only have one story, and I’ll save it for later.
I was working at Boston Financial 9-5 M-F, was catering Friday & Saturdays nights, and also DJing. There were even a handful of occasions where I would set up the food for catering, set up my DJ equipment, DJ the party, break down my setup, break down the catering setup, and bring it back to the kitchen.
I didn’t have a problem with doing both jobs at once… I mean I saved a ton of money for the commute.
-NA
