For more than 30 years Barry Grzebik has successfully combined both great creativity and a laser focused discipline as a Product Designer, Acoustician and Room and Sound System Designer. He established The Grzebik Design Group (GDG) two decades ago creating a platform for himself and other equally talented individuals to collaborate and ultimately bring well-crafted solutions to market.
Mr. Grzebik has supported a varied and interesting group of clients on 5 continents from the Circ de Soleil in the Royal Albert Hall to Lakewood Church in Houston Texas, The National Stadium of Taiwan, American Airlines Arena home of the Miami Heat to the US Capitol building complex.
Prior to establishing GDG, Mr. Grzebik earned a reputation as an industry leading product designer in the Sound Reinforcement Industry as V.P. of Engineering and Partner at Apogee Sound Inc. where he designed, or oversaw the design of products that sold in over 55 countries to the most demanding and discerning customers.
Mr. Grzebik had worked on projects and products that have received both TEC Awards and the Solomon Award. He has been called on to wright numerous feature length articles for Professional Audio Industry publications and is regularly enlisted as an educator conduction seminars on Audio and Acoustics.
In addition to a high level of understanding of the products used in the AV industry he has experience in live sound productions, corporate industrial theater and on sight contractor management. He is also an accomplished Luthier, Amateur Musician and Pilot. He is an active member of the Redwood Empire AIA and CSI where he served on the board as Treasure for many years. Mr. Grzebik believes strongly in design partnerships and encourages client participation to insure a high level of correlation between the client’s initial conceptual desires and the final built environment.
Michael began his career in the music industry in 1973 as an Artist Manager in Chicago after moving to the city from London, England. In 1975 he moved into the world of journalism, publishing a local monthly music magazine named Stage Pass for several years. In 1977 he began work in the Chicago area recording community and was asked to manage a seminal studio complex in the Chicago suburbs initially named Hedden West and later named Remington Road Studios. The complex included two multi-track studios, a State of the Art Mastering room, a recording school and a duplication facility. While managing the complex he also learned the art and craft of record making and after a nine year tenure struck out as an Independent Producer/ Engineer in 1986.
While at Remington Road Studios he accumulated experience and credits in many different musical genres – R&B, Soul, House, Blues, Indie Rock, Classical and Americana and as he moved to independent status and established himself as a prominent figure on the Chicago recording scene, he began to amass an extensive discography which continues to this day. Additionally he owned a duplication company in downtown Chicago for over a decade named Duplicates Inc., until 1997.
Michael’s work to date as a Producer and/or Engineer has received 3 Grammy Nominations and 1 Grammy Award, 5 Blues Music Award Nominations and 1 Blues Music Award and the Blues Foundation presented him with the prestigious “Keeping The Blues Alive Award – Producer” in 2011. He has worked on over 200 albums, during a career which now spans 5 decades. Sixty of these recording are in the Blues genre alone.
His extensive experience in recording studios all over the United States and several countries has also led to projects as a consultant and he recently became a Managing Director for a new State of the Art studio in Manhattan called Terminus – www.terminusnyc.com. The facility was previously commissioned as a private room for a producer and Michael was brought in to re-model, re-quip and put new operational and management systems in place to upgrade the facility for commercial use. Clients to date have included Philip Glass, Lisa Minelli and Michael Feinstein, rapper Icon and several NYC based A list engineers among others.
This year, Grzebik Design Group partners Barry Grzebik and Tom Parnell added Michael as a third partner to bring his knowledge and expertise in design, operations and management of recording studios to their team. Columbia College Chicago asked him to join their Audio Arts & Acoustics department as adjunct faculty in 2006 and he continues to teach master classes in recording during the Spring and Fall semesters.
Michael has served as a Governor, Chapter President, and National Trustee for the Chicago Chapter of The Recording Academy (NARAS) and currently serves again as a Governor and committee chair. He has chaired several national committees for The Recording Academy and serves on the advisory council for their Producer & Engineers Wing. He is a member of AES - The Audio Engineering Society and a founder member of EARS – Chicago’s Engineering and Recording Society and currently sits on The Board of Directors for The Blues Foundation in Memphis.
Tom graduated in 1970 from Southern Illinois University with a Bachelor Degree in Electronic Communications in Broadcasting. While in school, he had a very successful band called the Ashes of Dawn that recorded two singles that broke the Billboard Charts in 1969. Also while in Carbondale, IL, Tom opened a music store with two partners that also managed a recording studio, booked 15 bands, and ran two night clubs.
After graduating, Tom moved back to Chicago with his family and began working in the HiFi industry where he quickly became store manager of United Audio Centers. Several years later Tom made a career move to become Co-Manager of Schaak Electronics in Woodfield Mall. A year later Schaak Electronics bought out Allied Radio in Chicago and Tom became the district manager of 18 stores. In 1974 Tom was approached by a leading manufactures rep company to become the Marketing Director of Markal Sales and for next 7 years developed the company into a $70 million firm.
In 1978, Tom went back to school to update his knowledge by taking Recording Engineering classes at Hedden West Rccording where he met Mike Freeman. After several years of relearning the latest recording techniques, Tom rejoined the Professional Audio Industry as a manufactures representative in selling, training, and marketing some of the biggest names in the industry.
In 1981 Tom and two other industry professionals started a new rep firm called New Horizons that quickly became one of the top rep firms in the consumer, computer, and pro audio industries. Over the next year Tom continued to add a number of pro audio companies to their line card. While at New Horizons in 1983, Tom was approached by Panasonic Industrial, one of the companies he represented, to be the project manager of sound system installations for the 1984 Olympics whereby his responsibilities included the design, building and installation of the PA system for the Los Angles Coliseum, East Los Angeles College and 24 other venues where Olympic games were being played.
By the late 80's Tom's reputation in the recording studio, live sound market, and installation field lead to him being invited to be FOH engineer for the 1989 Academy Awards. In the early 90's Tom specified and projected managed the installation of the new sound systems at the newly renovated Navy Pier, and the brand new Rosemont Theatre. Tom expanded his expertise to providing equipment to many recording studios throughout the midwest part of the country to include Chicago Recording Company, Optimus, Streeterville, Paisley Park, Flight Time, Tone Zone, Hinge Recording, Pumpkin Studios and countless other high profile production facilities.
In 1994 Tom founded the Next Generation Marketing, Inc. to take the manufacture representative business to a new level whereby a rep company could provide system design as well as selling equipment. For the past twenty years Tom has been involved in specifying and designing audio and video systems for churches, auditoriums, corporate offices, health clubs, sports bars, stadiums, race tracks, football baseball and soccer fields, grammar/high, jr college/and university sound and video systems. Today, Next Generation is one of the top rep companies in the US market currently representing 15 major manufactures in the commercial Audio/Video industry.
In 2011 Tom joined the Grzebik Design Group in Petaluma, California so that we could add additional advanced design skills for customers that don't have CAD and Acoustical specialists on staff.
