Tufts alumni found Plaid Productions devoted to a cappella

A cappella, group singing performed without instrumental accompaniment, has long been a musical mainstay at universities and colleges across the United States and has rocketed into pop culture over the past decade as well. The “Pitch Perfect” (2012 - 2015) films, inspired in part by the antics of Tufts’ very own Beelzebubs, are critical and commercial darlings. And the TV series “Glee” (2009 – 2015) was something of a late 2000s juggernaut that also featured the Bubs. A cappella has even become a fixture at the Daily — a weekly column that offers an insider’s view of the a cappella process can be found in the pages of this illustrious rag (see Isaac Brown’s “Pop Filter” in the Arts section on Mondays).

But beyond inspiring music, films, books and TV shows, Tufts' thriving a cappella scene has launched the music careers of many of its alumni, including Alex Green of the Amalgamates and Alexander Koutzoukis of the Bubs. The pair of former Tufts students are the minds behind Plaid Productions, a music production company whose raison d'etre is, in Green’s words, to “record, edit, mix and otherwise produce a cappella.”

Plaid Productions, unsurprisingly, has its roots in Koutzoukis’ and Green’s musical backgrounds as well as the musical development they underwent at Tufts.

According to Green, his interest in music began to take shape during his senior year of high school, when he “started recording stuff [himself] in [his] bedroom.” But despite this early interest, Green also pointed out that he “sort of shied away from doing music as a career because [he] knew it was not always the most reliable.”

By the end of his time at Tufts, though, Green ended up double-majoring in archeology and music.

"By junior year of college, I was like, 'I guess music is for me,'" he said. "There’s no getting around it — this is what I want to do.”

Koutzoukis, on the other hand, arrived at Tufts with different expectations.

"[I was] majoring in physics, and then switched to engineering, and then sort of settled in computer science, which I thought was what I really wanted to do," Koutzoukis said. "I thought I was going to work for Google in five or 10 years.”

But even with his technical academic aspirations, having grown up with music motivated Koutzoukis to try out for the Bubs.

"Part of coming to Tufts was that I had seen the Bubs when I was in high school, and that was an interesting thing to me," Koutzoukis said. "So it worked out that I got in [to the Bubs] in my first week of college and never looked back.”

At Tufts, both Green and Koutzoukis served as musical directors of their respective groups, an experience that also deepened their knowledge of the recording process. For Koutzoukis, his exposure to recording came from working on three albums over five years as a member of the Bubs, and both he and Green were in a music production class in their final year at Tufts. During this class, according to Koutzoukis, he and Green connected over things such as "Iron Chef."

Immediately after moving on from Tufts, Green was a member of a professional a cappella group in Boston for a while.

"Somewhere around nine months into doing that, I realized I wanted to take a left turn but do something in the same vein,” he said. 

At the same time, Koutzoukis was working in his father’s woodshop but had also worked with noted a cappella producer and fellow Bubs alum, Ed Boyer, on “Glee." This experience nudged Koutzoukis into thinking, “I could do [a cappella production] for real.”

As Koutzoukis describes it, he and Green were both looking for a change.

“Nine months after graduation, we were pretty good friends, and we met up at a Chipotle one night, and I was like, ‘I don’t really feel like this real job situation anymore, do you want to try doing this for a living?’ and it went pretty quickly from there,” Koutzoukis said. “We had enough software and hardware between the two of us to get started…and we just started putting out feelers … We let the people who we had worked with or worked for over the course of our college careers know that we wanted to do this and if they needed they needed people to record or edit stuff we were going to be available.”

To grow Plaid’s reputation, Green and Koutzoukis also produced what they call collaborative recordings, where they would arrange, record and edit a song under very tight time constraints.

“At an a cappella festival in Syracuse we had this idea to do a cover of 'All of the Lights' (2010), and we got all of the pro groups who were performing there and anyone who would stick around to hang out in a classroom for four hours and we arranged a song on the fly," Koutzoukis said. "We sang parts to everybody to have them record stuff, and then brought it back and finished it. It got a lot of attention because a lot of people in the community were involved in it and were invested in seeing it happen. That sort of kicked off that thing [collaborative recordings], which we did at festivals for the next few years.”

Plaid Productions first did work for both the Amalgamates and the Bubs, but were eventually contacted in early 2011 by The Blend, Wheaton College’s co-ed a cappella group, who wanted help producing an album.

After The Blend, more groups got in touch seeking Plaid Productions’ services.

“Not long after that was the X-Factors from Northwestern University and Pitch Slapped from Berklee,” Green said.

Plaid Productions doesn’t just provide bare-bones to their clients, but instead acts as a resource for the groups they work with, providing guidance about how they can best achieve their goals.

“You make those connections and you help the groups in a way that’s not just on the clock or pressing the buttons. You get them from wanting to make an album…to bringing it to reality,” Koutzoukis said. “Some people don’t realize what their range or ability might be so you nudge it out of them.”

“[When recording a group,] rarely if ever do we talk with the group about technical stuff on our end," Green said. "It’s almost always round about artistic critiques to get what [the group wants] out of them.”

Although Plaid Productions has established itself as a cornerstone of the a cappella community with a roster of national and international clients, there is still room to grow. Both Green and Koutzoukis noted that a dedicated studio space would help with the recording process, and that ideally they would like to travel to help their international clients record, rather than doing production on already-recorded sound.

Plaid Productions is also still dedicated to helping develop the a cappella community through a cappella festivals, where they regularly hold workshops. In the immediate future, both Green and Koutzoukis will be at the Boston Sings A Cappella Festival, acting as Education Coordinator and Executive Producer, respectively. The festival, which runs from Friday, April 8 to Sunday, April 10, will be held on the Tufts campus and at the Somerville Theatre in Davis Square.