Hidden Gems: Meet Michael Mahgerefteh of Colley Executive Offices

Today we’d like to introduce you to Michael Mahgerefteh.

Hi Michael, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read this story and for the great opportunity for my organization 🙂

My name is Michael Mahgerefteh. When I was in high school, I was in a local band which had nowhere to play. Out of necessity, I decided to throw a free music festival for my band and all of my friend’s bands called ‘MikeStock’. This event landed me in the local paper and I threw it two years in a row.

After high school, me and a few friends created a band called Galaxy Dynamite. Over the next 7 years, we performed more than 500 shows all across the country – with me doing all of the booking, management, promoting, and everything that it takes to become an independent touring act. I met my business partner EJ Toudt who became the bass player of Galaxy Dynamite. He was a radio show host and program director for 19 years in the outer banks and he also was the creative director of the ‘Virginian Pilot’ which included winning a few national awards for his creative designing of the magazine ‘Distinction’.

EJ and Mike decided to throw an album release party for their band called ‘StarFire Festival’ which quickly became successful. The festival enjoyed more than 4,000 attendees each year and earned them a spot in the front page of The Virginian Pilot. During the pandemic, Mike and EJ decided to invest in a $10,000.00 studio which enabled them to record and audio/video capture improvised jam sessions through a high fidelity multi-tracked studio quality system. These jam sessions were broadcasted live on twitch when the band decided to add another program to the channel: Galaxy Jams Reacts

Galaxy Jams Reacts is a program where musicians, music fans and industry professionals listen and react to music together. Over the past few months, the band has been working hard to fill their schedule with fascinating guests – including the addition of Jesse Miller from Lotus, Emmy award-winning producer Clouchord, Berklee sound design professor Ben Cantil from Zebbler Encanti Experience, Owen Murphy from One Drop Design studios and Aarson Schafer – host of No Simple Road Podcast.

Please also keep in mind that we have hosted RJ Bee (CEO of Osiris Podcast Network), Band Leader Michal Menert, Gabriel Marin from Consider The Source and Brian Murry from Dogs In A Pile among many others in the past few months.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
The first struggle was creating the studio together. Space was the first issue, the room we are currently using is not very big so we literally had to measure out where each person’s station will be. The second most glaring issue was the technical aspect of creating the system. Our vision was for each musician to have their own independently controlled monitoring system – so that each musician could control each instrument individually to have their own custom mix. Also, instead of relying on hand signals and telepathic communication – each member of the band would have their own microphone that they could use to communicate with each other during the jam. This talk-back microphone would have to be installed in a way so that when the band was taking a break from the music and talking to the audience – the audience (and each musician) could hear what was being said in the microphone. However, when the band is performing – the microphones had to be routed in a way so that the audience could NOT hear what was being said (but the band could still hear each other during the performance). We needed to route the audio so that each band member could also hear audio that was coming from the computer. Lastly, we needed a way to ensure that all of the instruments would be multi-track recorded as well as being mixed live so that the stream sounded great. This was done by using the ‘Jamhub’, a now discontinued amazing piece of hardware which is almost impossible to find nowadays, unfortunately.

The band pored over different hypothetical diagrams for many months before deciding on the best possible way to accomplish this feat. Other issues that had to be overcome was a myriad of hums and electrical noise interference, learning how to stream and setting up different scenes so that the performance looked and sounded great, setting up five cameras and lights in the room and making sure the PC was able to run all of this simultaneously.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Colley Executive Offices?
Colley Executive Offices is a locally family-owned all-inclusive office space facility. Between our two buildings, we have more than 180 businesses of all sizes who work out of offices every single day. We are not like other co-working spaces, we do not focus on big cafeteria-style monthly membership spaces, and we do not do the “rent a desk” thing….each office is all-inclusive and private and comes with furniture, street address mailbox, free onsite ground level parking, 24/7 security, free use of our conference room, free wired internet in each office and a free 7-digit number for each office. All of the artwork in the building was done by my Mom and my sister does all of the accounting (and my Dad is the boss) – so we are truly locally owned and family-owned. We love when our Tenants move offices during their lease time – so what I am most proud of about our concept is to see our Tenants using our services to grow their business and expand into the building.

Let’s talk about our city – what do you love? What do you not love?
I love the music scene and I wish that there was more natural bodies of water 🙂

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @galaxy_jams
• Facebook: facebook.com/galaxyjams
• Youtube: youtube.com/c/galaxy_jams